St. Louis News Blog

You have a weekend, then a short week, and before you know it, you'll be in line outside the electronics store at 4 a.m. waiting to get flat-screen TV at deep, deeeep discount.

So please, enjoy this final weekend before holiday madness descends on all of us. Here are ten options for weekend fun for $10 or less, which is about the only thing these events have in common, besides their St. Louis location.

Looking for local music? Peep our weekend concert calendar.

Credit: Dale Chihuly

​Dale Chihuly at the Duane Reed Gallery (Opens Friday)
While nature is settling in for a long winter's nap, Dale Chihuly's glass pieces -- best known in St. Louis for being on display at the Missouri Botanical Garden are as lively as ever -- and they're within the warm confines of the Duane Reed Gallery (4729 McPherson Avenue; www.duanereedgallery.com or 314-361-4100) beginning Friday, November 20. Opening with a free public reception from 5 to 8 p.m., this exhibition of Chihuly's latest work features the stunning winter-whiteness of Palazzo Ducale Tower, a writhing, elegant form that will tower over gallerygoers, shimmering and shining all throughout the winter -- well, almost. The show remains on view Tuesday through Saturday until Saturday, January 30. Alison Sieloff has more details for your right here.

www.biojob.com

​Senator Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) this week mailed a letter to ten of the nation's top medical schools asking for their policies on ghostwriting.

The senator -- the ranking member of the Senate Finance Committee -- has grown alarmed by a New York Times series examining how pharmaceutical companies authored studies promoting their drugs. The companies then had medical academics sign onto the reports, making it appear as though the ghostwritten article was authored by a scholar.

Washington University in St. Louis was the recipient of one of Grassley's letters that stated (in part):

anytimecostumes.com

Taxed enough already, kid?

​You know how it is each April. You'd think your kids would be happy. Summer is just around the corner. Little League season is starting up. In short, there's a lot to look forward to.

But no. All your kids can think of is the @$%&in' government. 'Cause April is tax time, and nothing pisses off the kiddies more than filing that annual 1040 form.

Well, good news! Now your tykes have an outlet.

A 22-year-old student in Alton, Illinois, has formed an organization specifically tailored for angry, small-government-minded juveniles. It's called the Alton Youth TEA (Taxed Enough Already) Party Organization and it's having a rally this very month!

"I am very conservative. The youths don't know what is going on, and we don't have anything that focuses on getting news to kids," Eric Maxon, founder of the group told the Alton Telegraph this week. "Our generation will be the outcome of legislation being passed now. We will pay for it in the end."

Word up! The rally takes place Nov. 28 at Alton's Gordon Moore Community Park.

Viva la revolucion!

Photo: Jenn Silverberg

Hannegan lighting up at one of his favorite haunts, Herbies' Vintage '72.

​St. Louis' most tireless smoking-ban opponent Bill Hannegan stopped by the Riverfront Times the other day. In so doing, Hannegan hinted how his Keep St. Louis Free plans to topple the ban in the city that is slated to go into effect January 2011.

The strategy, says Hannegan, would be to challenge the ban's exemption that allows for smoking to continue unabated in St. Louis casinos.

A quick refresher for those of you not caught up on the issue: On November 3, voters in St. Louis County overwhelmingly voted in a smoking ban that also triggered a somewhat similar ban for the city of St. Louis.

Both the city and county laws exempt casinos from the smoking bans. In the county, so-called "drinking bars" whose alcohol sales outweigh food sales by a margin of 3 to 1 will be exempted from the ban indefinitely. In the city, bars of a certain size (less than 2,000 square feet) are also exempted from the ban but only for a period of five years. After that, all bars will be smoke free.

The sunset provision of the city's ban particularly irks Hannegan. "This is going to hurt bar owners in the city a lot more than in the county," he says.

So, if Hannegan is so concerned about how the ban will impact bar owners, why is he now targeting the casinos?  

Trash collection was making some downtown residents grouchy.

