No Train to Memphis?

I know, I know… I haven’t been bloggin’ in a while. So sue me. I just haven’t really been in the mood. Plus, it’s so much easier to just use Twitter lately to convey quick thoughts than spend the extra time to think of everything I’d want to put into an entire BLOG POST. Cuz, ya know… Lord knows BLOG POSTS have to be literary masterpieces (haha). OK, so what’s bringing me back to the world of blogging? Well, I got a wild hair today (or is that an itchy foot?) and decided to check some rates and schedules for taking a train to Memphis, just because it’s been so long since we’ve been there and it would be good to back, check in at Goner Records, Shangri-La, Sun, grab some delicious barbecue, maybe even catch a Redbirds game, and hit whatever other interesting places we can that we can glean from the latest issue of the Kreature Komforts Lowlife Guide to Memphis (a must-have if you’re going there, trust me). Make an extended weekend of it, even, ya know, Saturday thru Monday or even Tuesday kinda thing… so I checked Amtrak’s website to see how much it would run, and I was surprised (shocked is actually more like it) to see that they no longer offer any direct routes from St. Louis to Memphis! What the hell? This just seems very WRONG to me. How long has it been this way? Anyone know?

Anyway, feeling pretty aggravated and wanting to make my feelings known, I sent the fine folks at Amtrak a little piece of my mind. It went something like this:

I find it VERY hard to believe that Amtrak does not offer a direct train route from St. Louis to Memphis. You actually make people go via CHICAGO, which makes absolutely no sense at all. If Amtrak wants to increase ridership, they should reinstate service between these two great Midwestern river cities. They’re so similar culturally not to mention they’re now linked with baseball (Memphis is the Cards’ AAA affiliate), yet Amtrak chooses to not serve people wanting to travel between these two great American cities. Unbelievable!

So I dunno… does that get my point across? I hope so. I would also hope that more people would contact them and say the same thing. Hell, this makes me feel so irate that I may even attempt an Internet petition to get them to reinstate this route, especially since gas is so fucking expensive now. So, please, if you, too, like the idea of taking a train to Memphis and back, contact Amtrak and let them know. Who knows, maybe they’ll actually add the route back to their schedule someday.

‘75 Pontiac

This is a photo of my old ‘75 Pontiac LeMans Grand Am that I drove to work and school during my Junior and Senior years of high school. I remember we got it from a used-car dealer in St. Charles for $1,050 (they were asking $1,150) in late summer, 1982. It had 98,000 miles on it. This photo was taken in the summer of 1983, shortly after getting my first personalized license plates and having it painted “Mediterranean Metallic Blue” at Earl Scheib for like a hundred bucks or so (it was originally silver… not sure why I didn’t just have it repainted the same color!). This was actually my 2nd car. My first, a ‘74 Chevy Monte Carlo, I wrapped around a tree on a rainy day only a month after getting it (the damned thing fishtailed like you wouldn’t believe). I only had the Pontiac for a couple of years before my dad somehow talked me into trading it in for a ‘78 Ford LTD like this one. The Grand Am was pretty sporty, and fast. Handled much better than the Monte Carlo, too. Both had the typical 350 under the hood. I remember hitting 110 mph on Highway 40 with this one once, racing some friends. Yeah, the stupid shit you do when you’re young…

Oh, yeah, that’s my mom walking out the front door as I snapped the photo… taken with a crappy old Kodak disc camera (remember those?).

The Fountain on Locust

We checked out The Fountain on Locust, the new ice cream parlor on Locust & Cardinal in Midtown (a block away from the new [and also good] Pappy’s Barbecue on Lindell) last night and it was really, really cool (and yummy!). The inside is amazing. Beautifully restored 1920s-era decor by owner Joy Christensen (who was a K-SHE DJ in the late ’70s), who spent two years working on the place. She even went so far as to hand-paint the Fountain’s logo on the tops of the toilets in the restrooms! Great selection of fancy candies, coffees, and old-fashioned ice cream specialties, plus other light food as well (soups & sandwiches - although we just went there for desert). Gina had the Chocolate Brownie Cake in a Cup, Miles had the Dark and Sinister with Zanzibar Chocolate, and I had a nice thick Malt with caramel topping (the malt was delicious, too, with a kind of rum flavor to it). My only complaint was that the the malts are advertised as coming with the tin, but for some reason the tin was absent from my order (and I wouldn’t have minded a refill!). Otherwise, it was splendid. We even got a visit at our table from cheerful owner Joy Christensen. Check it out when you get a chance! This place has the potential to give the Crown Candy Kitchen a run for its money…

