Blogs

Dontcha love the St. Louis Post-Dispatch's Web site redesign? Brand-new, clean backgrounds. Brand-new, big typefaces.

Same old lame headlines, though.

Like Unreal's dear, departed mother used to say: What you gain on the swings, you lose on the roundabouts.

Speaking of mothers and headlines, here's another from today's Post:

Kinda a downer, to Unreal's eye, especially given the nature of the holiday. Why not accentuate the positive? Like:

Or perhaps:

-Unreal

I was listening to Kevin Wheeler on KMOX last night on the drive home and caught his conversation with first-year Cardinals general manager John Mozeliak. After some chitchat about the team's early-season run of great play -- and great plays, like Pujols' Monday-night mad dash and Ankiel's phenomenal-cannon heroics on Tuesday -- Wheeler asked Mozeliak to comment on the latest news about Mark Mulder, the oft-injured lefty whose recovery from recent shoulder surgery took a detour yesterday after he was examined by team doctor George Paletta.

I wasn't recording or taking notes -- I was driving -- so I didn't get it down verbatim, but the gist of Mozeliak's response was this: The decision to sideline Mulder for at least a week owing to what was described as a mild strain of the rotator cuff was the right thing to do for the team and, Mozeliak stressed several times, for Mulder.

The Riverfront Times knows how to cover a story in a timely fashion. But sometimes the local press must band together in order to take on an issue of great magnitude. You know: Reporters helping reporters.

Such is the case with Ballpark Village. Cooperation is vital in order to convey all the nuances of this story to people who may not have ventured outside in the past two years and have no idea why there's still a big hole where old Busch Stadium used to stand.

That's why we at RFT were happy -- gratified, even -- to lend a hand to our brethren and sistren at KSDK-TV (Channel 5) when our paths crossed on the Ballpark Village beat.

Here at RFT we don't have much time for reflection; no sooner do we put one issue to bed than we're late getting on to the next. And don't even get me started about the Beast that is the Blog.

But each week our art squad, led by art director Tom Carlson, puts a truckful of thought into the paper's cover. That's one reason I belatedly -- finally -- began putting a homepage link to "This Week's Cover" on our Web site.

The other reason is that I think Tom and Jennifer Silverberg and Sarah Norwood produce terrific work.

Which isn't to say we're in the league of George Lois. The subject of a retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art, Lois designed covers for Esquire magazine from 1962 to 1972.

Here (after the jump) are a few more examples:

Sparks flew when three sports mavens with St. Louis connections got together the other night. Bob Costas convened a panel of experts on his show Costas Now to discuss "Internet Media" -- or, more specifically, this newfangled thang we call blogging.

One guest was Cleveland Browns wide receiver Braylon Edwards. I forget whether Edwards said anything at all during the segment; it was Costas' other guests, Deadspin.com blogger (and diehard Cardinals fan) Will Leitch and 3 Nights in August author Buzz Bissinger, who chewed up the airtime.

Ann Wright, one of only three U.S. government officials to publicly resign over the U.S. invasion of Iraq, was in St. Louis Tuesday night to speak with anti-war supporters at MokaBe's Coffeehouse and at Left Bank Books, 399 N. Euclid Ave.

Wright, who spoke for about 90 minutes at Left Bank on Tuesday -- which was thee fifth anniversary of the fall of Baghdad -- criticized a war that continues today.

With a speaking tone more so resembling a maternal teacher than a shrill anti-war protester, Wright, who spent 29 years in the military, shared these anecdotes from a book she co-authored that homes in on the Iraq War:

An FBI translator noticed that her superiors were changing dialogue on transcripts of conversations between U.S. officials and Turks and Pakistanis about selling nuclear information. When she brought it to the attention of her bosses, she was fired.

Another former translator, this time in England, leaked secret information concerning alleged illegal activities by the U.S. government in the lead-up to the invasion of Iraq. She was criminally charged.

A naval lawyer based at the Guantánamo Bay detention camp released the names of prisoners being held there, after the military refused to provide any documentation. The lawyer served six months in prison.

These whistle-blowers and the stories of 22 others are chronicled in Dissent: Voices of Conscience.

The stories in her book -- published January 15 -- remain fresh as some of them made news as recently as last summer.