​St. Louis alderwoman Kacie Starr Triplett this morning introduced legislation regulating the hours that trash trucks can haul waste from businesses located near residential property.

On her blog today, the downtown alderwoman (Ward 6) writes:

While trash collection may appear as a routine issue, it has become an increasingly major concern for many city residents. They are being awakened at midnight, or very early in the morning to the sound of trash trucks barreling through their alley.

Triplett's "Stop the Racket Legislation" a.k.a. Board Bill 220 would bar trash trucks from picking up waste from businesses located within 200 feet of a residential building between the hours of 8 p.m. and 6 a.m.

City codes already prohibit trash collection in residential neighborhoods during those same hours. Triplett says her legislation is needed because many downtown lofts and condos are in areas zoned commercial where trash trucks can operate at all hours.

​Contractors for the city of Town & Country began baiting deer this month, setting up food stands throughout the west county suburb.

Town & Country is believed to have a deer herd numbering between 600 and 800. Earlier this year, city officials approved a measure to cull the herd.

The city is spending approximately $50,000 for sharpshooters to kill up to 200 deer. Another $75,000 has been set aside for sterilizing between 75 to 100 female deer with tubal-ligation surgery performed in the field.

The food stands have been up for several weeks now. Slaying and spaying begins in earnest December 1.

Fair warning, Rudolph: You and your reindeer friends may want to steer clear of T&C this year!
 

​11.16.2009 4:59 pm
Jury awards $100,000 in RFT photo dispute
By Robert Patrick
St. Louis Post-Dispatch

A federal jury in St. Louis on Monday awarded $100,000 to a woman who claimed that nude photos of her torso appeared in a 2006 Riverfront Times article about cosmetic surgery without her permission.

Lawyers for the woman had sought $2.5 to $3 million for compensatory damages alone, but one male juror said the jury awarded only enough to pay something to her lawyers and to allow for her hotel and travel expenses. The woman, identified in court documents only as "Jane Doe," now lives in Georgia.

The juror, who declined to provide his name, said that the jury thought that Doe's lawyers were just trying to "drum up" a case, and there was not enough proof to award more money. He said the cosmetic surgeons seemed remorseful and that jurors thought the office staff and the newspaper were more at fault.

OK, test time! Based upon what you just read, choose the single phrase that most accurately completes the sentence below:

​The New Oxford American Dictionary is out with its "Word of the Year" for 2009.

That term? Unfriend, meaning to remove someone from a social media site, such as Facebook.

The New York Times quotes Oxford lexicographer Christine Lindberg as saying unfriend has ''real lex appeal'' for best reflecting the mood of the year.

We here at Daily RFT credit Burger King for the success of the word. The fast-food chain's competition -- earning diners a free Whopper if they "unfriend" 10 people from Facebook -- has to be one of the best social-media promotions to date.

After all, what's more unfriendly than receiving a message that someone you thought was a friend dropped you for a hamburger?

A 24-year-old woman from Kennett, Missouri, is slated to go on trial tomorrow for alleged crimes stemming from a bizarre-o incident at Wal-mart more than two years ago. 

​Any of you catch the bizarre story yesterday at stltoday.com where online editor Kurt Greenbaum (whose job it is to monitor online comments to the website) wrote how he outed a commenter?

The incident went down like this: Last Friday Stltoday.com asked readers to tell them about the strangest food they've ever eaten. Within a few minutes a commenter responded with "a single word, a vulgar expression for a part of a woman's anatomy."

One of Greenbaum's colleagues immediately removed the word only for the commenter to once again leave the same lewd remark.

So what did Greenbaum do? In his words:

"I deleted it, but noticed in the WordPress e-mail alert that his comment had come from an IP address at a local school. So I called the school...About six hours later, I heard from the school's headmaster...The headmaster confronted the employee, who resigned on the spot."

Other commenters on Stltoday.com are now having a field day, calling Greenbaum a "Thought Nazi" and suggesting that he be fired for outing the commenter to his employer.

