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Is the Cardinals' brand of baseball not bold enough for you? Have you ever jumped up from the table in the middle of getting another barbed-wire tattoo around your neck to scream at the TV, "That double play was not extreme enough for my gonzo sensibilities"? Do you wish to see both teams -- pitchers included -- batting and fielding at the same time on a totally wicked double diamond? Do you dream of watching men run the bases in the wrong direction like human comets with asses afire? How 'bout some glow-in-the-dark team logos blazing on those uniforms? Snap into a SlimJim! And say hello to the National Extreme Baseball Association, Broseph.

We don't understand it ourselves. But we don't understand quantum physics either, and a burrito was just successfully microwaved in the break room. So either we're witches or we're willing to suspend comprehension in the face of delicious miracles.

The same blind eye will be cast on more baseball.

Right now the league is just two teams, and they're both located in Florida. But according to the league's Web site, plans are in the works for "20 to 30 teams" by 2008.

And, oh yes, St. Louis is on that list of expansion cities. Exchange a rockin' headbutt with your new team's name: The St. Louis Xmen.

(That "ding" you just heard was the sound of the idea bell going off in the sports-marketing department at KMOX. Or it might have been another burrito in the microwave.)

Before you get a big-ol' Wolverine tattooed on your back, please note that the Web site also has a crawler that reads, "Team names/city subject to change." Which might not be a bad idea, given that Tampa Bay is potentially home to the "Black Sox." Yeah, that's a scandal that needed reviving.

Anyway, if all goes according to plan -- and judging by the way the pitcher in that YouTube clip fielded that catcher's toss, there are no guarantees in Xtreme Baseball -- the Xmen could be making you proud in a stadium (or sandlot) sometime in the near future. Somebody with deep pockets and an excess of moxie just needs to step up and buy a team (looks plaintively at Dave Checketts with puppy-dog eyes and whimpers expectantly). Lest those pesky MLB lawyers get any ideas, the NXBL notes that league founder Phil Weidner "respects traditional baseball full heartily [sic] with the intent to compliment [sic] traditional baseball and not to compete with it."

Duly noted, Phil -- though Marvel Comics' lawyers might not be so easily swayed. And they have mutant healing powers.

-Paul Friswold

Bob Schneider's in town and Unreal's got our dancing shoes on.

But Bob, why the VooDoo Lounge? Blueberry Hill was far more convenient. After the show we could stagger back to the office and sleep it off in the Unreal cubicle. Now we have to drive way the hell out to a casino -- in St. Charles.

Truth is, Unreal has never before darkened the door of Harrah's. Not that we have anything against gambling. We simply prefer to do ours at Fairmount Park. Slot machines make us dizzy.

And we're not ashamed to admit that. Nor are we ashamed to let it be known that we're more than a little bit intimidated by the drinks the VooDoo Lounge apparently serves, which come in fishbowls and look like they're radioactive:

-Unreal

Our waiter was referring to yours truly, about to do a face-plant in my mushroom ravioli. These delicate morsels, adrift in a sauce of melted, mildly tangy caciotta (a Tuscan cheese made mostly from sheep's milk), were very good, but the true object of my lust was the black truffle that had been grated atop the dish, its aroma and flavor as heady as new love.

This week Ian reviews Acero, the hot new Italian restaurant in Maplewood. Click here to find out what he thinks.

And be sure to get a load of Gut Check, Ian's just-launched RFT food blog!

Here's a link to Sports Illustrated's profile of St. Louis Cardinals skipper Tony La Russa.

You won't read much that you didn't already know, with the probable exception of the manager's first marriage (which, statistically speaking, yielded two daughters and a divorce), any mention of which has been omitted from La Russa's bio on the Cards' Web site.

What with all the shit La Russa has taken in the first five months of 2007, maybe I'm predisposed to cut him some slack. But here's the thing: In spite of the several high-profile (and idiotic) recent lapses -- the DUI, the petty pouting over the St. Louis Post-Dispatch's (also idiotic) Cubs parody, the fungo-wielding threat leveled at reporters after Josh Hancock's fatal accident -- I not only feel for the guy; I actually find myself admiring him.

He's flawed, obtuse and frequently obnoxious. But he's also intelligent, and principled. You may not agree with his principles, but that doesn't mean he ain't got 'em. Moreover, he does his best to apply them consistently, and that's more than can be said of most human beings.

-Tom Finkel

It had been a while since we checked in on the St. Louis Journalism Review.

Still, I was a bit surprised when I clicked my www.stljr.org bookmark (come on, doesn't everyone have one?) and was directed to a Web page devoted to KTRS (AM 550) talkmeister Frank O. Pinion.

A URL shanghaiing!

The KTRS host has his own page on that station's Web site and also owns the URL www.frankopinion.com; type in "www.stljr.org" and you're automatically redirected to the latter page.

The perpetrator: Local radio vet Mike Anderson, former on-air partner of Frank O. Pinion, designer of KTRS' Web site and host of the online chat room stlmedia.net.