The choice of Daniel Ellsberg to write the foreword connects two generations, though it is creeping to three. Vietnam veterans who were in their early 20s in the mid 1960s may now have grandchildren readying for a tour in Iraq.

This generation lacks the smoking, gleaming gun that was the Pentagon Papers (leaked by Ellsberg), but the collection of stories in Dissent appears to be enough ammo for those questioning the Iraq War's legalities.

With Euclid Avenue pedestrians as her backdrop, Wright stood in front of the store window and recounted the hours of March 19, 2003, when she submitted her three-page resignation letter to Secretary of State Colin Powell. She recalled stating "that without authorization of the UN Security Council, the invasion of a Muslim, Arab, oil-rich country would be a disaster."

She hasn't actively campaigned for any one presidential candidate in '08, and said Tuesday she had never met with Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., or Sen. Hillary Clinton, D-N.Y., in her 16 years as a U.S. diplomat. Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., was in the Illinois state Senate when she was a federal employee.

On Clinton:
"Three years ago she was gung-ho war, and it's taken pressure from groups that are out there hollering at her, saying, 'We totally disagree with what you stand for on this war.' And she's moved her positions on it."

On all three:
"I would love to have an opportunity to sit down and speak with all three of the presidential candidates, and not coming from the protest side, but as a person who has had lengthy experience in the military and foreign affairs."

At 7 p.m. today, Wright will be at Tegeler Hall on the Saint Louis University campus.

-Nick Lucchesi

Unreal beats our head against the faux maple veneer of our desk on a daily basis trying to come up with the perfect headline. We have at our disposal dictionaries, thesauri, transcripts of old Simpsons episodes, subscriptions to the Wall Street Journal, St. Louis Magazine and the Evening Whirl. And on and on. And still we toil.

You cannot possibly imagine how dispiriting it is, then, to see how easy they make it look over at the competition's newsroom:

To say nothing of the fact that, intrepid local raker of the muck that we are, while the Post-Dispatch was clearly all over this newsworthy turn of events, Unreal had NO IDEA THEY WERE EVEN CONTEMPLATING SHUTTING DOWN EAST ST. LOUIS!.

We'd go over there and report back, but what good would that do? There wouldn't be anybody there to let us in.

-Unreal

Craig Silverman, editor of the Web site Regret the Error and author of a book by the same name, got back to me this afternoon about the St. Louis Post-Dispatch's March 30 retraction, which I posted about here.

This past Sunday the paper ran a detailed correction and apology for a story it had published on Easter Sunday, March 23. That front-page feature told the story of a woman who had overcome an abusive spouse and homelessness; it turned out the protagonist had fabricated the entire tale, complete with a fake name.

Silverman says the Post-Dispatch deserves credit for being so forthcoming. In the apology, authored by editor Arnie Robbins and managing editor Pam Maples, the paper concedes that its standards for verification weren't followed.

"They had some internal breakdown. There's actually something positive about that. I haven't seen a lot of papers admit that they also had a role in the mistaken thing in the paper," says Silverman, a freelance journalist in Montreal who also writes about workplace culture for the Toronto Globe and Mail.

But Silverman questions the paper's choice of where to publish its retraction. The Post chose page A2. If the original, front-page story was so "terribly wrong," Silverman asks, why did the paper not run the retraction on page one? "I would argue that's a front-page mistake," he says.

Likewise, Silverman differs with the Post's decision to permanently remove the story from STLtoday.com. While erasing an error from the public record might seem like the most logical course of action, Silverman says, he advocates leaving erroneous stories online with corrections appended.

"For the sake of the historical record, for the sake of even learning from the mistake, you need to keep what's there," he says.

You can read Silverman's post about the incident here.

-Kathleen McLaughlin

Today Food & Wine magazine named Gerard Craft, executive chef and co-owner of Benton Park restaurant Niche, one of its ten "Best New Chefs" for 2008. Craft is the first St. Louis-based chef to receive the honor, which began in 1988. Previous winners include such noted chefs as Daniel Boulud (Daniel), Thomas Keller (The French Laundry and Per Se) and Tom Colicchio (the restaurant Craft and co-host of Top Chef).

Craft learned the news a month ago. "I thought one of the other chefs was playing a joke on me," he told me this afternoon on the phone from New York City, where tonight he and the other winners will attend a party in their honor.

The magazine swore Craft to secrecy, which he admits was difficult: "I have a big mouth."

