• Checked Off My Bucket List: Visit A Korean Festival

    You mean to say that going to a Korean Festival is not on your bucket list? Then my bucket list (if I had one) definitely kicks your bucket list’s ass.
    The best thing about going to a Korean Festival is a lot of Koreans, they are nice and friendly people who don’t mind a freeloader who showed up as a friend of a friend of a guest.


    Any self-respecting Korean Festival starts off by singing Korean National Anthem followed the US National Anthem.

    httpvh://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oXIJKyuU1d4

    httpvh://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jdki1LhKT5k

    Korean War Veterans get a lot of respect at the event.


    You’d think that reading Korean is hard…

    …but you’d be wrong, I immediately knew what the 3rd prize was.

    Another great thing about Korean Festivals is a combination of soccer, tennis and volleyball they play there.

    For the entertainment Koreans enjoy making fun of the non-Koreans pretending to do martial arts.

    I thought something was strange when whatever the martial arts people were screaming sounded a lot like “Jesus First” but then they proceeded to create cross formation and re-enact the Passion of the Christ.

    This is the part after they crucified their instructor a.k.a. Jesus…

    httpvh://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JxnZAqZ97BI

    …so he can return from the dead.

    httpvh://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m5aAhsfRSl0

    Of course no one leaves hungry.


    To recap: nice people, a show about Jesus and martial arts, good food and lots and lots of soap.

    Now on to the next item on my list….

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  • Dueling Billboards of Missouri

    The state of Missouri takes its “show-me state” nickname literally, and there is no shortage of places where certain things are shown to the citizens and guests of the state.

    Billboards for the adult mega-centers and superstores break the monotony of an average I-70 cross-state drive.

    The righteous citizens counteract the best they can. The following billboard is the Holy Grail of billboards. I frequently post on the subject of billboards here, but I don’t think I can ever top this one. To photograph this rare find I took a detour and put myself in danger parking on the side of the highway.
    What makes this billboard so unique is that until today I always read it as “Jesus saves and forgives pornography”, not having enough time to read the last line driving by at highway speeds. Apparently that’s not the case and that’s a pity, because Jesus would probably double the amount of followers if he did.
    There is no better place to educate people about abortion then the side of the highway. That’s where many people do most of their reading.


    As an unintended side-effect of my billboard hunting I discovered a creative way to deal with the native omnipresent Missouri front-yard pile of rusted metal. This resident of Concordia, MO can give KCMO artist Stretch some pointers on how to run a welder.








    Other flying objects were hidden in the building.




    Lastly, consider this your visit to Jonesburg, MO.









    The “pride in their heritage” museum is open on Sundays 2 to 4.

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  • Johnson County,KS: Then and Now

    Today’s feature may be called “Back to the future” or “Forward to the past” because it goes back to the time when this metro area had a commuter rail which some of us so desperately want now.

    Interurban Line

    The description of this image reads:
    Black and white film negative of two trolley cars on the Strang Line between Pflumm & Haskins on Walnut. The car at the left is an open car. Text on the left end: “SANTA FE TRAIL ROUTE.” Text along the side of the car roof: “MISSOURI & KANSAS INTERURBAN RAILWAY.” The car has a number of seated passengers and two children stand in the end of the car. Several of the women passengers wear hats. The right car is an enclosed car. An oval on the side of the car, in which the name of the car is may read “OGERITA.” The building at the far right is the Lenexa mill. A portion of a railroad stations appears to be visible behind the cars. Several utility poles run along the track. A portion of a house is visible at the extreme left. Bare dirt in the railroad right-of-way is in the foreground.

    You can find a brief history of the Strang Line on the the JoCoHistory website. Strang Line (officially named Missouri and Kansas Interurban Railway) was developed by William B. Strang Jr and existed between 1906 and 1940 providing a link between Olathe and Kansas City and further on to St.Joseph. A book by Monroe Dodd (recently laid off from the Star so buy the book!) A Splendid Ride: The Streetcars of Kansas City, 1870-1957 has more details and a better quality picture of the same or similar train. A website by Ed Gentry is dedicated to the Interurban linking Kansas City and St. Joseph.

