If you are not just headed to the Kansas City Public Library to look at porn or have sex, you may want to visit their excellent free exhibit Alert Today, Alive Tomorrow: Living With the Atomic Bomb, 1945-65. Whether you are a history buff or just want to know why your crazy grandpa is storing canned water in the basement, you will find this collection of books, posters, games, educational materials, art and toys curious, exciting and somewhat morbid.

It’s hard to comprehend that generations of Americans grew up with the thought of a nuclear blast being a sure thing always in the back of their mind. And although Geiger counters and Atomic trains seem like cool toys today, at the time they served to get the children used to the idea that someday they will be using the real thing. From the neighborhood and personal fallout shelters to the best-selling atomic handbooks the subject of an inevitable nuclear attack  determined the foreign and domestic policy for 20 years after United States bombed Japan and throughout the Cold War era.

As always I took a lot of pictures, but I suggest you check it out for yourself. The exhibit is fairly small and will take you about 30 minutes to get through.

It may be hard to believe but on a rare occasion I make myself feel like a rich man and spend more than five dollars on a lunch. So this post is written by the “big spender” me, not the “normal” me who usually pays for drinks with a pocketful of nickels and dimes. Today’s lunch tab at the new Farmhouse restaurant was $12.02 – definitely pushing the limits of my generosity, but that was the price to pay for a lunch with the prominent local blogger and beer consultant to the stars – Bull.E.Vard who is  not accustomed to my usual cheap eats.

The Farmhouse Restaurant is located in the former Delaware Cafe space in the City Market area.

It’s a great location with a roomy outdoor seating area, where we had no problem finding a table. Inside the restaurant decor features exposed brick and various farm touches, like tables made out of an old door, lanterns and waitresses in cowboy boots. Before the restaurant opened for business there was a buzz among the annoying “foodie” community about the new local farm-to-table trend in the restaurant business and other such nonsense. All of this does nothing for me, except maybe waitresses in cowboy boots; the one who was serving our table was the highlight of the hour, and she didn’t charge me for the salad (sorry that was the “cheapskate” me commenting here). Unfortunately my old habit is to tune out people’s names so I can’t recommend her that way, but you will know who I am talking about when you walk in.
The reason we even thought about the Farmhouse was the unusual “Chicken Fried Duck, Sweet and Hot Pepper Relish, Arugula, Egg Bun: $8.00”; this must be the duck season on the farm or something.(that and the phrase:”All Sandwiches Comes with Fries & Pickled Vegetables” which somehow made me think of “all your base are belong to us“).

The sandwich arrived quickly, with the salad (by mistake) and “chilled potato leek soup” on the side.

A duck breast in a crispy fried coating with some relish on top was bigger than the bun.

It was pretty tasty,although it didn’t taste very ducky. If I didn’t say duck on the menu, I probably wouldn’t have noticed, but to be fair I haven’t had duck in years, so I may not remember what it tastes like in the first place. Not tasty enough for a 45-mile round-trip, but still not bad. Potato-soup was average. As another “farm” touch the drinking water was dispensed in the empty wine bottles. I am sure someone will write about great farm-like atmosphere “just like at grandma’s”. All I remember from living at my Grandma’s is the outhouse, I bet that would really enhance the atmosphere in every sense of that word.

Anyway, I liked the restaurant,the food and especially the waitress. In my opinion the place is sorely missing the alcohol, although it just opened so that may be forthcoming; I didn’t feel like inundating the people who work there with unnecessary questions. Speaking of annoying, my conversation with Bull E.Vard centered around the trend of self-obsessed foodies taking all the fun out of dining (just like social-media spammers are killing it for the rest of us). Luckily in this area there are many bloggers covering all things food from cheap to disgusting and from ethnic to traditional, all with the necessary detail and honest opinions. I am generally not interested in the Chef’s name or a paragraph-long name of a sandwich; I am very interested in how it tasted, wait times, general attitude and waitresses’ names.

With that said, I am now going back to my normal spending pattern until the piggy bank I broke today is glued back together and filled with change.

I interrupt slow vacation coverage and other musings to report on my recent archaeological trip to the Missouri Valley Special Collections to waste a day off photograph some artifacts from the Republican National Convention, hosted in Kansas City’s Kemper Arena in 1976.

On this day 22 years ago a young German pilot Mathias Rust landed a small Cessna in the middle of the Red Square in Moscow, bypassing all the “impenetrable” air defenses. In the aftermath a huge shake-up was conducted in the Soviet Army leadership, and Rust spent 432 days in jail. Just 35 years before that it would have been a bloodshed. Times, they were a-changing…

httpvh://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aerA5oLif3k

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