Wash U. kids show big balls in protesting reception attended by energy executives, including some from the coal (above) industry.
Actually, it was a flash mob.
Some 100 students clad in yellow T-shirts and arm-bands paraded into the "America Energy First Conference" cocktail reception being held at Wash U. on Monday night and staged a flash mob to protest what they said was an "over-representation" of dirty-energy sources at the conference.
A campus group called Green Action led the protest. Not only were they dismayed that the renewable energy sector did not appear to be represented at the conference, Green Action members said they're uneasy about the university getting in bed with two coal companies: Peabody Energy and Arch Coal.
The CEOs of both firms -- Peabody is St. Louis-based -- joined Wash U's Board of Trustees this past summer.
As Green Action member Will Fischer put it: "We will not stand aside while executives from Arch Coal and Peabody paint a dirty energy future for our school and our nation. We believe that America's real energy future uses renewable, socially responsible energy sources."
A Southwestern High School teacher in Piasa, Illinois, (outside of Alton) is back in the classroom today after a multi-day suspension for an assignment about homosexual behaviors in animals.
English teacher Dan DeLong was placed on paid leave last week after someone complained about the optional homework assignment he provided his sophomore students.
The homework had students read an article that challenged Darwin's theory of sexual selection by documenting hundreds of animals species that engaged in seemingly homosexual acts.
Unreal recently received an email asking if Riverfront Times would pass along a PSA promoting the Marine Corps' annual St. Louis Toys for Tots campaign.
Still, for some reason the PSA (below) reminded Unreal not so much of Christmas cheer. Instead, we're remembering why we could never hack it in the military.
Tell us, does Lt. Col. Tomko remind you of anyone? Perhaps the following figure?
Today the St. Louis Post-Dispatch has an interesting story about the Missouri Department of Revenue's determination that yoga studios are fitness centers and therefore subject to the state's 4 percent sales tax on the latter.
The yoga lobby -- OK, that's a stretch, but Unreal couldn't resist -- counters that yoga classes aren't the same as, say, spinning classes because the physical activity is actually a means to a spiritual end.
If the yoga studios can sway the state on this First Amendment-based argument, they'll get an exemption on religious grounds.
Before you guffaw, consider that the state of Washington, after pulling a similar maneuver, considered the yoga studios' argument and then backed down.
Now, Unreal's never been one to favor anything that denies folks their spiritual enrichment. But the few times we've darkened a yoga studio's door one of the first impressions we've noted is feet. Stinky feet.
Halloween is a pretty sweet holiday. Literally. Candy of every shape and flavor is heaped into the baskets of small children, providing a much-needed excuse for a suger-fueled cavity-inducing bender that's been lining dentists' pockets for decades. Adults, in addition to sneaking their own sugar-fix, get to dress up in silly (or slutty) costumes and drink themselves silly.
The Mexican Día de los Muertos-- the Day of the Dead-- takes all those things and ups the ante with better food, more drinking, and some existential spiritual pondering.
This Sunday from 1-7 p.m., for the third consecutive year, the Latino-owned businesses of Cherokee Street will celebrate the holiday with storefront ofrendas (shrines with offerings to the dead), free samples of traditional Day of the Dead food (mole, tamales, day of the dead bread), and music (described by one event organizer as "something very happy where we mock death.")
In September the monthly tabloid published its last issue for 2009. At the time publisher and owner Pam Schneider told Daily RFT the reason was because she needed time to concentrate on a redesign and office move.
Turns out, Schneider left out a key detail: she was also selling the newspaper. Effective yesterday, the new owner of the Vital Voice is Darin Slyman, a.k.a. "D-Sly the Style Guy."
A St. Louis media veteran who has written fashion columns for Riverfront Times, Ladue News, toastedrav.com and Alive Magazine, Slyman joined Vital Voice earlier this year as a style contributor. That gig eventually led to a spot as associate publisher of the paper. Then, two months ago, Slyman says Schneider asked him if he wanted to take the reins.