    Today the old Strang Line can still be traced on the map and in a surviving street name.

    The site of the old picture still has rails but they belong to the real railroad.

    P1020496

    In the end it’s always the real people who make the old pictures come alive. Someone named Bob Blackwell commented on the museum photo in October 2006: “The picture is looking to the Northeast so the dirt road is probably at the front of the old Trails End Hotel. I have fond memories of the Strang Line although I do not remember any open cars. I do remember the Obregon car. My mother Francis Blackwell used to take me to Kansas City on the Strang Line so she could shop. I rode the Strang Line to Olathe to high school in 1938 until it closed down.”

    Maybe some day we will be able to ride “the highest, coolest and most beautiful ride out of Kansas City” and create our own fond memories.

    View Larger Map

    This look at the past was brought to you by the Kansas City Lunch Spots : Where Lunches and Spots Meet In The Open. Also sponsored by: My Job: Three-day weekends – plenty of time to waste Additional financing by: Light Rail: Dream on.
    Previous posts here.

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  • Kansas City: Still Here 30 Years After

    Since there is no large-scale event like an All Star Game planned in Kansas City in the year 2013, I propose to make the 30th anniversary of the movie The Day After the theme for the year. Granted, The Day After is a horrible, poorly acted, made for TV movie, with special effects that make The 7th Voyage of Sinbad look like the Star Wars, but it scared the crap out of millions of Americans and convinced President Reagan to sign a Nuclear Treaty few years later.

    The movie demonstrated  that it only takes hours after the nuclear strike for the American Military to disband and start fending for themselves, few days for the food riots to start, and few weeks for most people to lose their humanity and forget the English language. It also showed that the government will be predictably unprepared, a nuclear shelter doesn’t protect against a big gun and that people will still ignore the warnings and go to a movie theater right before being blasted with inexplicably excessive number of nuclear devices.

    The idea of using The Day After to promote tourism in Kansas City is not new and not even mine. In his article “Kansas City after “The Day After”” published in the Travel Holiday Magazine in June 1984, John Garrity quotes Richard Pfanenstiel, director of the Missouri Film Commission saying:

    The Day After was the best thing that ever happened to Kansas City, Kansas City looked good”.

    then goes on to write:

    “If you caught the final 20 minutes of the ABC’s The Day After, last November’s doomsday movie, you probably don’t agree with the above statement. You saw Kansas City as an ash-gray rock pile, a windy moonscape dotted with small fires around which a few radiation-ravaged survivors huddled for warmth. The Day After,  you guessed, would not o for Kansas City what Where the Boys Are did for Fort Lauderdale.

    “As of Sunday night,” Kansas City Times columnist Arthur Brisbane wrote after watching the film, “we’re famous as the city ABC blew up.”

    Or, as some other wag noted, “There goes the neighborhood.”

    “If it weren’t for the honor of the thing,” a television newsman deadpanned, “I’d just as soon have passed it up.” This last remark, of course, paraphrased Mark Twain, the most famous of all Missourians, who predicted that mankind’s folly would bring it to just such an inglorious end.

    Others contend that ABC, by blowing Kansas City off the map, actually put Kansas City on the map. The film has now been shown to nearly 200 million viewers around the world. And if The Day After  depicted Kansas City as unlivable after a nuclear strike, its pre-attack footage captured this heartland city at its best: tree-lined boulevards, lush parks crowded with joggers and Frisbee throwers, monumental fountains, fashionable people shopping at fashionable store in the Country Club Plaza. The camera caught them all with an aching poignancy.

    Whether Kansas City will be rewarded with a sudden influx of foreign tourists (along the lines of Hiroshima’s sober pilgrims), it’s too early to say. But even the casual visitor to Kansas City could do worse than use The Day After as an approach for a visit.

