This is all barbecue sauce.
It’s on display at a gas station in Kansas City called Shamrock. Read the rest of this entry »
The Cashew is a four-story bar in downtown Kansas City. It didn’t exist when we were in high school. Everyone attending had paid $70 ($60 in advance) for an open bar and “heavy appetizers.” At 11:30, the staff told us that we could either pay another $2,500, or our open bar was closing. Lame. Read the rest of this entry »
After making plans and then cancelling them, I suddenly decided to return to KC for my 20th high school reunion. I spent a lot of money on the ticket, so I attempted to compensate by taking the subway to JFK airport. It didn’t take nearly as long as I expected. On the tram during the final leg of the journey, I found myself surrounded by a group of licentious individuals. Notice the girl getting high off a chemical in her scarf (clever way to get it through airport security). And the guy in the white shirt is clearly in the middle of a sophisticated dance move.
The cartoon that started the meme “on the internet, nobody knows you’re a dog” was printed in 1993, but already this is no longer true. If you’re online, you’re probably on Facebook, Linkedin, and other real-life networking services. Everybody you meet online who could possibly know who you really are is probably going to find out.
Question: What happened?
Answer: The popular kids took over the Internet.
When my family got our first computer in 1984 (Apple II+), my desire to talk about it at school was a sign of social awkwardness. Nobody in their right mind discussed technology with a straight face school unless a) they just didn’t get how the social system worked, or b) they had already given up on any hope of ever being even mildly popular. It was understood that computers were for people who were unable to negotiate the more nuanced planes of human relations, and had to take comfort in the “ones and zeroes.”
There was some truth to this. It wasn’t an accident that one of the first computer games to become really popular was Adventure, a text-only fantasy in which the user discovers treasure, fights dwarves, and negotiates labyrinthine cave passages (ironically based on real cave passages). Read the rest of this entry »
Diablo Cody’s new-ish comedy about multiple personality disorder, starring Toni Collette, takes place in Overland Park, Kansas. I grew up in a house in Prairie Village, the city adjacent to Overland Park, and I spent a lot of time in Overland Park. Overland Park and Prairie Village are both part of Johnson County. And if you’re from Kansas, then “Johnson County” is the label that you’d apply to me most readily.
So far (we’re near the end of the first season), The United States Of Tara has depicted Johnson County with startling accuracy. Offhand references to landmarks and neighboring areas are all accurate. The characters’ living situations match their socioeconomic status in a distinctly midwestern way. One character, who is the 20-something manager of a stand-in for TGI Friday’s, shares a modest but comfortable house with a friend, in a nice part of town. Tara’s family of four has a nice two-story house and a “shed,” actually a comfy unconnected building in the back yard where Tara’s alternate persona T creates and stores her artwork. (What exactly Tara’s husband does is, I think, still a mystery. But that, too, is midwestern. Your occupation doesn’t define you as much there as it does in a big city… at least in New York.)
Johnson County is, in many ways, the perfect place to set a story about someone with a confused sense of identity: Read the rest of this entry »
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