While the news did remain a secret, obsessive observers of the St. Louis dining scene might have suspected that the stars were aligning for Craft. Food & Wine editor-in-chief Dana Cowin dined at Niche a few months ago and mentioned the restaurant in the "Where I'm Coming From" sidebar to her editor's letter in the magazine's February 2008 issue.

On the eve of the announcement, Food & Wine's Web site offered clues to the identities of this year's "Best New Chefs." One of the clues set alarm bells ringing in anyone familiar with Craft's career before he moved to St. Louis:

Two of this year's BNCs have cooked—and might still be cooking—in an unexpected city on the west coast (okay, Salt Lake City).

(Craft worked at the Salt Lake City restaurants Bistro Toujours and the Metropolitan.)

When I spoke with Craft this afternoon, he was exceptionally modest, saying that his staff at Niche "were the ones who got [the award] for me."

"I consider myself to be extremely lucky," he says. "There are so many [chefs] better than me. They all deserve to be recognized. Hopefully, this will give a boost to the St. Louis dining scene."

Josh Galliano, chef de cuisine at An American Place, agrees: "It's awesome for St. Louis."

Galliano believes the award will let Craft and Niche represent St. Louis' contemporary dining scene to the rest of the nation. "People can look beyond the St. Louis specialties," he says. "There’s nothing bad about that heritage, but we're in a new [restaurant] industry."

Among Craft's fellow winners are several chefs who have already received national attention. New York Times restaurant critic Frank Bruni recently ranked Tim Cushman's Boston restaurant O Ya and Jeremy Fox's Napa Valley restaurant (and yoga studio) Ubuntu #1 and #2 in a countdown of the 10 best new restaurants in America outside of New York City.

Michael Psilakis, chef of the New York City restaurants Anthos, Kefi and Mia Dona, was named "Chef of the Year" for 2007 by Esquire magazine's well-known food critic John Mariani.

The other winners are Jim Burke of James in Philadephia, Koren Grieveson of Avec in Chicago, Ethan Stowell of Union in Seattle, Giuseppe Tentori of Boka in Chicago, Eric Warnstedt of Hen of the Wood in Waterbury (Vermont) and Sue Zemanick of Gautreau’s in New Orleans.

Craft and the other chefs will appear on the cover of Food & Wine's July 2008 issue. If tradition holds, there will be a profile of and a recipe from each chef in the issue. Coincidentally, Mathew Rice, pastry chef at Niche and the adjoining Veruca bakeshop, will have a recipe featured in the magazine's June issue.

Correction: The original post incorrectly identified Mathew Rice as the owner of Veruca. Our apologies.

-Ian Froeb

A woman calling herself Virginia Gillis told what seems like the perfect Easter Sunday tale to St. Louis Post-Dispatch religion reporter Tim Townsend. But for Townsend, the published story quickly turned into a reporter's worst nightmare.

[Editor's note: For an update on this post, point your browser to this more recent STLog entry.]

In "A Time to Renew Hope," which appeared on the front page of the Post's March 23 edition, Gillis related to Townsend how in 2005 her husband burned down their house and later slashed her throat. After the trauma, she told Townsend, she ended up homeless, only to eventually find a new life as head chef at Centenary CARES, an outreach program run by Centenary United Methodist Church downtown.

In Townsend's narrative, Gillis' tale of resurrection provided a fitting segue into a story about the meaning of Easter to Christians.

"Anyone can lose everything in one second," said Gillis. "Anyone can go from spiritual life to spiritual death. But it can be reversed just as quick. I should not have lived through what happened to me, but I was reconstructed -- resurrected, I guess."

Soon after publication, Townsend and his Post-Dispatch editors learned that the woman's story was untrue. In a letter to readers published this past Sunday, editor Arnie Robbins and managing editor Pam Maples detailed what the paper discovered through further reporting, including:

• The woman's name, according to her mother, is Pamala Brown.

• She is 51, not 42.

• She is wanted for violating probation on bad-check writing and forgery charges.

• Law-enforcement officials in Jefferson County can find no record of the purported throat slashing.

"In short," write the editors, "this story did not meet our standards for publication."

Riverfront Times staff writer Kristen Hinman appears on the Charlie Brennan Show at 10 a.m. today on KMOX. You can hear her interview at www.kmox.com.

