Daily Briefs: Post-Pop Overpop, Plus: A Sample Column

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By CHRIS PACKHAM

Kansas City’s population is up by 71,000 to 500,000 people! Maybe. Yael T. Abouhalkah has his doubts, but I’d like to welcome all our new residents personally, with a small gift basket and an envelope of coupons — I actually have to, because the neighborhood Welcome Wagon is a responsibility I take extremely seriously. Predictably, the commenters on Yael’s blog attribute the population increase to “porous borders,” an awesome euphemism meaning “brown people” — the current receptacle for societal anxiety, at least until the next El Niño southern oscillation or communist uprising.

It occurred to me that if I could collect just one dollar from each of these 71,000 new Kansas City residents, I could knock off for the year and work on my fantasy novel. After the jump, a proposal for the new people regarding possible contributions toward a down-payment on a particular kind of hot sandwich taking the country by storm. Click here or on this WIC-approved cheeseburger in a can: