Daily Briefs: Midwifery, Erotic City and Your Prostate’s Credit Score

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By CHRIS PACKHAM

· Thing I learned on KCUR today: The proper pronunciation of “midwifery” is actually “midwhiffery.” So, great. Not only can I not penetrate the glass ceiling of unlicensed midwifery, I’ve also been saying it totally wrong. Look: I’m a simple man. I have to go with the letters you actually use to spell things. Are you listening, House Minority Leader John Boehner of Ohio? Because I am not as easily mesmerized as the Washington press corps. Here is a video of a man hypnotizing a chicken. Substitute the chicken hypnotist for John Boehner, the chicken for Wolf Blitzer, and passively staring at a line on the ground for saying, “Bay-ner.”

· The Kansas City Star is endorsing Senators Hillary Clinton and John McCain for President. Via the reductive dualism that is contemporary journalism, the truth must fall somewhere in the middle.

The Star undermines its own endorsements with the following KFC Famous Bowl of mashed-together cliches: “National security issues loom large. Frustrating conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan drag on. Our military forces are stretched thin, emboldening our adversaries in the Mideast and elsewhere.” If you can think of a sentence that conveys less meaning than “National security issues loom large,” please post it in the comments.

· It’s Martin Luther King, Jr. Day. Somehow, when Dr. King is paraphrased by the Kansas City Star’s foremost authority on pilates and proper mascara application, Jeneé Osterheldt, it’s as though his words have been magically transformed into the sparkly idiom of 7-year-old girls:

I could just die. I don’t know why that works, but it does. I think America’s entire chromatic spectrum can agree: We should all work together toward a world in which the bunnies and the duckies live together in peace and harmony. Until now, nobody had phrased America’s struggle with racial equality quite as adorably. Jeneé Osterheldt, you are this year’s winner of the Sparkle Princess Baby Panda Award for Cutest Thing Ever Written About America’s Racial Divide.

· With the latest horrible news story about Erotic City, someone has to ask: Is there a less-appropriately named retail store in Kansas City? How, exactly, is it “erotic?” I’ve always equated erotica with soft-focus, Boehner-inspiring Emmanuelle in San Tropez cinematography, as seen in the adolescent memories of every man whose parents had Cinemax. If you want to make the argument that Erotic City is “erotic” the way a truck-stop prostitute with a bad cough is “erotic,” then you are obviously experiencing stroke-related aphasia and you need to call the paramedics immediately.

· Deputy dragged by mother, assaulted by son.

· Raven Baxter is “a seemingly normal teenager with the not-so-ordinary gift of seeing visions of the future.” Matt Blunt spokeswoman Jessica Robinson is a seemingly ordinary political hack with the not-so-ordinary gift of being able to make Democrats disappear. Robinson got to choose the camera angles fed to area television stations during the governor’s State of the State address last week. Guess which non-Republican political party went almost completely unrepresented during the broadcast? It totally rhymes with “Shmemocratic Party of Missouri.” That’s So Not Raven, Jessica Robinson. Here is a picture of the Disney That’s So Raven Stylin’ Hair doll as a point of comparison:

· Fair Issac Corp., developer of the FICO credit score, is rolling out a new database to hospitals next summer that will rate the ability of sick people to pay their bills. That was amazingly fun to type, the same way that it’s fun to type “Hitler Trephinates Cute Beagle Puppy in Day Care Center.” Try it: Just string together the vilest possible sequence of thoughts you can imagine. It still won’t beat Fair Isaac Corporation’s new venture in denying appropriate hospitalization to fixed-income grandmothers and what-not.