Hinman speaks about her stories on the dispute between unions and the St. Louis Convention & Visitors Commission -- and what conventioneers really think about St. Louis' accommodations. Hinman acquired exit surveys from the CVC through Missouri Sunshine Law requests. Those documents were made available to all here on the Stlog on Monday.

The three PDF documents below contain the nine exit surveys Hinman received (with some information redacted by the CVC).

PDF 1
PDF 2
PDF 3

On Friday, Hinman blogged about how the union lockout at America's Center had escalated. Read the CVC's press release, issued after the unions put out their own release, titled, "Fact Sheet on Lockout of IBEW Local One and IATSE Locals 6 and 143 (the “Local Unions”) Illegally Imposed by St. Louis CVC."

Hinman investigated the dispute in the RFT's May 2007 cover story, "Bad Blood."

Also up for interview today on Brennan is John Larry Ray, brother of James Earl Ray. Read our interview with Ray in this week's cover story by Ellis Conklin.

-Nick Lucchesi

The joke's over.

April 1 was touted as "Energy Wasting Day" by Together.com, a Web site constructed by The Climate Group, which aims to "catalyze business and government leadership on climate change in order to put the world on track for a low carbon economy."

In the weeks leading up to today, the character of "Dan Power," a bullish Brit who loves to waste energy -- he also works at a power plant -- was chronicled through LOL videos on YouTube.

But today, Power's character came out an apologized for his promotion of wasting energy. Quite sheepishly.

It's all an attempt to motivate us to use less energy, but it's safe to assume that the folks behind these videos have conceded defeat to energy-sucking computers.

To "waste" a few minutes of your day, check out these videos:

Energy Wasting Day - posted March 18

Energy Wasting Day- an apology - posted today

... By the way, Earth Day is April 22.

In St. Louis, check out www.stlouisearthday.org for details on its April 20 festival set for the the Muny Grounds in Forest Park.

- Nick Lucchesi

The St. Louis Cardinals are trying to get us pumped for the upcoming season, during which we'll likely watch the "new-look Cards" finish with a losing record. And it kills me to say that. Especially after a decade-plus of stretch drives, one National League pennant and a World Series championship.

The bloom of contention is, as the poets say, off the rose. The front office has undergone changes; two executives, John Mozeliak and Bill DeWitt III, got promotions. The team on the field looks different too (as you may have read).

But with lowered expectations come funny commercials!

Check out these slightly weird ads. They don't exactly conjure feelings of an October run or a 100-win season. They do, however, make me long for summer.

The organization's new slogan, "Play Like a Cardinal," is a little fuzzily defined. Judging from these commericals, it might translate to: Share a hot dog with a friend, play hard and be sure to include the mascot in team warm-ups.

My favorite spot stars pitchers Adam Wainwright and Jason Isringhausen and a hot dog. The two aren't afraid to share a baseball during a game, and apparently also are unfazed by wiener-swapping:

Here we have Fredbird doing the high-knee jog with the team. To those who don't see the mascot every...single...freaking...day on television in St. Louis during the baseball season, the guest spot might seem novel. Well, hell, the kids love him:

A third spot has Rick Ankiel professing that he isn't just a pitcher. And he is only sort of a right fielder. Rest assured he is 100 percent "ballplayer," though:

-Nick Lucchesi

Former Vashon High School coach Floyd Irons, one of Missouri's most victorious high school basketball coaches, and his former confidant and booster Mike Noll, were sentenced to federal prison Monday, along with mortgage broker John Mineo Jr., thus closing the book on a real estate fraud case that earlier resulted in prison time for a property appraiser as well.

U.S. District Court Judge E. Richard Webber showed leniency with Irons, Noll and Mineo.

The judge sentenced Irons to two twelve-month prison terms, to run concurrently, as well as five years' probation, and ordered him to pay $653,147.09 in restitution to the banks that lost money as a result of the mortgage fraud. Federal sentencing guidelines, which judges may stray from, had called for a 27- to 33-month sentence.

Assistant U.S. Attorney Hal Goldsmith had recommended 18 months.

Webber sentenced co-conspirator Mike Noll to twenty months in prison and five years' probation and ordered him to pay $1,032,212.71 in restitution. Guidelines had called for a 33- to 41-month sentence. Goldsmith had recommended 25 months.

