Sunday, January 28, 2007

Today Kansas City, Tommorrow the World

There was a bit of serendipity going on Friday afternoon. I received the blog comment on Po’ Girl within an hour of my discovering the connection with The Be Good Tanyas on Wikipedia. Wiki is rather amazing as it has an entire section on alternative country bands and, well, sometimes I have a lot of free time. This does at least partially explain how the hell I ended up with this CD but doesn’t help in figuring out why I like one band and not the other when they are effectively the same band. My guess is that it is due to the strange rap sections that appear in Po’ Girl songs. 10 out of 10 for originality, minus several thousand for execution.

I had another email on Friday that will go down as the most amazing thing that has ever happened to me as a result of the blog. I received an email from the Funkhouser for Mayor campaign containing a press release about how the internet has gotten behind his campaign with the first words being “We Want the Funk.” This means a couple of things. 1) Political campaigns are reading my blog. 2) They are then using my ideas in their press releases. 3) My late night ramblings may impact the political scene in a somewhat major US city. Yes, I will now appoint myself Kingmaker in this Midwestern metropolis.

(I’m not making any of this up. I was singled out as a blogger despite the fact that I a) admitted that all I know about local politics comes from yard signs and b) my main insight into his candidacy is that he has a funny name.)

So, since I am apparently an unpaid consultant for the Funkhouser for Mayor campaign I figured that I might as well build his political platform. Here is my agenda for what I want to see during the Funk era in Kansas City.

Item One: Immediate rechristening of the Sprint Center as “The Mothership”.

Item Two: Forget a light rail initiative, we will have a “Grand Funk Rail” initiative.

Item Three: All residents will be encouraged to check themselves on a regular basis in order to prevent recurring instances of wrecking themselves.

Item Four: A combination education and health initiative focusing on freeing one’s mind as the ass will then follow.

Item Five: Slugger will be replaced as Royals mascot by that dude in Parliament Funkadelic who plays guitar while wearing a diaper.

Basically, this is just the starting point in brining the focus in this town away from political platforms and back where it belongs, on very impractical platform shoes. People of Kansas City! Rise up and let your voices be heard. Let us create One Nation Under Funk!

(While I’m in no way associated with the following website or campaign, I should give them props. http://Funkhouserformayor.blogspot.com The fact that he is an auditor and looks, well, kind of like Rasputin, just makes this more interesting.)

Not saying that this town doesn’t need help politically or in any aspect of PR. This is based on the fact that I spent part of the day watching Kansas City SWAT on A&E. See, we can’t be like Muncie, Indiana and have Erik Estrada acting like a cop and being followed by a camera crew. That would be slightly cool. Hell, who wouldn’t want to be arrested by Ponch. Instead, we get a very intense view of hostage standoffs and drug raids. The sort of things where when you watch and say, “Hey, my house is on TV!” you realize that it might not be a good thing.

The five random CDs for the week
1) Jay Bennett & Edward Burch “The Palace at 4am (Part 1)”
2) Golden Smog “Down By the Old Mainstream”
3) Mike Plume Band “Fools for the Radio”
4) The Two Dollar Pistols with Tift Merritt “The Two Dollar Pistols with Tift Merritt”
5) U2 “The Eye of the Fly” (U2 live in Detroit and Madison 9/92)

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