Blogs

Not totally satisfied with your weekend itinerary? Never fear, Go! is back! This regular feature highlights everything from rock shows to art openings, from delicious dishes to hidden-gem hangouts.

Friday, 8/31

One Last Boogie: Don't miss the final night of the Jungle Boogie Concert Series at the Saint Louis Zoo with soul songstress Kim Massie from 5 to 7 p.m. And put those wallets away -- admission is free!

Something's in the Heir: Nothing is better than a glass of Chianti and some funky jazz to start off the weekend at Erato Wine Bar (3117 South Grand Boulevard; 314-664-6400). Local nu-jazz musicians Fresh Heir will begin at 9 p.m.

Saturday, 9/1

What's Cookin': Learn from Eleven Eleven and Vin de Set mastermind Ivy Magruder at the Chefs at the Market series how to not burn down your house. He'll be at the Market Courtyard at the Soulard Farmers' Market (730 Carroll Street) at 10 a.m., and you should, too -- for your family's sake.

Sweet Pee-Wee: Don a ruby red bowtie and shamelessly ride a bike with streamers for the Pee-Wee look-alike costume contest at Cinemania. The contest starts at 8:30 p.m. in a Grand Center lot (between 3713 and 3719 Washington Avenue) followed by a screening of Pee-Wee's Big Adventure.

Mountain Men: Come see Denver DJs Matthew Orloff and Dennis Roseth of Twenty40 spin the night away at Dante's (3221 Olive Street). Doors open at 9 p.m.; admission $5 before 11 p.m. and $10 after.

Sunday, 9/2

In the Navy: To conclude Navy Week, sail your butt over to the Saint Louis Science Center (5050 Oakland Avenue; 314-289-4424) to view "Magic of Flight" at the ever-so-enchanting OniMax Theatre at 1 p.m. General admission is $8 and $7 for kids and seniors; those with military ID can get in for $5.

Dance with Meaning: End the weekend with the National Dance Troupe of Nigeria at 8 p.m. at the Touhill Performing Arts Center on the University of Missouri-St. Louis campus (1 University Drive at Natural Bridge Road; 314-516-4949). General admission is $15, and UMSL students and staff pay $7. Lucky them.

-Jeanette Kozlowski

Frankly, we stuffed ourselves at Gut Check this week.

- We toured the Festival of Nations -- and took pictures!

- We learned that Alton Brown doesn't impress World's Fair Donuts.

- We admitted our fascination with chains and, in doing so, provided another blog-exclusive review.

- Cheesesteak Quest resumed.

There's so much more at Gut Check.

-Ian Froeb

Rabbi Hyim Shafner has been blowing his shofar for weeks now. The High Holidays are coming, and it's time for Jews to return to God.

Didn't hear the alarm?

Well, the rabbi figured as much, so he did the next logical thing. He sent an e-mail to a lapsed Catholic at the RFT. Fortunately, he used the word "crazy," which always gets my attention.

I met the rabbi last week and immediately determined, based on the length of his beard, that he is not crazy. But still, very interesting.

Shafner is the rabbi at Bais Abraham, the last synagogue in the Loop. It's an orthodox congregation with many elderly members at its core, plus a new group of young people. Mixed-faith couples and Jews who aren't technically Jewish are welcome, too.

"It's rare to find an orthodox synagogue where you don't have to be orthodox to be inspired and grow," says Shafner, who was the rabbi at Washington University's Hillel student center before he filled the vacancy left by Rabbi Abraham Magence, who died in 2003. (RFT named Magence Best Rabbi in 2000.)

Dan Horkheimer liked the exhibit tabs on his legal documents spaced exactly one inch apart.

He could speak German and Mandarin Chinese and was learning Spanish and Bosnian.

He helped drive a neighbor boy to school.

He lived with his wife in the north-side neighborhood of St. Louis Place. That's where Horkheimer was on a Saturday morning, August 11, when an unknown assailant shot and killed him. He had been painting his windows outside.

Police will add the crime, which might have been a botched robbery, to statistics that now include a child stabbed to death by another child, a cop allegedly killed by a teenager and a multitude of other shootings this summer.

