Daily Briefs: Squitiro, Twinkies and the MLK Day Pork Pack

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By CHRIS PACKHAM

• The pollen count is expected to be extremely low today. So it’s a great day for allergy sufferers to get out there and attempt to maintain their core temperatures in the icy arctic weather front while contemplating their mortality.

• Dude in Independence says he came up with the idea for the WNBA. And he’s saying it in the articulate poetry of a federal lawsuit.

OK, first of all, “Lightning Mitchell”? That’s just awesome. For everyone who ever failed to give me a cool-sounding nickname — I’m looking at you, everyone I’ve ever met in my entire life — you can pretty much forget about getting me to help you move your couch. I didn’t want to be called “Hurricane,” anyway. Second, people are always stealing MY ideas, too. Like, the heliocentric model of the solar system? MY IDEA.

• Gloria Squitiro, Funkhouser campaign treasurer and administrative embarrassment of Cloverfield-ian proportions, is laying her credibility on the line, saying that the $80,000 discrepancy in campaign spending reports will be reconciled.

• Michigan Republican Mark Siljander has been indicted in the U.S. District Court in Kansas City, Missouri, on charges of money laundering, conspiracy and obstruction of justice. He’s accused of working for an alleged terrorist fundraising ring that sent more than $130,000 to an al-Qaida supporter.

• My brain is generally pretty good at filtering out all of my catastrophically stupid ideas before they get to the “coming out of my mouth” stage. Clay Chastain’s catastrophically stupid light-rail plan has voyaged so far from the part of his brain that originally came up with it that he is now suing the city for overturning it. Which is a good illustration of the need to remind yourself at least once a day that there is no such thing as a plains state that needs an elevated gondola system.

• Bankrupt Twinkies maker Interstate Bakeries is reorganizing. I’d reorganize, too, if I somehow managed to go bankrupt selling Twinkies.

• Between 1964 and 1970, Sheriff Buford Pusser waged a one-man war against the Dixie mafia in McNairy County, Tennessee. His story inspired the Joe Don Baker-starring film Walking Tall. In one of the film’s most pivotal scenes, Pusser beats up everyone in a roadhouse with nothing but a stick. In the course of Pusser’s campaign against organized crime in Tennessee, he was shot eight times and stabbed seven times, and his wife, Pauline, was murdered by a hired gunman.

By contrast, Police Detective Jim Murray of Diamond, Missouri, goes on the Internet and pretends to be a 14-year-old girl. Just sayin’.

In light of the arrest of Collins, Missouri, Mayor Allen Kauffman on four counts of enticement of a child and his subsequent attempt to suppress the evidence, I am irresistibly compelled to point out that there is almost certainly a chat transcript on a prosecutor’s desk somewhere that features virtual sex between this man:

And this man:

Am I alone in thinking that a virtual lemon party is a victimless crime? Also, when Kauffman phoned Murray to plead for mercy, was the conversation weighed down with sublimated postcoital awkwardness? Because, y’know, when you’ve given your whole self to another person, you can feel really vulnerable…

• Finally, the observation that just as commercial interests have taken the “Christ” out of “Christmas,” they’re now taking the “Christ” out of “Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Day.” Heritage Foods USA is observing next week’s holiday with the Martin Luther King Jr. Pork Pack — it includes one country rib pack (two four-rib racks that weigh 2.5 pounds), one St. Louis rib pack (two 3-pound slabs), one boneless picnic shoulder roast (5 pounds), riblettes (2-pound pack), two packs sliced bacon (1 pound each) and 2 pounds of ground pork. SWEAR. TO. GOD. According to the press release I found in my in box, all pork comes from Mark Newman’s Certified Humane farm in Myrtle, Missouri, vaguely justifying its inclusion here today.