The Fountain on Locust
3037 Locust Street in Midtown
314-535-7800

Oh yeah, and the “Soap Hospital” radio comedy series they have running at the booths on the west side is hilarious… sit over there and check ‘em out if there is a booth available.

Please Buy a Shirt!

I was reading on the RFT’s website recently about how a local woman, Joan Metzler, had sold something like a THOUSAND “Brave Enough to Live in America’s Most Dangerous City” tees when the report came out a little over a year ago that St. Louis was controversially ranked as “America’s Most Dangerous City” by Morgan Quitno Press. You can read it for yourself here. For some reason I was completely oblivious to these shirts when they seemed to be all the buzz locally and it seems a bit silly to buy one now (especially since the most recent report had us dropping to 2nd place, behind Detroit). Guess I wasn’t getting out much back then or something. Anyway, my point is… if she can sell a thousand of those shirts for $20 a pop (and on eBay, no less), wouldn’t you think I might be able to sell maybe TEN of the ones I just designed (see previous post)? If I can sell ten, then I can upload some new designs… not like I have a bunch or anything, but I do have a few more ideas. But so far I haven’t sold ONE yet. So, please, come on… help a brother out!

StLouieLouie.com

Some of you may remember that there used to be a phpBB message board over on StLouieLouie.com. I originally set it up back in the fall of 2006 in an effort to create some sort of online discussion about the things that I used to struggle to keep updated in my old Lowlife Guide to St. Louis. My idea was that the Saint Louis Forums could ultimately serve the same purpose as that old, outdated, online guide, but even better, because we could have a multitude of people weighing in on various subjects pertaining to the obscure and unusual local culture for those of us either living in or visiting Saint Louis… offbeat or “underground” local music, arts, restaurants, bars, unique attractions, sports, food, booze, fun things to do, weird stuff, etc. Unfortunately, despite promoting it on various other message boards, email lists, blogs and websites around the area, it just never took off as I’d hoped it would… probably because there were already plenty of other message boards and email lists (not to mention Myspace) where people were already spending a lot of their online time. I was about to pull the plug on the whole thing when my close friend Bill Streeter decided to create a new local social network site that would be connected with Lo-Fi Saint Louis that would basically serve the same purpose, plus offering people the ability to upload and share videos, music, and other media content. Not being fully satisfied with the Saint Louis Forums, I saw this as an easy way out. I would simply redirect the old site URL to Bill’s new site (which he named The Circuit) and encourage people to start using it instead. So I did that sometime last fall, and I do believe it helped Bill grow his network a little, because some people (even though they obviously did not post a lot) were still at least reading the Saint Louis Forums message board, and therefore got whisked away to The Circuit, where I would hope that they would have found the forum there instead.

I was happy to leave the redirect up for that site for a while, hopefully giving all of the former members a chance to catch onto the idea that The Circuit was THEE place to be, so that they could update their bookmarks and get accustomed to checking his site instead of mine. In the meantime, I thought it would be cool to come up with a few eye-catching St. Louis-themed designs that could be put onto T-shirts, kinda like STL-STyLe, but different. Having always been a fan of the St. Louis city flag, my first couple of designs are based on that flag’s art, only slightly modified (look closely at the fleur de lis, which I customized a little to look more like the one the St. Louis Browns used in the 1940s but still retaining much of the design of the classic city flag). So I set up a shop at Spreadshirt.com to sell some of these, and will probably be trying to come up with more designs in the future to add to it. If you have any ideas for more, please let me know!