Greenbaum is holding his ground, firing back in the comment thread:
 
"Defend the guy who posted the vulgarity all you want. I'm not regulating someone's thought. He can think whatever he wants. I'm moderating our boards. Follow our guidelines and this won't be a problem for any of you. Remember, I said it was a school, right? It could have been a student. I didn't know who it was. I just thought the school might like to know about it. I sleep fine at night."

Meanwhile, here at Daily RFT we're lying awake wondering that exactly the guy wrote that was so insulting. Greenbaum never divulges that seemingly very important factoid.

So, dear readers, what do you think it was? Continue on to cast your vote in our poll, "Possible Vulgar Expressions for a Part of a Woman's Anatomy."

​ Okay, so the story in today's business section of the Post-Dispatch is mostly about how a company that sells holiday decorations is opening an office in downtown St. Louis. (Yes, exciting!)

But the real news is the photo (below) that accompanied the story.

Post-Dispatch, Section B1, 11/13/2009

​
If you'll recall, the zoo hasn't had much luck keeping polar bears in recent years. The zoo's last polar bear, Hope, was euthanized in April when veterinarians found it had cancer.

In May 2005 another polar bear, named Churchill, ate a fatal helping of cloth and plastic inside its bin and died while undergoing stomach surgery. Five weeks later, a polar bear named Penny died at the zoo from infection. Turns out, she had two dead fetuses inside her uterus, though zoo officials didn't know she was pregnant.

So, what's the solution to those problematic real polar bears and their pesky habit of dying?

This week employees with James Trogolo Co. installed a family of electronic polar bears in the zoo's empty polar bear display. Technology wins again!

http://www.flickr.com/photos/recyclethis/ / CC BY 2.0

​Remember your pride, Missourians, when kidnapping child-molestor Michael Devlin made headlines around the globe? And after serial torturer/killer Bob Berdella, you'd thought we had nothing else to contribute. Well get ready. The Show-Me State now presents: The Mohlers!

Defendants are innocent until proven guilty, true. But if the allegations against 77-year-old Burrell E. Mohler, Sr., of Independence, Missouri and four of his sons prove founded, we've got another winner. And the world is watching: news outlets in France, the U.K. and Australia have all picked up the story (not to mention CNN).

Bestiality, rape using various objects, the forcing of an 11-year-old into an abortion and coerced "marriages" to family members are all being alleged by a group of victims that has come forward many years after the fact, according to the Columbia Daily Tribune. They say it all went down on the Mohlers' farm in Bates City, MO.

Weirdest part: the victims say the Mohler boys told them to write down bad memories, slip the pieces of paper into glass jars and bury them so they could forget the horror.

Now, authorities are out at the Bates City farm, digging for the glass jars. And bodies. A sixth man was arrested Thursday. Stay tuned. 

bergersbeat.com

Jerry Berger

​Former Post-Dispatch gossip columnist Jerry Berger has been banned from his old place of employment.

Berger -- who retired from the St. Louis daily in 2004 and recently debuted his own online gossip column -- has remained a somewhat regular fixture at the Post-Dispatch over the years, turning up in the newsroom every three or four weeks.

Recently, though, Berger's visits have gotten a bit -- shall we say -- touchy. Late last week the paper sent the erstwhile employee a letter informing him he was forbidden to set foot inside the building at 900 North Tucker Boulevard. The reason?

"After a recent newsroom visit, we received several complaints from staff members about inappropriate behavior directed at them from Jerry," says P-D editor Arnie Robbins. "I love Jerry. We're friends. But we cannot tolerate that type of behavior in the newsroom."

Robbins declines to elaborate on the "inappropriate behavior," but Daily RFT has heard from one Post-Dispatch staffer who says he and several colleagues were the target of Berger's untoward advances.

'Cause you can't keep MetroLink down.

​That's the news from the Washington University Student Life newspaper.

In an article today the paper reports that Wash. U. has already forked over $25,000 to support a tax measure that could go before voters as soon as this April. Philanthropist Sam Fox has given another $10,000, according to the Student Life.