People who knew Horkheimer will keep him as an example of how much one dedicated person can accomplish for his fellow man.

Meticulous, thoughtful and giving, the 29-year-old was good in a way that even fellow do-gooders who worked with him, advocating for immigrants, say they rarely witness.

"I knew he had community connections, but I had no idea he was so involved in so many different organizations until the funeral," says Kim Allen, staff attorney for the Immigration Law Project at Legal Services of Eastern Missouri.

Horkheimer was not a lawyer, but he was head of Legal Services' immigration unit and an accredited representative, licensed by the Department of Justice to advocate for immigrants in court and at all levels of the administrative process.

"Dan, in his quiet, effective way, would reach out to these folks," adds Dan Glazier, executive director and general counsel at Legal Services. "All those pieces of the quilt of Dan’s life came together."

Horkheimer grew up around Milwaukee, Wisconsin. (His only nearby relative is an aunt who lives in Illinois.) He earned his bachelor's degree in December 2000 from Saint Louis University, where he met his future wife, Courtney Barrett. Barrett had lived at the Catholic Workers' Karen House in St. Louis Place, and the two bought their home in the same neighborhood. (Catholic Workers, who live with the homeless people they serve, have had a presence in St. Louis Place since the 1970s. As Riverfront Times editorial fellow Molly Langmuir detailed in a January feature article "Cool to be Kind", they are attracting new devotees with new ways to serve.

Horkheimer and Barrett remained part of the Catholic Workers' extended network after they married in the fall of 2003. Their house, a former four-family flat on North Market Street, was the scene of many a dinner party that included a diverse group of friends and neighbors.

"He just loved the community," says Katie Herbert Meyer, who worked with Horkheimer at Legal Services and is now the legal director at Interfaith Legal Services for Immigrants. "The rest of us, we dedicate our work to it. I have to be able to go home and have time to myself. He continued his work, even when he went home. I don't think he ever considered it a sacrifice."

Herbert Meyer says Horkheimer and his wife helped friends build a solar-powered house down the street. And they hoped to start a college scholarship fund for kids from their neighborhood.

Horkheimer, whose degree was partly in international studies, started with Legal Services as a full-time volunteer in September 2001 and had a full case load by the time he filled a paid staff position in 2003, says Angie O'Gorman, his former boss and founder of the Immigration Law Project. O'Gorman has returned to Legal Services to pick up Horkheimer's work.

The legal team credits Horkheimer with bringing to their attention the large number of elderly Bosnians who were in danger of losing social security benefits while they waited, some for as long as two years, for the government to act on their citizenship applications. Instead of letting cases to trickle in, Legal Services, SLU's School of Law Clinic and Catholic Legal Assistance Ministry brought a suit on behalf of 50 Bosnians, who became citizens last December. Another group of about 30 Bosnians in the same situation were naturalized this summer.

Mary Anthony, an immigrant advocate who worked under Horkheimer, helped notify more than 160 clients of his death. Many cried, and some were scared, she says. "Dan was their lifeline."

Horkheimer's work helped stop the deportation of an Ethiopian refugee who was facing drug possession charges, Allen says. "He had seen a lot of torture and a lot of killing in his country," she says of their client. "Dan found an expert to talk about trauma and its effects on survivors." Horkheimer added the expert's affidavit to a voluminous brief on Ethiopia and what the man might face if sent back there. "The judge couldn't say enough about how impressed he was with it."

Herbert Meyer, who is familiar with the case, remembers that Horkheimer obtained permission to bring a shirt, tie and pants so the Ethiopian man wouldn't have to wear his prison-issued orange jumpsuit in front of the immigration judge.

"I've had clients before who were detained and it never crossed my mind," Meyer says. "He had to make phone calls, and get it approved, but he did. It's just little things like that."

-Kathleen McLaughlin

Chris Duncan hit a home run in the first inning of Tuesday's game against the Astros that elicited an entire dictionary's worth of hyperbolic verbs. The ball was ripped, tattooed, crushed and, dare I say, dry humped.

