In the world of biological impossibility, Harry S. Truman would be 124 years old today. He was also the first -- and remains the only -- president from the great state of Missouri. In celebration, some government offices, like the DMV, have shut down for the day.
Besides, Harry Truman was pretty damn cool.
The dead, as far as I'm aware of, have not risen from their graves and begun to feast upon the living, but if they ever did, the Zombie Squad would make sure you were prepared for the undead cataclysm. That, you see, is their mission:
It has been a wild few days for freelance photographer Nichole Torpea. The 22-year-old UMSL grad was shooting the My Chemical Romance concert at the Pageant for Riverfront Times this past Saturday night when, she says, she was assaulted by a member of the band's security team.
While taking pictures from the balcony of the Pageant during last Saturday's sold-out show, Torpea says, she was approached by a man she believes is a member of MCR's security team. The man, whom she later described to St. Louis police as six-foot-three, 210 to 230 pounds and dressed all in black, grabbed her arm, led her through a door to a stairwell and forced her to the ground. Torpea says the man paid little attention to the photo pass attached to her shirt.
"I was collapsing under his pressure," she says. "I had no idea what was going on. He had no ID and wouldn't tell me who he was. He kept saying, 'You know what you did. Give me the fucking camera.'"
Saturday was Free Comic Book Day, and our freelance videographer Anastasia Folorunso hit the street to speak with flesh-and-blood superhero (impersonators) who had also managed to foil a would-be thief at Star Clipper.
For the kid in all of us, read about the event and watch the video after the jump.
In St. Louis anyway, summer is here.
Touring bands, street festivals and the Cardinals vs. the Cubs at Busch Stadium. You may have even gotten a little sunburned.
A weekend recap is after the jump...
President George Bush spoke in Maryland Heights today, touting the imminent economic stimulus package intended to bolster a flagging economy and raise hopes of the impoverished or recently laid off.
After you receive your check from Uncle Sam, you're supposed to go buck wild at the mall or any other commercial establishment. If you pay off your bills with the money or save it -- arguably the "responsible" things to do -- you're not really stimulating the economy.
If you're like most of us, you may already have that money spent. If not, after the jump we suggest some tax-stimulus expenditures for those in doubt.
Since I moved to St. Louis less than a year ago, I've been in three minor car accidents, none of which were my fault. My ride was hit while it was parked near the Loop, I was rear-ended at a stop light, and, most recently, one of those airport parking shuttles changed lanes without checking its blind spot and clipped my passenger side doors. Now I'm on a first name basis with the guys at the body shop.
I know it's cliché to say when you move somewhere new that the drivers are terrible, but I think I have a pretty legitimate case here. Given my experience, I can confidently contend that Missourians drive like savages.
I have often asked why. Initially I speculated the Mad Max impersonations were the result of a city-wide frustration at having so many useless stop signs and inefficient traffic lights. As I've gotten to know the area, however, I have come to strongly believe that everybody is driving shit-faced. With the piss-poor public transit and cab service and the city's unquenchable thirst for Budweiser, I always thought I had a pretty sound hypothesis.
On Wednesday, came vindication. The federal Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration released the results of a survey of more than 127,000 people across the nation, asking if they'd driven under the influence in the past three years.
In October 2007, the American Planning Association named the Delmar Loop, ''One of Ten Great Streets in America.''
In handing out the award, the non-profit urban planning group lauded the University City street's revitalization in the past few decades and called the Boulevard, ''a vibrant place with a character all its own.''
Not surprisingly, officials at city hall were ecstatic about receiving the honor.
''It was a marketing person's dream,'' says Monica McFee, the city's public relations director. ''You can't pay for advertising like that.''
What University City officials could pay for were banners laying claim to their title. McFee says that the city purchased three signs to hang in conjunction with the Loop In Motion festival in October 2007. One was hung in front of city hall and another spanned Delmar at Westgate Avenue. McFee says U-City wanted the third to be displayed somewhere in the east end of the Loop.
Since the border between the municipality and the City of St. Louis is Skinker Boulevard, they had to find another organization willing to display the banner. Eventually they sold one of the posters to the East Loop Business Association, who hung the sign in front of a vacant lot near Rosedale Avenue.
While the first two signs came down shortly after the Loop festival, the third has remained. The lot where it hangs has gradually accumulated enough litter, rainwater, and shoddy fencing to rival Ballpark Village. Not exactly the best representation of what the Planning Association described as the Loop's ''prosperity and vitality.''
Got Worms?
Ballpark Village may be a big, wet hole, but that doesn't mean it's closed for business.
Seriously, I was just on my way to bed, when things started shaking and freaked me out. The St. Louis Livejournal community confirmed I wasn't crazy. And according to the U.S. Geological Survey, it was a 4.5 magnitude earthquake centered five miles northwest of Mt. Carmel, Illinois (and 131 miles away from St. Louis).