In November 2008 voters in St. Louis County narrowly defeated Proposition M that would have boosted the sales tax by half a percent to pay for future MetroLink expansion and other costs. Months after the initiative failed, Metro was forced to severely cut back its service owing to budget shortfalls.

Student Life reports today that Metro boosters want the tax hike on this coming April's ballot because some of the temporary funds that have restored transit services expire in May.

flickr.com/photos/jhudocumenta

​

The Daily RFT rarely breaks into sudden spasms of outrage, but this horrific story out of the Los Angeles today -- and on Veterans Day for Christ's sake -- has us in full-boil rant mode.

It's the kind of tale that makes you wonder -- what kind of cruel cards is God dealing?

After serving three tours of duty in Iraq and surviving the hellhole that is Fallujah, a Marine named Trevor Nieman comes home and gets himself killed by some crazy man in Victorville, California, as he's installing cable TV. 

Believe it or not, the fatal assault came after Neiman got his head smashed, ribs broken and a lung punctured in a knife attack in May at his home in Phelan, California.

www.im4mokwa.com

Joe Mokwa

​State Auditor Susan Montee released this morning the findings of a much-anticipated financial review of the St. Louis Board of Police Commissioners.

The audit is the first look into the finances of the board since former police chief Joe Mokwa stepped down last year in the wake of a scandal involving the department's towing contract with a third-party company.

As expected, the audit found that S and H Towing underpaid the police department $453,000 in fees for its contract with the police force. A federal investigation into that matter continues. 

More tantalizing than the towing business, perhaps, are the revelations in the audit of how Mokwa and others manipulated department policy to fund exotic trips, make questionable purchases, treat themselves to enhanced retirement benefits and leave the force with treasure.

Image Via

​It seems like just yesterday that a ten-point buck sauntered into a Home Depot in Town & Country and began to wreak havoc.

You'll recall in that incident how a renegade Bambi tried to fight an ornamental deer statue, broke off an antler in the process, and then headed into the hardware store's lumber department where two police officers needed three rounds from a handgun and one from an M-15 assault rifle to bring the beast down.

And that was just one deer.

Officials estimate the herd in the lush St. Louis suburb hovers around 800 -- much to the chagrin of garden-tending residents.

Makes one wonder whether the controlled deer hunt in Town & Country (scheduled for later this fall) will be as fruitful as the recent one in Kansas City's Shawnee Mission Park.

In what sounds like an epic bloodbath, "volunteer sharpshooters" bagged 313 deer there last week.

Now officials are deciding whether archers should be brought in to thin the herd even more.

Tired of waiting for Major League Soccer (MLS) to grant St. Louis an expansion franchise, Jeff Cooper is joining other soccer team owners to begin -- in the words of Penny Marshall -- a league of their own.
​Cooper, a well-off Illinois attorney with the Simmons Law Firm, has been attempting to get an MLS franchise in the St. Louis area for a number of years though his outreach group St. Louis Soccer United. 

In a statement today, Simmons announced that he and the owners of soccer franchises formerly of the USL-1 conference in Atlanta, Miami, North Carolina, Minnesota, Montreal and Vancouver would form the new league.

"This will be a league that will offer the best of both worlds - outstanding experience and leadership at the ownership level combined with the promise and ability to chart our own course for success as a new league," said Cooper.  "It's this structure that motivated me to bring St. Louis into the new league, and why I believe the new league will have a lot of success at launch next year and well into the future."

A pharmaceutical giant's love affair with St. Louis is over, and it seems no amount of drugs and/or chemical enhancements will ever rekindle the flame.

Just when you think Pfizer will grow, it shrinks. It happens to lots of companies.

​Yesterday, Pfizer (maker of Viagra, Celebrex, Lipitor and countless other drugs whose advertisements pay for the network evening news) announced that it will cut 600 of it 1,000 employees in St. Louis. 

Photo: partycovepics.com (site is very, very NSFW)

Captain of the raft at Party Cove in Lake of the Ozarks. Two business owners near the lake are being sued for allegedly allowing raw sewage to flow into it.