By the way, in doing a Web search for common (or uncommon) St. Louis phrases, I was directed to a thread on StLouisGasPrices.com’s message board. As I was reading through it, I found a post in which someone had written a complaint about being tired of the phrase “Ask a doctor if _________ is right for you.” I thought that was pretty funny, and funnier still if you put “St. Louis” in the blank! So that’s where the idea for that shirt came from…

The other design on there right now came to me after I kept seeing all of these St. Louis Cardinals T-shirts with “Established 1892″ on them. There were a lot like that! But to the best of my knowledge, I’d never seen a shirt that said anything about St. Louis’ establishment date. That’s when I threw this one together!

There are lots of different shirt styles to choose from, for men, women, and even kids. And I can’t say enough about the great quality of these shirts from Spreadshirt… they really are nicer than screen printed tees. Please check ‘em out and buy one, or two, or three…

McCain ‘08 - Like Hope, But Different.

How can anyone in their right mind vote for this guy? We are already spending over $270 million A DAY on this needless war… yet he seems to think we don’t care when it ends, even if that’s TEN THOUSAND YEARS from now? Fucking Republicans are insane, I swear…

This video is hilarious, but the message behind it is disgusting. Be sure and vote against this prick in November.

Be sure to read the stuff in the “About This Video” section, too…

Devil Born Without Horns

I’ve been riding the bus to work lately, which has given me some extra time to do some reading. I just finished a great book that I thought I’d recommend to any pulp/crime fans out there called Devil Born Without Horns. I was really surprised at just how good it actually was… especially for anyone who’s ever had a dead-end job in retail or warehousing (or, even more specifically, the furniture business). I used to be a warehouse manager at a CompUSA store many years ago, and believe me, the author is spot-fucking-ON when it comes to accurately detailing the dysfunctional nature of warehousing and delivery, not to mention just how fucking annoying salespeople and bosses can be. The author, by the way, is Michael Lucas (who has a had a fairly active history of being in some pretty cool bands, such as the Phantom Surfers, Wild Breed, the Pussy Hounds, Poontang Wranglers, the Knights of the New Crusade, and the guy behind Repent Records) and the book is published by his new publishing company, Rudos and Rubes Publishing. I’d give it a big fat thumbs up, or probably about 4 out of 5 stars. Seriously, it was that good.

Oh, by the way, he also just published a book of short stories by Johnny Strike (of SF punk pioneers Crime) called A Loud Humming Sound Came From Above, and I started reading that one this morning. So far, so good. There’s info on that one on the Rudos and Rubes site, too.

Net Neutrality

Big phone and cable companies are trying to get rid of Net Neutrality, the fundamental principle that prevents them from discriminating against your favorite websites and services.

Unless we speak out to our members of Congress, they could move to allow large telephone and cable companies to control what you do, where you go and what you watch online.

Click here to learn more about what’s at stake and send a loud message directly to Congress:

To take action on this issue, click here.

Ruby Tuesday, R.I.P.

Feb. 11, 1998 - Feb. 8, 1008

Gina and I had to put our 10-year-old Golden Retriever, Ruby, to sleep tonight. She had had a baseball-sized tumor that she had carried with her on her right side the past couple of years, and it ruptured this past Monday, which not only meant that a very expensive surgery would have been required to remove it (in the neighborhood of $600), but that she, due to her age, plus having advanced infection from the growth (detected in a blood test), and also possible kidney problems, would also be in danger of never waking up from the anesthesia. There was also the added concern that a ruptured tumor indicated advancing cancer, and that even after it was removed, the cancer would continue to spread and her quality of life would have gone downhill rapidly and she may have only lasted another few months with us, anyway. So in considering all of the above, we felt it was just best to have her euthanized. At least our last memories of her were of her standing there looking at us lovingly and happily wagging her tail, as she always did.

She was the happiest, sweetest, and most playful dog I’ve ever owned, and she was my best buddy, always right there by my side no matter what it was I was doing. We will miss her dearly.

Clinton or Obama? The Choice Is Obvious!

Video by Larry Lessig. Watch and learn…