OK, so the evidence is circumstantial. There's more here. You'll have to scroll down a ways, to the entry dated "5-19-07," which begins:

Today we offer ... free and unfettered membership to this website, our newsletter and our Message Board (upon registration) to the maillist that SJR's Charles Klotzer sent his message to when he defamed me and this website in a recent email to all of his contributors.

I quit my website design and management position for the SJR when Mr. Klotzer offered me an insulting payment for the service, after I had designed the paper on line for nearly six years.

A little background: Early this year SJR's long-time benefactor, Webster University, pulled the plug on funding and returned the 30-year-old media watchdog to its founder, Charles Klotzer.

Nothing to worry about. A City of St. Louis pension task force formed in 2005 is toiling away to bridge a multimillion-dollar funding gap, but evidently some city employees are just as nervous about the tinkering as at the prospect of retiring broke. To paraphrase one city employee:

What are they going to screw us out of?

City Operations Manager Ronald Smith recently issued a memo to dispel rumors about what the task force has cooking. The short answer, boiled down from this memo (reproduced on the jump):

Nothing you've already banked, but don't count on cushy benefits in the future.

The backdrop for all this is a lawsuit brought by police and firefighters, who oversee their own funds within the city's vast pension system. In a decision issued this past March, the Missouri Supreme Court sided with police and firefighters. According to a story in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, that ruling would add $23.9 million to the city's liability ($18.5 million for firefighters, $5.4 million for police).

For more information on the city's pension liability, go here.

-Kathleen McLaughlin

Gut Check, the brand-spankin' new Riverfront Times food blog, is live. We'll be discussing food and drink in St. Louis: restaurant news and reviews, discussions both serious and silly, tips on where to find interesting and top-quality ingredients (and pleas for the same) and maybe even a recipe or two. Go check it out!

To get you in the mood, here's a picture of one of my favorite dishes on this or any other planet, tacos al pastor: two corn tortillas filled with smoky pork, pineapple, onion and cilantro. A squeeze of lime, some salsa, you're good to go. Enjoy!

-Ian Froeb

-Unreal

Well, not quite. But baseball's über-agent does say this about the locally revered Cardinals general manager, who lowballed Boras' client Jeff Weaver this past off-season:

“You have to respect that teams have a right to make their own decisions. [But] here’s a GM who never played the game saying, ‘We’re going to go with our young guys,’ and I go, ‘You can’t.’ The Cardinals not signing Jeff Weaver is how you don’t win divisions, and my prediction is the St. Louis Cardinals won’t win their division this year.”

Read all about it in Jeffrey Anderson's "The Boras Factor," courtesy of our sister paper the LA Weekly.

-Unreal

Not in this instance, allegedly.

Congratulations to all who had "25 days" in the How Long Will It Take to File a Josh Hancock Wrongful Death Lawsuit Pool.

And kudos to those who singled Newman Bronson & Wallis as the local personal-injury firm.

Pat "We Offered to Call Him a Cab" Shannon's middle-of-the-night phone call to St. Louis police chief Joe Mokwa was what we in the trade like to call a "red flag": Someone was gonna sue Mike Shannon's Steaks and Seafood in the wake of the fatal drunk-driving misadventure; it was merely a question of who and when.

Along with Mark Bronson, Claude F. Clayton Jr., Keith C. Kantack and J. Kristopher White, all of Tupelo, Mississippi; and S. Ray Hill III, of Oxford, Mississippi, are reportedly listed as representing the plaintiff, Dean Hancock, Josh Hancock's father.

Shannon's has company: Listed as co-defendants are the tow-truck company whose vehicle Hancock's rented SUV plowed into and the driver of the disabled car the tow-truck driver had come to the aid of.

In the Post-Dispatch's story, reporter Heather Ratcliffe quotes the lawsuit as saying:

"The intoxication of Joshua Morgan Hancock on said occasion was involuntary."

-Unreal

It must have felt good being Kristeen Young last night at the Pageant. Kinda. There she stood -- in a fugly, Bjork-esque bubble suit and clunky high heels -- the long suffering, under-appreciated avant-diva of the St. Louis underground past, on a stage five times bigger than anything she ever played when she was a club-circuit mainstay in the late ´90s.

In the five years since Young left St. Louis for New York, she’s had a run of deserved good fortune: Tony Visconti productions; a duet with David Bowie; and, the most fruitful, the affections of legendary Brit song stylist Morrissey, who signed her to a record deal and took her on road with him. Last night the tour stopped in St. Louis (on Morrissey’s birthday, no less). Young had the opportunity to perform for a hometown which was always frustratingly ambivalent to her talents.

-Unreal

When it comes to navigating your way around the looming reconstruction of Highway 40/Interstate 64, Google Maps probably won't offer much help.

So the minds at the
Missouri Department of Transportation give us:

Map My Trip.