That's about as strong as the 4.6 earthquake aftershock that hit the area last Friday morning at around 10:15 a.m., after the 5.2 earthquake that happened a few hours before.
Can't deal with this anymore. Someone hold me.
-- Annie Zaleski
Update:
Metro East news outlets are reporting another quake just after 10 a.m. today.
Earlier:
At 4:37 a.m. this morning, we woke up to a rattlin' like no other. According to reports, the shake was a 5.2 magnitude in scale, causing some lanes of the Kingshighway overpass to be closed off because debris had fallen from the underside of the structure.
Where were you?
Post your story – were you at the casino? Driving? At a diner? Enjoying an all-night game of Risk? – below in the comments section. The writer of the most interesting story will be awarded with Internet fame and a T-Shirt.
Also, refer to ON SHAKY GROUND: The earthquake hazard here may be greater than you think. And planning for it is less than you'd expect, our 1999 story by C.D. Stelzer.
Links to learn more and thusly, be the know-it-all around the water cooler:
Stloday.com: Earthquake Measuring 5.2 Rattles St. Louis Region
Saint Louis University Earthquake Center
http://www.eas.slu.edu/Earthquake_Center/
St. Louis Metropolitan Area, Missouri-Illinois, Earthquake Hazard Mapping Project
http://earthquake.usgs.gov/regional/ceus/urban_map/st_louis/
This week's cover story by Keegan Hamilton, Birds of a Feather: The strange and violent world of St. Louis bail bondsmen, explores the cutthroat world of bail bonding in St. Louis, where convicted felons can become bondsmen and help suspects emancipate themselves. But it's never a get-out-jail-free situation.
Click on the blue markers to read the basic Google info about each agency. There are more than 850 bail bonding agents in Missouri.
On March 13, a St. Louis County jury told James Neumann, CEO of Chesterfield-based outdoor advertising firm AdOne Media Inc., that he and his company had to pay $1.1 million in damages to a former employee. Earlier this month he filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy.
The damages were the result of a sexual harassment lawsuit filed by Sherry Flotron, an employee who worked for the company for four months starting in January 2007.
Flotron claimed Neumann constantly dogged her when she worked for the company and that he sexually assaulted her while the pair was on a business trip to Las Vegas. Neumann denied the allegations, pointing out that Flotron continued to buy stock in the company, and even convinced her father and grandmother to invest, until just before she was fired.
"In San Francisco, you can landmark a 'historic tree' -- but no one has ever thought to designate a historic bush."
The little shrub has caused a debate in the Bay Area: whether to fell thousands of non-native trees planted there by the some of the city's earliest residents in order to save the natural plant, or to allow the trees to stand and likely sacrifice the plant.
Eskenazi continues, "So, if the last Raven’s manzanita falls in the forest, would San Franciscans make a noise?"
Raven keeps a busy schedule in St. Louis -- with adjunct teaching positions at the University of Missouri-St. Louis and at Saint Louis University -- as Eskenazi learned:
"Securing a 20-minute phone interview with Raven, now the director of the Missouri Botanical Garden in St. Louis, required more than a dozen phone calls and e-mails to several assistants -- and the minute the 71-year-old hung up the phone, he hopped a flight to Israel for a members-only botanical garden tour of the herbage of the Holy Land."
The rare plant, seemingly doomed to extinction owing to the difficulty it has reproducing, has weathered challenges both natural (fungus) and mechanical.
Writes Eskenazi:
What a weekend. Here's what you missed:
The Alice Rose of Austin, Texas played Friday night at Lemmons in South St. Louis. Click over to A to Z to read more.
On Friday night, the wind was whipping down Washington Avenue, but that didn't stop the club crowd from heading out. Here's a recap from Joseph Olk:
Friday Night and It's Windy
It is 10 p.m. on Washington Ave. and it's colder than it should be. All previous knowledge tells me that this is a cloudy night in mid-October, but my phone tells me it's the eleventh of April. I'll trust my phone.
Stepping into the Dubliner offers a reprieve from the wind. The Cardinals are on every television and the crowd is in a boisterous mood, we must be winning. A pair of Irish-accented gents, known as the Fleadh Brothers, are setting up in a corner; they will shortly be filling the bar with damned catchy Irish folk songs. When the music begins to play, the crowd is still wrapped up in the game, but as the mandolin and guitar start grooving heads begin to bob and feet begin to tap.
Exiting, I walk on down to the Flamingo Bowl; the night is still young for the bowling alley/martini lounge, but I need a drink and a martini sounds amazing. Not to mention, when I drink martinis I feel as though it is 1947 and some rich dame is having me snoop for her dead husbands killer. The bowlers up at the lanes run the gamut, as far as skill is concerned, and more than a couple drunken gutter-balls are thrown. I finish the olive and move on to figure out where the party's at.