"She's done a great job building this paper up over the years and felt the time had come to pass it on to a new generation," says Slyman, 36. "My response: Let's do it!"
Wanna know where Saturn stands in relation to the sun, kiddies? Do your astronomy homework in the Delmar Loop!
On a scale of one to 5 billion, where does Uranus stand in relation to the sun?
Well, if the sun is the Moonrise Hotel, and "5 billion" is Cicero's Restaurant, Uranus would be parked right at Brandt's Cafe.
That's the gist of the new Delmar Loop Planet Walk opening on November 8 with a "Big Bang" party and ribbon-cutting. The interactive walk - a la the Loop's already-popular St. Louis Walk of Fame - represents a scale model of the solar system.
Instead of stars molded into concrete, the Planet Walk is comprised of five-foot-tall signs bearing fun facts of astronomy.
At 2,800 feet long, the walk will begin at the Moonrise with a model of the sun and follows west, ending at Cicero's, with Neptune's likeness.
And what about Pluto, you ask? "Pluto has been demoted," explains Stephen Walker, the Planet Walk's creator. "The International Astronomical Union met in 2006 and decided Pluto would be downgraded to a dwarf planet."
C'mon down! Bob Barker, the erstwhile host of The Price is Right and longtime animal rights activist, has just donated $1 million to his alma mater, Drury University in Springfield, MO, to establish a professorship in animal rights. Barker hopes it will be the beginning of a full-fledged program in animal rights, the nation's first.
"I think some students would become full-fledged animal rights
activists," Barker told the Associated Press. "Some will become lawyers and doctors who will
always be interested in animal rights. And some will have more respect
for animals."
The food/travel guide Zagat published its annual "America's Top Restaurants" edition last week and the book includes a survey of which cities leave the biggest tips by percentage. St. Louisans beat out the highfalutin cheapskates in Seattle and San Francisco to be named the nation's most generous diners.
St. Louis diners tied with those in Philadelphia as the best tippers in the nation -- leaving a gratuity of 19.6 percent on average, according to a Zagat survey released Wednesday.
The results were culled from polling more then 145,000 surveyors who ate 24 million meals at 1,533 restaurants in 45 cities over the past year.
St. Louis was one of 15 cities new to the rankings and was singled out in the league's press release for improvements the city has made to encourage pedal-powered transportation.
St. Louis, Mo., for example, is one of the 70 largest cities surveyed in the ACS and a new BFC. The community nearly doubled their number of bicycle commuters from 2000 to 2008. The city has completed several noteworthy projects within the past year, including 53 new miles of on-street additions to the bikeway system, a $10 million investment, and an expansion of bicycling education offerings for children and adults. "St. Louis like cities across the country, is making smart investments in building a welcoming community for biking that will inevitably lead to more, healthier and sustainable transportation options and increased recreational opportunities." stated Bill Nesper, League Director of the Bicycle Friendly America program.
If all goes according to schedule, the St. Louis Public Schools will regain state accreditation in 2011. But first the Special Administrative Board that's running the district must approve an accountability plan designed to get the school back in the good graces of the state.
Earlier this week, the administrative board was presented the lengthy, 48-page plan that aims to improve conditions in five key areas:
Student Performance
Highly Qualified Staff
Facilities, Instructional Programs, Support
Parent and Community Involvement
Governance
And Superintendent Kelvin Adams has a homework assignment for all teachers, parents and city stakeholders concerned with the district: Take a look at the plan and its supporting documents (viewable here), and let the district know what you think.
Sizer was best known as the father of the Essential Schools movement, which he founded in 1984. The movement's umbrella organization, the Coalition of Essential Schools, spans a diverse array of public and private schools united by their adherence to a set of common principles.
The principles hold, among other things, that a school is an egalitarian community and that the student is a valued worker in that community, with the teacher in the role of mentor or coach. Depth of knowledge is emphasized over breadth, with the mastery of a few core subjects preferred over the scattershot spate of electives the modern high school seems to favor.
www.essentialschools.org
What's that got to do with St. Louis? you ask. Well, a whole lot, on the one hand, and, on the other, not very much. We'll start with the latter: The St. Louis area is home to -- drum roll, please -- precisely one Coalition-affiliated school, the Whitfield School in Creve Coeur.