​For the second time in a little more than a year, raw or partially treated sewage has been dumped into popular vacation spot Lake of the Ozarks, according to two lawsuits filed by Missouri Attorney General Chris Koster.

In one case: Mark Kelly, a condo developer, is accused of operating shoddy wastewater facilities, which let sewage flow straight into the lake, a popular swimming hole for Spring Breakers, families, and weekend partiers. Missouri Department of Natural Resources officials knew about the problems in April 2008, and warned Kelly to fix them, but he failed to do so, according to a statement released by the AG's office.

In the other case: The restaurant Shady Gators (yes, Shady Gators), owned by Gary Dean Prewitt, also the location of a wastewater treatment facility, was the site for sewage runoff right into the lake. According to the state's complaint against Mr. Prewitt, he allegedly allowed raw sewage to bypass the proper filtration system and let it flow into the lake. More than a year ago, Missouri's DNR informed Prewitt to clean up the mess, but he rejected. Then in June 2009, Prewitt told the state the problems had been solved.

So what happens if both men are found guilty?

A strip joint, a late-night shooting, at least 30 shell casings recovered, three weapons five arrests, and one man hospitalized: Was Adam "Pacman" Jones in town Saturday this weekend?

Yes, the Belleville News-Democrat is reporting yet another shooting incident at a Brooklyn, Illinois strip club, this one at the Bottoms Up Nightclub.

The Bottoms Up is located at 307 Jefferson Avenue, next door to the Pink Slip, a club that had two separate shootings (details here and here) in August that left one woman dead and two men wounded.

Here's a map of the area:


Details on the latest dust-up last night after the jump, via the BND:

Interstate 64, a.k.a. Highway 40, will open December 7 -- a month before the deadline to complete the massive rebuilding of the roadway

At a press conference this morning near the intersection of Hanley Road and the highway, Missouri Department of Transportation (MODOT) director Pete Rahn said the project would also come in at $11 million under budget.

A stretch of Highway 40 in Richmond Heights as viewed in August.

​

www.randomhouse.com

Judge Robert Dierker

​Last week St. Louis Circuit Court Judge Robert Dierker was denied a court motion to dismiss a red-light camera ticket issued against him, but the magistrate is undeterred.

Dierker is convinced he'll win when the case when it finally goes to trial.

On October 29 visiting judge Ralph Jaynes over-ruled Dierker's motion that the case be dismissed on constitutional grounds. Dierker contends that the red-light camera system violates due process of the law by presuming guilt. The judge says that he can't say for sure whether he was the person driving his car when it was ticketed on Kingshighway last December for running a red light.

Instead of simply paying the $100 fine for the ticket or trying to argue it in traffic court, Dierker demanded a jury trial in circuit court. It's believed that his case would be the first to reach a jury in St. Louis. (A pre-trial conference is schedule for later this month.)

Dierker says he may represent himself at trial, where he'll argue three key points:

Wikimedia Commons

If they're gonna build a canal, why not a mountain, too? Just like in the real San Carlos, Mexico!

​St. Chuck, apparently.

Mike Sellenschuetter, president of Dean Homes, has a $1.5 billion plan to erect the Harbor San Carlos not far from the Family Arena.

The developer hatched the partly-public-subsidized idea more than four years ago, but it'd been nearly swamped because of the economic mess. Until this week, that is.

The St. Louis Business Journal's Kelsey Volkmann reports that on Tuesday night, Sellenschuetter was officially designated developer of the 300-acre site by the St. Charles County Council.

According to Volkmann's story, "The plan calls for a hotel, shops, condos, marina, restaurants and pedestrian walkway on the city's largest undeveloped swath of land. The plan also requires dredging sand in a canal to allow for boating between the shore and Bangert Island, a St. Charles County park."

Contractors who've done work for Sellenschuetter are pissed.
 

www.stevestenger.com

​By now you've probably heard how St. Louis County Councilman Steve Stenger was flabbergasted Tuesday when a casino executive "muscled" him prior to a council meeting.