MoDOT promises its online mapping tool won't steer you to the Broadway exit when it's closed (thanks for nothin', MapQuest). The tool will be programmed to account for all MoDOT work, Highway 40 included, in St. Louis and St. Louis County.

We gave it a whirl this afternoon.

Our first test resulted in the kind of ridiculous suggestion that we’ve all encountered on MapQuest and its ilk. To reach Webster Groves from the RFT offices in University City, Map My Trip suggested driving south on Skinker Boulevard to Highway 40, take 40 east to Hampton Avenue, go south to Interstate 44 and exit at Elm Avenue (Exit 280) in Webster Groves.

That route is two miles longer and about ten times more likely to induce road rage than the one suggested by Google Maps. Google Maps was the only one of the major Internet mapping tools to suggest taking Big Bend. (To be fair, MapQuest suggests the same route as Map My Trip, which is based on Yahoo! Maps.) And none of the services suggest Big Bend to Forest Park Parkway to I-170 to Brentwood Boulevard/Kirkham Road.

Map My Trip would have come in handy for that ill-fated trip to Soulard, though. Exit 40B/Broadway will be closed until May 23, so Map My Trip suggests Exit 38C to Jefferson Avenue, south to Russell Boulevard and east to Gravois.

-Kathleen McLaughlin

Let's get this straight. Last week Webster University brought in Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi as its commencement speaker. Tomorrow Tim Russert of NBC's Meet the Press is slated to speak at Washington University's graduation. And who has Saint Louis University recruited to round out the trifecta? Why none other than Yogi Berra!

The baseball Hall of Famer (and St. Louis native) might not have the acumen or political insight of other speakers, but Berra's malaproprisms and tangled verbiage have been entertaining and bemusing audiences for years. No doubt SLU's graduating class will get a kick out of the geezer, who turned 82 last Saturday. To wit, I refer you to the Ft. Worth Star-Telegram's humor columnist David Thomas, who imagines the wisdom Berra might impart this weekend.

-Chad Garrison

Tuesday morning the St. Louis Post-Dispatch unveiled its new Here & Now section, a byproduct of the newspaper's decision (go here and scroll down for that memo) to bury its Everyday section within existing "focused weekly sections."

In case you missed it, page one was laid out kind of like a Web page, with a big HERE & NOW banner at the top and five featurettes arrayed beneath. The topics: the "Kiss Cam" at Busch Stadium; first Communion; the Webkinz craze; an Olivette woman who famously belches on YouTube; and a group of Nerinx Hall gals who've chartered a school bus to take them to and from their prom. Only one of those bits jumped inside (the Kiss Cam one); the remainder of the section looked pretty much like an everyday Everyday.

Tepid? You be the judge. Inside the Post newsroom, the section was greeted like a fart in a crowded elevator. Several reporters from the Metro section barged in to a morning editors' meeting, demanding to know what the heck was up. The give-and-take that ensued led to an afternoon follow-up, to which all newsroom employees were invited. Many came (it was standing room only).

Today I got the memos (reproduced on the jump) written by managing editor Pam Maples and Christine Bertelson, the newly appointed assistant managing editor for features, that address the fallout from those meetings.

I also spoke with another Post-er who was present at both gatherings. That staffer (no names, please) characterizes the dialogue as "a proud moment for the staff and the newspaper," and one that was initiated by "people who don't have a dog in the fight other than they want the paper to be better. There's a vanguard of people who do care."

The inaugural Here & Now was viewed as short on content, poorly executed and derivative. "If you hold up the ideal of what a feature section is supposed to be, that's not it," the staffer says when asked to sum up the general reaction within the Post newsroom. Perhaps the greatest disappointment was the fact that the Tuesday edition of the Everyday section had been viewed in the newsroom as the paper's last bastion of the true "feature" story form: "Tuesday was the last pure feature hole," the staffer says. "[The Everyday] section was broken. But this is not the way to go forward. We could do better. I think we all agree."

And what of the folks who'd had a hand in producing Here & Now? "Reaction? I don't know," says the staffer. "I think there'd be more concern about that if it weren't so unanimous that this isn't the place we need to be. I think there were definitely bruised egos, but if someone got hurt, that's OK. We're professionals."

The memos from Maples and Bertelson go pretty heavy on the platitudes (to put it mildly). But the staffer points out that the meetings made it clear that among those who were none too pleased with Here & Now are some Post editors. Additionally, Maples and Bertelson are new to their positions: Bertelson just this week moved over from the editorial page, while Maples came to the paper late last year from the Dallas Morning News with a résumé filled with hard-news cred. Of the former, the staffer says, "She's got a great reputation here"; of the latter, who has emphasized an open-door policy: "Pam rose to the occasion."

That said, things might get worse before they get better. Tomorrow marks the maiden voyage of Screens (featuring film and TV coverage), which fills the Everyday void on Friday. And on Saturday another new vehicle, Weekend.

-Tom Finkel