A pity, because we could use a lot more.
I know about Sizer thanks to my sister Liza, who taught at Whitfield in the late 1980s. She pretty much fell into the job, having fled a Ph.D. program in paleontology after going as far as a master's. That job, I'm sure she'll tell you, changed her life. When she left Whitfield it was to enroll in a doctoral program in education. She's either taught education or taught middle- and high-schoolers ever since.
At first it seemed like an aberration that St. Louis and the Show-Me State consistently came in last (or first in a bad way) in every national poll, study, and ranking under the sun.
Well, three new studies are out and none of them are flattering for our neck of the woods. Unless you consider being one of the cheapest places for old people to retire to as a compliment.
Those are the questions essentially posed by urban affairs blogger Aaron Renn in his latest posting, titled "The White City."
Renn takes a look at the mid-sized cities of Portland, Austin, Seattle, Denver and Minneapolis that are routinely hailed as being hip, progressive towns. He then holds those five places up to U.S. Census Bureau statistics, and finds that in each case the city (and its core county) falls below the national average for African-American residents.
In the city of St. Louis, the African-American population accounts for nearly 49 percent of the population. Combined with St. Louis County, the African-American percentage of both regions is a little more than 28 percent, according to U.S. Census figures.
Compare that to Portland, whose African-American population accounts for just 6 percent of residents and is -- according to Renn -- America's "ultimate White City."
Questions Renn:
"Why is it that progressivism in smaller metros is so often associated with low numbers of African Americans? Can you have a progressive city properly so-called with only a disproportionate handful of African Americans in it? In addition, why has no one called these cities on it?"
Moreover, Renn wonders whether the folks leaving Rust Belt cities (ie. more heavily populated African-American places) for the likes of Portland and Denver are really as progressive as they claim. Or, are they just participating in what he calls "White Flight writ large"?
The highly flammable greenhouse gas, most famous in the form of cow flatulence (hence the lovely picture above), is causing a scare for a handful of North St. Louis residents.
The St. Louis Demolition Landfill, located just east of Hall Street adjacent to the Mississippi River, has "potentially explosive levels" of the gas seeping out of the ground.
The Missouri Department of Natural Resources was working with the City to close the dump when testing revealed more than 18 times the allowable levels of methane present in the air.
An e-mail arrived in my inbox late yesterday from Tsila Schwartz, whose husband Howard Schwartz is a fixture in the graduate writing program at the University of Missouri-St. Louis.
Schwartz, who's 64, had a stroke last Saturday night that has affected his left side, as well as his speech. He's now out of the hospital and on the mend in rehab and is optimistic that he'll be able to return to teaching next semester.
A graduate of Washington U, Schwartz has been at UMSL since 1970 and is exceptionally knowledgeable about Jewish mythology. Biblical and kabbalistic imagery pervade his poetry, and he has written extensively on the topic in nonfiction works, including the critically acclaimed Tree of Souls: The Mythology of Judaism, which won the National Jewish Book Award in 2005.
I've known Howard for about as long as I can remember; he made a point of looking out for me during my misspent youth and, among other good deeds, stoked my passion for all things Bob Dylan with his exhaustive collection of concert bootlegs back in the days when such things were circulated only via cassette tape.
Matthew Shepard, a gay Wyoming college student murdered in 1998 and an inspiration for the revised hate-crimes law.
You've probably heard by now how the House of Representatives passed a measure last week that broadens the definition of a "hate crime" to include incidents committed because of the sexual or gender orientation of the victim.
The controversial measure largely fell along party lines, with many Republicans arguing that the proposed law was unnecessary.
"The idea that we're going to pass a law that's going to add further charges to someone based on what they may have been thinking, I think is wrong," said Ohio Rep. John A. Boehner, who called it "radical social policy."