The prodigious blast, which you can see here, came off former Cardinal Woody Williams and easily reached the upper deck of Houston's Minute Maid Park. But how does Duncan's shot measure up against other Cards homers this season?

Hit Tracker Online lists detailed data for each and every big-league home run. Using some fancy math, which is explained here, and factoring in conditions like wind, ambient temperature and altitude, the site calculates, among other things, how far a home-run ball was hit, and how fast it was going when it left the bat.

According to Hit Tracker, Duncan’s homer on Tuesday left the bat traveling 113 mph and flew 432 feet. Or it would have flown that far had the upper deck not blocked its descent back to earth.

Surprisingly, of Duncan's 21 home runs in 2007, good for second-best on the team, this was not the biggest and baddest. In May he hit one 435 feet off of Detroit's Justin Verlander, and on July 21 he powered an impressive 438-foot shot against Atlanta's Buddy Carlyle. Nor was Tuesday's homer his hardest-hit ball of the season -- that honor goes to his first, a 426-foot screamer that left the bat at 117 mph (also in Houston).

Duncan, whose homers average 403.3 feet, just barely misses out on leading the team. Albert Pujols' team-leading 31 homers have averaged 403.8 feet. Pujols also boasts the team's longest dinger (sorry Dunc), a 462-foot blast off the Cubs' Ryan Dempster in April, as well as the hardest-hit homer, a ball that left bat traveling a hair under 119 mph in June.

Other lengthy swats include a 454-footer by Jim Edmonds and a 447-footer by Adam Wainwright.

To put the numbers in perspective, Hit Tracker lists the longest home run in baseball this season at 482 feet, mashed by Arizona's Tony Clark.

The site also offers info on some historic Cards homers, most impressive of which is Mark McGwire's bomb at Cleveland's Jacobs Field in 1997, which is estimated to have traveled 512 feet, clearing a 19-foot fence and 23 rows of bleachers before denting the park's Budweiser sign. Also included are Mac's 1998 homer that hit the Post-Dispatch sign in old Busch Stadium (470 feet, 120 mph off the bat), and Pujols' walk-off homer against Brad Lidge in the 2005 NLCS (455 feet, 119 mph.)

-Keegan Hamilton

There were no hoops when local pols gathered at Vashon High School, just trash talk.

Thursday night's forum on developer Paul McKee Jr.'s north-side properties was a time for declarations.

Fifth Ward Alderwoman April Ford-Griffin warmed up the crowd with these lines: "We will not live with public nuisances. We do not need anybody to come here who thinks they need to tear us down to build us back up."

Ford-Griffin received more applause later in the evening for her pledge not to approve the use of eminent domain.

"Are you going to eminent-domain my house when Paul McKee comes with his bulldozers?" asked Barbara Manzara, a resident of the Old North St. Louis neighborhood.

Ford-Griffin said she would not.

"So this is a pledge from my alderwoman?" Manzara persisted.

"Yes."

Nineteenth Ward Alderwoman Marlene Davis, state representatives Jeanette Mott Oxford and Jamilah Nasheed and aldermen Freeman Bosley Sr. and Charles Quincy Troupe also took the stage in Vashon's auditorium. Each took a turn rallying residents to hold down the fort while the elected officials do battle with McKee and his main supporter, St. Louis mayor Francis Slay.

Ford-Griffin and Davis said they hope to toughen the city's nuisance laws -- and perhaps stick it to McKee, who owns hundreds of vacant lots and buildings -- when the Board of Aldermen reconvenes September 14.

Slay sent two representatives, who didn't have a chance to return the kind sentiments. Once everyone was feeling sufficiently riled up, Davis declared that the only person fit to speak for city hall was Slay himself.

"I'm not one to answer questions for the mayor of St. Louis," Davis said. "I'm not going to let Charles Bryson, either," she said of the mayor's deputy chief of staff, who sat on stage and listened for the entire two-plus hours of proceedings.

By the time Davis put the clamp on Bryson, his colleague Barb Geisman, Slay's deputy mayor for development , was long gone.

Geisman had been the evening's first speaker.