John Mineo Jr. received a sentence of twelve months and one day -- which ends up amounting to a lesser sentence than twelve months, because of prison rules, Judge Webber noted -- and was also ordered to pay restitution of $653,147.09. Guidelines had called for jail time of 21 to 27 months. The federal prosecutor had recommended 14 months.

It was a long afternoon, with proceedings beginning at 2 p.m. and not wrapping up until 7:15 p.m. Irons was the last to be sentenced; his day in court ended with an unlikely sight: a receiving line of well-wishers offering hugs and handshakes. More than 100 people -- standing-room only -- had crowded the courtroom in his defense.

Degree of culpability, as well as character, seemed to factor most into Judge Webber's rulings.

Noll's attorney, Ed Dowd, claimed that Mineo approached Noll about the scheme to purchase and flip properties using false paperwork. But the judge rejected that idea and determined that Noll was the ringleader.

Dowd asked for leniency for Noll, based on Noll's twenty-year history as an informant on gambling and organized-crime cases. Dowd said Noll has had shots fired at him and received oral threats against his life because of his work for the FBI. "He has lived in danger while he served his country for no reason other than he wanted to help," Dowd said. "He has given the government everything he knows and is willing to continue to cooperate."

Dowd also referred to Noll's decades of providing financial assistance and support for children across the metro area to attend sports camps and tournaments, high schools and colleges. "He has no assets at all to support his family or to pay his legal fees," Dowd said, "so [my fellow attorneys] and I have been working on this case for free...because, particularly, of the numbers of young people he's helped."

Dowd read from letters written on Noll's behalf by parents and students who were recipients of his beneficence. The defense attorney also cited from letters written by two Catholic brothers and by St. Louis Rams executive vice president Bob Wallace.

Noll himself asked Judge Webber to spare him from prison: "Basketball kids, my extended family and my immediate family, they will bear the brunt of a lengthy punishment -- "

"How is that true?" Webber interrupted. "You're going to have to pay back more than one million dollars, and if you ever try to do anything like that again you're going to get arrested."

Back in January Rick Majerus offended local Catholics (and particularly Archbishop Raymond Burke) when the Saint Louis University basketball coach publicly stated his support of stem-cell research and abortion rights.

Now it seems Majerus has insulted yet another Christian populace: the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Speaking on the syndicated radio program The Dan Patrick Show last week, Majerus opined that nothing -- not even Mitt Romney or Mormons' "magic underwear" -- would help Brigham Young University defeat Texas A&M in the first round of the NCAA basketball tournament.

The comments came at the close of a ten-minute interview on Monday, March 17, in which host Dan Patrick asked Majerus to quickly provide his picks for the tourney. "Let me run down the list," said Patrick. "You just say who you like. You don't have to tell me why unless it's a really insightful comment that the listeners will say, 'Damn, that was insightful.'"

When asked about the BYU-Texas A&M matchup, Majerus responded, "A&M. I don't like BYU from my Utah days. The magic underwear Mitt and those guys send themselves."

Huh? During his tenure at University of Utah, Majerus apparently learned quite a bit about the Mormon culture, including the practice of wearing temple garments under their clothes. The garments -- often referred to as "Mormon underwear" -- are traditionally worn by adherents as a reminder of their promise to live a virtuous life. Though as Slate reported prior to BYU's entrance in last year's tournament, few Mormons wear the garments while competing in sports.

In response to Majerus' comment, a laughing Patrick quickly changed the subject: "You're going to get me put on probation." But not everyone was willing to forgive and forget so quickly.

Posting last week on the sports site bleacherreport.com, blogger Andrew Perkins compared Majerus' comment to Don Imus' ill-fated musings on Rutgers' women's basketball team last year. "Whether or not he has any love towards Mormons is not the issue," wrote Perkins. "The issue is that Majerus said something that is discriminatory and disrespectful to a specific group of people."

Perkins isn't the only one whose shorts are bunched over the remarks. Responding to Perkins' blog post, a reader named Tracy Hall commented, "If Majerus had made a derogatory comment about a Jewish player's 'magic beanie,' he would have been fired on the spot. It's time to realize that anti-Mormons and anti-Semites belong to the same Klan."

No matter whom you support -- the SLU coach or the Mormons -- you can't argue with the coach's pick. The ninth-seeded Aggies beat number-eight seed BYU 67-62.

-Unreal