    As you can see, I already completed all the necessary research, made a trip to the Kansas City Library and suffered through the entire 2 hours 6 minutes of the movie (which I have successfully avoided for my almost 20 years in this country), and now I am presenting this concept to the Kansas City Convention & Visitors Association absolutely free of charge. We need to hurry up before Lawrence steals the idea. I propose the following mottoes to be used in the campaign (sample):

    • Kansas City 2013: We Haven’t Been Blown Up For Real, You Know.
    • Kansas City 2013: We Are Not Mutants.
    • Kansas City 2013: Come Visit, The Radiation Is At Almost Gone.

    Proposed activities (sample):

    • Multiple walking, bus, Segway, Volvo station wagon and helicopter tours will carry the tourists to the sites shown in the movie such as the Liberty Memorial, Plaza, Nelson-Atkins Gallery, West Bottoms, Truman Sports Complex.
    • Big screen TV’s placed at these and other locations will be playing the movie as well as the KMBC special “Sunday, Nuclear Sunday” which aired on November 20, 1983, complete with commercials where young Larry Moore, Brenda Williams and non-senile Walt Bodine will discuss now outdated nuclear research.
    • Restaurants will offer themed menu items like “Missile Fries” and “Nacho Cheese Meltdown”.
    • This horrible song may be used for additional advertising materials.

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  • Retarded Parents Produce Stupid Kids

    I thought that Miley would be someone that my girls who they could look up to, but I guess that I was wrong. Thanks a lot Miley!
    Posted on Kansascity.com

    Many comments left in response to the article about Miley Sirus’ Vanity Fair cover fiasco are way more entertaining than the story itself. These comments are from parents who are upset because their kids’ role model is now disgraced after posing for “inappropriate” pictures for the magazine. What’s inappropriate is their kids even having a role model such as Myley Sirus. What do people even know about her to encourage their kids to look up to her? Is she a future Nobel Prize winner? Maybe she will cure cancer? Is she a great artist, composer, writer? Winner of American Idol? Up-and-coming porn star? (that may be). For all these people know, she could be torturing kittens, be a bully on a rare day when she shows up at school, she could have eating disorders, she could be a pathological liar and steal her neighbor’s paper.How can you possibly present her or any celebrity as a role model for your kids based on her 30 minute show on Disney Channel and an occasional concert is beyond me. No wonder these children have problems when they grow up.

    Of course when I was growing up there were no shortage of role models offered to me and they weren’t some creepy child-actors who could sing and jump on stage. They were bona fide heroes: Pavlik Morozov – a 13-year old boy who denounced his father to the authorities and was in turn killed by his family, Yuri Gagarin – the first man in space, Zoya Kosmodemyanskaya – a 17-year old who was caught trying to sabotage Germans during the war and was tortured and killed, or Alexei Maresiev – a war pilot who was shot down, lost both legs trying to get back to the hospital, then trained himself to fly with prosthetic legs and returned back to being a pilot. There were hundreds and thousands of others. There were books about them, songs, movies, poems, their portraits hung in our classrooms. Years later we found out that some of their stories were nothing but well produced propaganda. Others were true heroes who are still honored many years later. Despite the abundance of supplied role models, I never wanted to be like them or look up to them. I admired their actions, cried when their lives tragically ended but I could always separate the action from the actor. This may not be the case with the false role models of today.

    The only people who I knew in real life were my parents and relatives. They were my real role models. My Father was a doctor with a gift and a selfless dedication to his patients and profession; a writer, a poet, with great sense of humor; a true intellectual. From his childhood in the Jewish ghetto under German occupation, his father never returned from WWII, he went on through discrimination and poverty to become a beloved and respected physician. Many people whose lives he saved or touched came to remember him at his funeral. He was a hero to them. He is a hero to me.

    I hope that if anything my daughter gets from me (besides liking strange-for-Americans Russian foods) it’s enough common sense to tell the difference between someone like Miley Sirus or whoever else Disney Channel thinks she should look up to, and real everyday role models who are around her and not on TV. Miley Sirus’s come and go, sometimes forgotten, sometimes disgraced, their likenesses scattered amidst garage sales and donations to the Salvation Army. That’s not the road you want your child to follow. Or maybe you do. Then reread the title of this post.

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