"All the aldermen will tell you we spend a tremendous amount of time and energy on problem properties," she said. "That is why we have been advocating for a land-assembly tax credit, not just last year but for the last three or four or five years." (A tax credit that could benefit McKee is on its way to Governor Matt Blunt's desk today.)

"Nothing is going to happen with this tax credit without your aldermen," Geisman said. She added that it might be years before the tax credit is put to use on the north side. "It takes a long time to acquire property."

In the meantime, Geisman said, residence should keep filing complaints about nuisance properties.

Then she hit the road.

If Geisman couldn't stick around to hear from people like Rosie Willis, who has been keeping after a McKee property at 2832 Dayton Street for two years, she might have wanted to defend herself against the sharp tongue of First Ward Alderman Charles Quincy Troupe.

Troupe told the audience to be wary of assurances from Geisman. "Every piece of land I've tried to give away in my ward had to be approved by her. That's how tight the reins are," he said. "If you look at what she does, she's nothing less than a praying mantis."

As in the carnivorous species of insect whose females sometimes eat their mates? Scientists are still trying to understand the evolutionary function of such behavior. Here in St. Louis, we know it's just part of the political game.

-Kathleen McLaughlin

Due to a production error, the clubs and concerts listing printed in the August 30 issue of the paper were incorrect. See below to download the correct listings for the week of August 30 through September 6!

Click here to download the clubs listings, with bonus Homespun!

Click here to download the concert listings!

-- Annie Zaleski

Celebrate good times! C'mon, it's a celebration!

-Unreal

My review of Bissinger's: A Chocolate Experience is now available online. Click here to read.

Also in this week's issue: Malcolm dreams of anchovies in sauce gribiche, while Kristie enjoys a glass of Penfolds Thomas Hyland Shiraz at a curiously quiet mall.

-Ian Froeb

For more on food and restaurants in St. Louis, visit Gut Check.

Here's the headline I put on the blog entry I just posted about the U.S. Food and Drug Administration's and Federal Trade Commission's responses to complaints from Monsanto that U.S. milk producers are "misleading" the citizenry about the Creve Coeur-based chemical company's product Posilac, a.k.a. rBST, a.k.a. recombinant bovine somatotropin, a.k.a. bovine growth hormone:

FDA and FTC Tell Monsanto to Quit Bellyaching

Now here's the headline from the Business page of yesterday's St. Louis Post-Dispatch, atop a story by Rachel Melcer that covers the exact-same topic:

FTC takes websites to task on claims

Back in April, I wrote a pair of posts, one detailing Monsanto's complaints to the FDA and FTC, the other contrasting Melcer's story for the P-D with stories published by other news outlets.

Well, here we go again.

I'm not going to go over all the old ground. Let me just point you to the only other story about the denouement that's appeared so far, written by Associated Press writer Sam Hananel. That story was published in various newspapers around the nation under this headline:

FTC says milk ads on synthetic hormones not misleading

'Nuff said.

-Tom Finkel

How do you say "shove it" in Bureaucratese?

Two letters to Creve Coeur-based Monsanto -- one from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, the other from the Federal Trade Commission, ought to give you an idea.

Earlier this year Monsanto petitioned the two federal agencies to bitch-slap milk producers who have made "deceptive" claims that say or imply dastardly things about Posilac, a.k.a. rBST, a.k.a. recombinant bovine somatotropin, a.k.a. bovine growth hormone.

In an April 4 press release, Monsanto had bemoaned how "certain milk labels and promotions that differentiate milk based on farmer use of POSILAC bovine somatotropin (bST) are misleading to consumers and do not meet the standards set by laws and regulations for either the Federal Trade Commission or the Food and Drug Administration."

I wrote about the chemical company's wadded knickers here and here.

Monsanto's complaints fell into three categories. The first two were relatively straightforward:

• Some producers were labeling their product with claims like "No Hormones" or "No Hormones Added." Such assertions, Monsanto's attorneys pointed out, are patently false, because 1) all milk contains naturally occurring hormones, and 2) the vast majority of milk sold in this country is augmented with vitamin D, which is itself a hormone.