Many Republicans were also outraged that the proposed law was attached to a massive defense-spending bill. In the end, the measure passed 281 to 146 and now moves onto to the Senate where it's expected to pass easily.
So how did St. Louis area congressmen (some of whom are currently running for higher office) vote on the measure?
As far as the local judicial system is concerned, Lewis Greenberg's art is still a danger to society. A St. Louis County circuit judge yesterday upheld a ruling by the Ballwin municipal court that Greenberg's yard installation, The Holocaust Revisited, may be art, but it's still dangerous and needs to be removed.
Judge Lawrence Permuter told Greenberg that he has 30 days to remove the sculpture from his yard or pay a $1,000 fine. David Howard and Veronica Johnson, Greenberg's attorneys, plan to take the case to the Missouri Court of Appeals.
Greenberg, who was recently declared Best Geezer by the RFT, began assembling The Holocaust Revisited in 2004. His neighbors in the Whispering Oakwood subdivision protested that the sculpture, which contains twisted metal and pointed sticks, was a health hazard and lowered property values. The case first went to court two years ago.
"I'm very disappointed," said Howard. "Neither of the judges [Permuter or Ballwin municipal judge Kathryn Koch] addressed the Constitutional issues. They let an ordinance trump the Constitution."
It may not be the Olympics or even the All-Star Game, but St. Louis will get a chance to bask in the international spotlight for three consecutive Aprils starting in 2011 when the FIRST Robotics Competition (FRC) finals will come to the Edward Jones Dome.
flickr.com/photos/silkegb
Well, OK, it's a very narrow international spotlight. But it's an intense one, sort of like the National Spelling Bee for math and science nerds.
FIRST, which stands for For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology, was founded in 1989 by Dean Kamen, inventor of the Segway, as a way to encourage young people to get involved in math and science. Kamen calls the robotics competition "the varsity sport of the mind."
A still for Up in the Air features Goerge Clooney at Lambert Field.
[Editor's note: As many RFT readers know, for many years Randall Roberts was a fixture at this paper, first as a freelancer, later as music editor and then as a staff writer, before he packed up his quill pen and ink bottle and hied to the left coast, where he now music-edits our sister paper LA Weekly.
Well, you can take the boy out of St. Louis, but you can't take St. Louis out of the boy. So it was that Randy found himself at a screening of Up in the Air earlier this week, and just had to check in with us folks back home...]
It all makes a transplanted Angeleno a little homesick. Tuesday night at International Creative Management's screening room in Century City, director Jason Reitman introduced his new film, Up in the Air, to a small group of interested parties. Much of the film, which stars George Clooney, was shot in St. Louis, even scenes that purport to be Chicago and northern Wisconsin -- even though the movie's story only lands in St. Louis for maybe ten minutes.
If upon driving down Interstate 44 through Shrewsbury you've looked off to the north and asked yourself "What in God's name are those towering cages!?", here's the answer: They're gasometers.
The steel structures were built by Laclede Gas in the 1920s and '40s and once held millions of pounds of natural gas in storage tanks that would rise and fall (depending on how full the tanks were) inside the skeletal steel sleeves.
Laclede Gas quit using the gasometers in 1995, and for the past decade they've sat there rusting with their storage tanks no longer visible.
The Vital Voice has ceased publication until January 2010.
The monthly newspaper serving St. Louis' LGBT community published its last issue for 2009 in September. Voice publisher and owner, Pam Schneider, tells Daily RFT that she decided to shutdown the paper for the rest of the year to concentrate on a redesign of the publication.
The Voice is also leaving its current space in the city's Grove Neighborhood for a yet-to-be-determined location. Schneider, who owns the building that now houses the paper, says she's selling the property. She hopes to relocate in The Grove or Central West End neighborhoods.
"The economics of it all -- with us moving offices and doing a major redesign -- it just made sense to take the time and money we need to focus on coming out in 2010 the way we want," she says.
Author Salman Rushdie is to become the 42nd recipient on the Saint Louis University Literary Award at a book signing and reception next month.
