Daily Briefs: Yael Unleashed, the Gouging of Prices, Hippie Wind Farm SARS

By CHRIS PACKHAM

I do not review your nerd films: All’s I’m saying is, M. Night Shyamalan’s Indiana Jones and the Lady in the Water, you guys. FAIL. Also:

KC Museums eating WIC-approved tuna: %{[ data-embed-type=”image” data-embed-id=”57150c4c89121ca96b9622b4″ data-embed-element=”aside” ]}%Since I’m not a parent, I never have to go to museums, which pretty much frees me up for all the not walking around for hours at a time my hectic schedule demands. Nonetheless, the Kansas City, Missouri, City Council is aiming for a ballot measure increasing property taxes to fund a variety of area museums. It’s like a trick, forcibly extracting admission from Kansas City residents who may not want to visit the Irish Museum and Cultural Center at Union Station. (You soooooo do not want to visit the Irish Museum and Cultural Center in Union Station.)

Yaelbo: First Blood Part II: I hereby retract any previous implication that the Kansas City Star‘s Yael T. Abouhalkah is a Roomba-like automaton, mindlessly supporting Mayor Mark M.C. Funkenstein with a floor-covering combination of algorithmic spiral cleaning, wall-following and random walk-angle-changing. I don’t know who’s in charge of that at the Star these days (MIKE HENDRICKS), but Yael wrote a wholly critical blog post at primebuzz.livejournal.com, taking the mayor to task for going to some kind of Mayor Expo in Philadelphia instead of prepping the big light-rail plan he’s presenting on May 30. Pretty harsh. Also, good! I think it’s related to Yael’s recent public cascade of American Idol-inspired world-weary cynicism. Will somebody at the Star please give lovable old Yael T. Abouhalkah a big “High, Hard and Inside” hug?

Let the market decide how far you bend over: Have you or a loved one been the victim of fuel surcharge price gouging? Because it’s on the rise, according to the Better Business Bureau in Kansas City, whose caseload of fuel-surcharge-gouging investigations has shot up this year to a total of two from, presumably, none. That’s, uh, a 200 percent increase in consumer complaints according to some back-of-the-envelope calculations I made by timesing two hundred by zero. Hi! English major! Would you like to hear about Shirley Jackson’s The Lottery?

Hippie wind farms sicken rural folk: Not metaphorically. The vibrations and sound of wind turbines are apparently making people ill by — if you’ll pardon the medical jargon — fucking with the inner-ear equilibrium systems of nearby farm dwellers. Wind Turbine Syndrome, you guys! Please excuse my child from school. He is very sensitive to the conversion of kinetic energy into mechanical energy and also likes to collect vintage Barbie outfits. ATTENTION, E. THOMAS MCLANAHAN: If this doesn’t buttress your arguments for total cultural stagnancy, you may as well throw in the moldy-smelling strict-constructionist towel. Because this is practically torn from the pages of Michael Crichton’s Climate Change Hippie Conspiracy Park, about a theme park staffed by filthy, hemp-hat-wearing Tom Robbins fans who kidnap all the park guests and render them into renewable fatty bio-fuel.