• Other labels said things like "rBST-free," "No Artificial Hormones" and "Does Not Contain Artificial Growth Hormones." Because rBST is administered to cows and not added to milk, no milk can be said to "contain" rBST.

It was the third category of alleged violations that rammed Monsanto's stout ship of argument up against the pointy shoals of common sense. To wit:

St. Louis City and scores of other Missouri municipalities may soon see an end to a lengthy legal battle involving some $500 million in disputed cell-phone taxes.

Since University City and 21 other cities filed suit in December 2001, wireless phone companies the likes of AT&T, Sprint, Verizon and Vodafone have argued that they should not be taxed at the same rate as regular phone lines. Landline phones typically pay local governments anywhere from seven to ten percent of a customer’s monthly bill in a “gross receipts surcharge,” also known as a license tax.

This week the first of the wireless carriers involved in the class-action litigation is expected to reach a settlement with the cities. Other settlement negotiations are ongoing. Just last week St. Louis County Judge Bernhardt Drumm Jr. was to rule on summary judgment motion involving AT&T, but that hearing was continued until September as the carrier continues its negotiations with cities. AT&T is not expected to settle this week.

“We’ve been in talks off and on with cities for months, even years,” says AT&T spokesman Kerry Hibbs. “We’d love to see this settled, but like any issue it will require compromise."

AT&T is currently paying taxes to 116 Missouri municipalities “under protest,” in which the funds are put into a special escrow account. “The whole tradition of these taxes dates back to when the phone companies were tearing up streets and erecting phone lines on public land,” states Hibbs. “The taxes were supposed to repay the cities for that burden. But that’s not the case with cell phones.”

John Mulligan, attorney for University City, disagrees. “Wireless calls to traditional telephones still travel over landlines,” argues Mulligan. “Why then should one phone technology not pay the tax when the other does?”

Moreover, as consumers have canceled their landline phones for wireless service, many cities have seen their tax base drop dramatically. Mulligan says University City collected nearly $800,000 in telecom taxes in 2000. Last year the city collected less than $500,000. Statewide, Mulligan estimates the amount of disputed or back taxes involving cell phones now reaches more than a half-billion dollars.

-Chad Garrison

The National Association of Black Journalists (NABJ) announced the recipients of its 2007 Salute to Excellence Awards at its convention earlier this month in Las Vegas. Competing against other newspapers nationwide with circulations of less than 150,000, Riverfront Times received first-place awards in two categories.

In the Enterprise category, staff writer Kristen Hinman was honored for her "Basketball by the Book" series, which revealed widespread residence violations by the legendary Vashon High School (Wolverines) basketball squad under the leadership of ex-coach Floyd Irons. And in the Business category, former RFT staffer Ben Westhoff was honored for "Ace of Spaides," a profile of local hip hop artist Spaide R.I.P.P.E.R.

Additionally, the Association of Food Journalists (AFJ) announced the winners of its 2007 awards competition in Minneapolis this past weekend. RFT staff writer Malcolm Gay took third place in the Best Newspaper Food Column category, for his weekly "Keep It Down!" column. Submitted were two entries, accessible here and here.

-Tom Finkel

Gut Check had an up-and-down week.

- We mourned the passing of another well-known St. Louis restaurant.

- We were intrigued by the "double-decker" pizza -- another blog-exclusive review.

- Salmon? Or deadly puffer fish?

- We mourned the passing of someone who has nothing to do with St. Louis or food.

- We celebrated the mysteries of Thai cuisine.

Gut Check. Pull up a chair and dig in.

-Ian Froeb

Doggone it! Unreal was just assembling a feast of our Michael Vick trading-card collection for the feisty pug that hangs out downstairs. Turns out a Cape Girardeau woman has already cornered that market -- check out the Southeast Missourian's and Sports Illustrated's reports here and here.

eBay, however, reined in the bidding -- it appears to have ripped Rochelle Steffen's mangled card collection off the site sometime yesterday. A call to eBay hasn't been returned.

In the meantime, a Lab named Lilli in Western Pennsylvania is marking her territory on the auction portal. Twenty eBay bidders so far are vying for a Michael Vick trading card that Lilli mauled and put up for bid today.

-Unreal