Rushdie, is the best-selling author of ten novels including Midnight's Children (Booker Prize, 1981), The Moor's Last Sigh, The Ground Beneath Her Feet and three non-fiction works. Though he is perhaps best known for the Iran's Ayatollah Khomeini calling for Rushdie's death following the publication of his novel Satanic Verses in the late 1980s. (And for being briefly married to our favorite Hardee's pitchwomanPadma Lakshmi.)
Rushdie will receive the 2009 Saint Louis Literary Award on Wednesday, October 7,
2009 at 5:30 pm in the Wool Auditorium in SLU's Busch Student Center,
20 N. Grand. Blvd. The program is free and open to the public.
A reception and dinner will be held at 7:00 pm in
the Coronado Ballroom, 3701 Lindell Blvd. Reservations are required for
the dinner.
True story. I used to work for a St. Louis publication that each year came out with a supplement profiling the "Wealthiest St. Louisans."
This special edition required us to pore over SEC filings and other public records in an effort to attain the estimated wealth of the individual. That was the easy part.
The nauseating part was then calling up these individuals and families -- whose only news value was their affluence -- and ask them to comment on just how stinking rich they really were.
In the two years I worked on this supplement -- reporting on a dozen or so blue-blooded St. Louisans -- only one person ever called me back. He was Don Bryant.
The quarters will go into circulation sometime in the next dozen years -- part of the mint's effort to honor some 56 national parks and sites in all 50 states.
"The natural beauty of Missouri is exemplified by the clear streams of the Ozarks,"
said Nixon in a statement.
Apart from when the Ozarks quarter will debut, the questions now are what image the mint will use to depict the rivers and whether that depiction will highlight the waterways prior to -- or after -- a ban on beer bongs that goes into effect this year.
Blogger Doug Duckworth took a video camera to one of those no-media-allowed meetings developer Paul McKee has been having with residents of north St. Louis to discuss the massive, NorthSide redevelopment project he envisions for the area. (Some $390 millionof the proposed $8-billion-plus project would be paid for through tax increment financing.)
The camera bode well for Duckworth -- who describes himself as a "licensed asshole" on his blog, Random Talk on Urban Affairs -- in that the video recorder caused McKee to halt the meeting and confront Duckworth. When Duckworth declined to stop filming, McKee summarily ended his presentation and departed the building.
Football is a really, really hard game to understand and guys just hate it when you interrupt and ask them to explain stuff. They hate it even more than when you walk in front of the TV during an important play or don't bring them their beer the minute they ask for it.
Well, thank God for the St. Louis Rams! On Monday night, September 21, for the fifth year in a row, they'll be sponsoring a seminar called Football University to teach the ladies all about their super-complex game. How very civic-minded of them. (Their civic-mindedness may not extend to actually winning, but hey.) About 500 women are scheduled to show up at the Russell Training Center, says Molly Higgins, the Rams' vice president of corporate communications.
"We're doing it earlier this year," she says, "so the ladies can watch and enjoy games throughout the season."
So what kind of knowledge can a lady pick up at Football U?
The future of the editorial cartoon in St. Louis looked bleak a few years back when the Post-Dispatch's longtime cartoonist, John Sherffius,resigned in a huff following his publisher's demands that his drawings be less political (ie. nicer to Republicans).
Thankfully -- miraculously, perhaps -- Sherffius replacement at the St. Louis daily is just as good and perhaps even better than his predecessor. Week after week, the editorial cartoons of R.J. Matson are often best damn read (or is it see?) in the daily paper.
Yesterday's cartoon (above) was no exception in the way it skewered his own newspaper and its notoriously racist online commenters while at the same time paying homage to another great editorial cartoonist from the New Yorker.
Last week RFT music editor Annie Zaleski was first to break the news that legendary rock 'n soul performer John Oates would headline the American Mustache Institute's annual 'Stache Bash" on October 31.
Now comes news that Oates is re-growing his famous mustache just for the event. At least that's how today's press release from AMI reads.
See for yourself after the jump. It's for the press. It's released. It's Daily RFT'sPress Release o' the Day.
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