Kansas City,

Recently your generosity helped finance some worthwhile and other projects. Your giving hearts and open wallets gave a much-needed hand-up to several budding entrepreneurs so they can continue to make this city better, funner, more exciting place to live.

This is why I find it appropriate to ask you once again for a small donation. I am not asking for myself, I am asking for all of us. We all know that Kansas City is one pig truck away from the big leagues.

With the pig truck cruising our streets and highways we will finally join the ranks of trend-setting metropolises such as Seattle, Los Angeles, Chicago and, dare I say it, Omaha.  With the pig truck of our own, you will finally be able to proudly say: “I am from Kansas City” without having to listen to the laundry list of the things we don’t have from Trader Joe’s to the In-N-Out.

Isn’t pride worth just a few of your dollars? How much do you love your city? Donating money to the pig truck fund is like stuffing dollar bills into a stripper’s thong so she can graduate from the law school and finally take her rightful place in the society – doing the same thing but with the clothes on.

But wait, there is more. Unlike some other cities where a similar pig truck may exist, the Kansas City version will not be serving food. I will be just driving it around town. This will make it the first ever ironic food truck, leaving the other cities in the junk pile of backwardness and unhipness.

Here is how this is going to work: every donation will be rewarded.

• Less than $10 – you will be allowed to wash the truck on the first-come-first-served basis.
• $10-$50 – unlimited photos in front of the truck for you and your friends. (photos not included)
• $50-$100 – you will be allowed to climb on/in the snout area and take a photo. (photos and liability not included)
• $100-$1,000 – one ride to/from work limited to 25 miles for you and 5 of your friends and family members. 2 honks oinks will be allowed during the ride at the time of your choosing.
• $1,000-$10,000 – one 50-mile round-trip to the location of your choice, pictures, truck-wash and unlimited use of the honk oink.
• $50,000 – you will be given full use of the vehicle for one (1) night with no driving privileges. You will receive “We Did It Piggy-Style” framed certificate upon emerging from the truck. Your future child will appreciate an autographed framed photo of you in front of the truck with the caption “You were conceived in a pig”. (condoms, STD treatments and liability not included. Maximum 3 persons.)
• Other prized can be arranged.

Only your generosity can save the future and the prestige of this city. Your dollars will propel us ahead of all the places who now have the audacity to look down on us.

Send your donations:

c/o #kcpigmobile to the email address on this site.

Don’t let the pigtail of progress wave in your face.

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This article about the Hyatt Regency disaster published in the Weekly World News on August 11, 1981 has a curious inset.

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KDOT’s recently completed construction of the 75th Street collector-distributor exit ramp lane did not alleviate traffic backups that predictably occur in that area during the rush-hour at least twice a day. Anyone who drives on I35 with any regularity would’ve predicted that before any concrete was poured into that project. Traffic jams occur not because people are trying to exit on the 75th st; they are caused by an inflow of morons merging into the traffic and immediately attempting to reach the left lane so they don’t miss their exit to I635 several miles later.

Luckily there is a silver lining and the said lining can only be found on this blog, well-known for its optimism and positiveness. While the project completely failed in its original intent, KDOT has unintentionally created the first ever express lane in the Kansas City Metro Area.

On this video (made by an extremely unidentified driver) you can see how the long and winding exit lane with more tunnels than a Hutchinson prairie dog town, conveniently bypasses the entire traffic jam and safely gets back on the highway.

httpvh://youtu.be/J5qCE1Y9O4k

Now if only someone would get rid of the long stop light at the end of the exit ramp.

In the meantime, we are looking forward to KDOT’s other poorly engineered projects and their unintentional results.

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Preface:

Hundreds of thousands of people with better cameras and better photography skills vacation at the same places as me.

Hundreds of thousands of people are better at travel writing than I am, better at writing in general, and are clearly better than me at speaking English.

Go read their damn blogs….

I love to travel. It helps me to relax; feel in charge when I am planning my next trip, buying tickets and making reservations; learn new things; change the scenery; feel better (or worse) about my hometown. Most importantly, it helps me not to raise a moron. This year we traveled to the Pacific Northwest, a place that until now remained a blank spot on my travel map. We visited Seattle, took an Amtrak train to San Francisco and drove 450 miles along the Pacific Coast on Highways 1 and 101, stopping for a night in Monterey. The trip turned out to be even better than I imagined.

The next several posts will be about these places illustrated with tons of photos (I brought back 1,214, which would probably weigh tons if I was using film).

Face:

If there was a god, the Pacific Northwest would have been his reward to the people who didn’t quit going West in the middle of Kansas, and, instead of making “Ad Astra Per Aspera” their motto and giving up, continued to endure and persevere for months and years, slowly consuming their mates on the way. When these people, exhausted and with little hope remaining, saw the water in front of them (after the rain stopped and the fog cleared 6 months later), they knew it was all worth it, and everyone they ate on the way would have wanted it that way. Over time they proceeded to cut and kill most of the things so abundant in the area, swindle the Indians, build depressing slums and fill the void with homeless people, Mexican radio stations, French-speaking tourists and a special breed of people who ride the Ducks.

Over time, people had an epiphany, and after multiple fires and earthquakes, the Pacific Northwest and Northern California (I have no idea if these are considered one geographical region) are an American jewel, a place where the nature, weather and landscape combined with the architecture, city planning, atmosphere and a number of Asian restaurants approaching infinity make one understand why people are willing to pay mind-blowing prices to live there.

If I had to summarize Seattle in one photo, it would probably be this shot of a redheaded, bearded guy in a cap, wearing sandals and smoking a pipe.

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