As Stenger told the Post-Dispatch yesterday, the chairman and chief executive of Pinnacle Entertainment, Daniel Lee, and his entourage cornered Stenger (D-Affton) on Tuesday night just before the council was set to vote on a controversial casino proposal for north county.

The Las Vegas-based Pinnacle is finishing up a $357-million casino in Stenger's south county district and the casino boss didn't want Stenger to vote in favor of yet another casino in the St. Louis area.

Trouble is, Stenger just can't say no to casinos -- any casinos.

Image Via

​While thousands of St. Louis county voters took to the polls yesterday to decide important issues like a smoking ban and increased 911 funding, the fate of the largest stretch of undeveloped Mississippi River waterfront in the St. Louis region was left in the hands of six members of the St. Louis County Council.

They voted 4-2 in favor of re-zoning 376 acres of wetlands south of the Columbia Bottom Conservation Area for commercial development, specifically a massive casino and resort that includes 8,000 parking spots, a golf course, and a wind farm.

Hazel Erby, Kathleen Burkett, Michael O'Mara, and Steven Stegner voted in favor of the re-zoning.

Greg Quinn and Barbara Fraser were the nay votes. Colleen Wasinger, a Republican expected to vote no, was absent.

The decision was, by all accounts, controversial. The meeting was picketed by environmental groups and a Spanish Lake neighborhood association. One attendee estimated that more than 50 people spoke up at the meeting, offering a myriad of reasons why the development should not go forward.

The  casino development still faces several hurdles, including obtaining a gaming license, before construction can begin.

​Any good cop TV show has the same line. Just as the criminal is being placed in shackles, the police officer states: "You have a right to an attorney. If you cannot afford an attorney, the state will provide you one."

Did you know, though, that that line isn't necessarily true? At least not in Missouri where the state's overburdened public defenders have adopted rules allowing them to deny counsel to two types of criminals:

1. Those who first hire a private attorney and then drop that initial lawyer for a public defender
2. Those accused of violating the terms of their probation.

But shouldn't public defenders be compelled to provide legal counsel to any and all accused criminals?

That's the question being weighed in Jefferson City as the Missouri Supreme Court yesterday heard arguments on both sides of the debate.

​ ​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. 
 

obgyn.wustl.edu

​We shall let the New York Times' international wanderer-columnist Nicholas D. Kristof open this blog post with a description of obstetric fistula, a truly grotesque condition suffered by women mostly in the global south. Such a woman, writes Kristof,

suffers obstructed labor, has no access to a C-section, and endures internal injuries that leave her incontinent -- steadily trickling urine and sometimes feces through her vagina.

She stinks. She becomes a pariah. She is typically abandoned by her husband and forced to live by herself on the edge of her village. She is scorned, bewildered, humiliated and desolate, often feeling cursed by God.

But "the happiest thing" that could happen to such a woman, according to the column published in the NYT by Kristof on Saturday, is meeting Dr. Lewis Wall from Washington University's School of Medicine.

Wall launched the Worldwide Fistula Fund in 1995 and continues to do all kinds of medical work in Africa. He's also a Rhodes scholar and Fulbright recipient. Frankly, Daily RFT is disappointed that he's not more impressive. Check out Kristof's column here.

The construction of a sprawling 376-acre resort and casino next to the Columbia Bottom Conservation Area in North St. Louis County faces it's most critical vote yet tomorrow night.

The St. Louis County Planning Commission already gave the initial go ahead to rezone the massive swath of land in a flood plain immediately south of wetlands that border the confluence of the Mississippi and Missouri rivers, despite the protests from multiple environmental and community groups.

If you've never been, here's what the Conservation Area looks like:

Photo of Columbia Bottom Conservation Area by Ozark Bill via Flickr

​Now, the full County Council will decide whether the area should be rezoned for commercial use.

This time around, a new environmental heavyweight is stepping in and trying to rally its troops against the project.