Kansas City Quotes

It isn't necessary to have relatives in Kansas City in order to be unhappy.

The hero surviving his own murder, his own suicide, his own addiction, surviving his own disappearance from the scene

Kansas City, that’s like in Kansas, right?” I ask. “Missouri,” Frank and Dad both correct.

We the People - shelling the Vietcong

And now to sleep, to dream...perchance to fart.

Daddy, how come in Kansas City the bagels taste like just round bread?

The old folk from Indiana and Iowa and Illinois, from Boston and Kansas City and Des Moines, they sold their homes and their stores, and they came here by train and by automobile to the land of sunshine, to die in the sun, with just enough money to live until the sun killed them, tore themselves out by the roots in their last days, deserted the smug prosperity of Kansas City and Chicago and Peoria to find a place in the sun. And when they got here they found that other and greater thieves had already taken possession, that even the sun belonged to the others; Smith and Jones and Parker, druggist, banker, baker, dust of Chicago and Cincinnati and Cleveland on their shoes, doomed to die in the sun, a few dollars in the bank, enough to subscribe to the Los Angeles Times, enough to keep alive the illusion that this was paradise, that their little papier-mâché homes were castles.

Kansas City Sunday, August 22, 1915 I'm going to find everyone kind and all the help I need, as usual.

Abelman’s Dry Goods Kansas City, Missouri U.S.A. Mr. I. Abelman, Mongoloid, Esq.: We have received via post your absurd comments about our trousers, the comments revealing, as they did, your total lack of contact with reality. Were you more aware, you would know or realize by now that the offending trousers were dispatched to you with our full knowledge that they were inadequate so far as length was concerned. “Why? Why?” You are, in your incomprehensible babble, unable to assimilate stimulating concepts of commerce into your retarded and blighted worldview. The trousers were sent to you (1) as a means of testing your initiative (A clever, wide-awake business concern should be able to make three-quarter-length trousers a byword of masculine fashion. Your advertising and merchandising programs are obviously faulty.) and (2) as a means of testing your ability to meet the standards requisite in a distributor of our quality product. (Our loyal and dependable outlets can vend any trouser bearing the Levy label no matter how abominable their design and construction. You are apparently a faithless people.) We do not wish to be bothered in the future by such tedious complaints. Please confine your correspondence to orders only. We are a busy and dynamic organization whose mission needless effrontery and harassment can only hinder. If you molest us again, sir, you may feel the sting of the lash across your pitiful shoulders. Yours in anger, Gus Levy, Pres.

My dear grandmother (who was a psychic in her own right and very well known in Kansas City, Missouri) used to say if you find someone who doesn’t like animals, children, or music . . . run.

It’s too late now. The game’s been won by companies who don’t two shits about community character or decent jobs. Congratufuckinglations, America! We did the deal. Now we’ve got an unlimited supply of cheap commodities and unhealthy food and crumbling downtowns, no sense of place, and a permanent under class. Yay. The underclass isn’t relegated to urban ghettos either. It’s coast to coast and especially in between. Take US 50 west from Kansas City to Sacramento or US 6 from Chicago to California and you’ll see a couple thousand miles of corn, soybeans, and terminally ill towns. It looks like a scene from The Walking Dead. If there’s such a thing as the American Heartland, it has a stake through it.

And the City, in its own way, gets down for you, cooperates, smoothing its sidewalks, correcting its curbstones, offering you melons and green apples on the corner. Racks of yellow head scarves; strings of Egyptian beads. Kansas fried chicken and something with raisins call attention to an open window where the aroma seems to lurk. And if that's not enough, doors to speakeasies stand ajar and in that cool dark place a clarinet coughs and clears its throat waiting for the woman to decide on the key. She makes up her mind and as you pass by informs your back that she is daddy's little angel child. The City is smart at this: smelling and good and looking raunchy; sending secret messages disguised as public signs: this way, open here, danger to let colored only single men on sale woman wanted private room stop dog on premises absolutely no money down fresh chicken free delivery fast. And good at opening locks, dimming stairways. Covering your moans with its own.

This town was caught in a perpetual state of stagnation. The same three thousand or so people were still living the same small-town life. They thought they ruled the universe from the confines of this one-mile square, yet their world ended at the city limits.

There were canvases in our backseat. We had tried to flog them at Max's Kansas City the night before, but we had failed. Paintings that nobody wanted. Still, we had carefully arranged them so they wouldn't get scratched. We had even placed bits of styrofoam between them to keep them from rubbing one another. if only we had been so careful with ourselves.

My parents come from old money in Kansas City. They

Kansas City, Missouri, not Kansas City, Kansas. There’s a difference.

Years as a detective on the Kansas City police

Sigsby One. Kansas City Chiefs.

I’d heard people order coffee drinks whose names went on for half an hour . . . A double mocha joka jerky over ice with a peppermint twist and a Kansas City pickle on the side.

Huddled in her mink in the Kansas City airport, she had a vision of women writing about sex as openly as male writers, but quite, quite differently. Some women would treat sex much as men did,as conquest, as adventure--in a way as McCarthy had. Other women would treat female sexuality far less romantically then men who did not consider themselves romantics, like Hemingway, were wont to. The earth would not move, no, there would be more biology and less theatrics. Women had less ego involvement in sex than men did, but far more at stake economically.

-Prayer In My Life- Every person has his own ideas of the act of praying for God's guidance, tolerance and mercy to fulfill his duties and responsibilities. My own concept of prayer is not a plea for special favors, nor as a quick palliation for wrongs knowingly committed. A prayer, it seems to me, implies a promise as well as a request; at the highest level, prayer not only is supplication for strength and guidance, but also becomes an affirmation of life and thus a reverent praise of God. Deeds rather than words express my concept of the part religion should play in everyday life. I have watched constantly that in our movie work the highest moral and spiritual standards are upheld, whether it deals with fable or with stories of living action. This religious concern for the form and content of our films goes back 40 years to the rugged financial period in Kansas City when I was struggling to establish a film company and produce animated fairy tales. Thus, whatever success I have had in bringing clean, informative entertainment to people of all ages, I attribute in great part to my Congregational upbringing and lifelong habit of prayer. To me, today at age 61, all prayer by the humble or highly placed has one thing in common: supplication for strength and inspiration to carry on the best impulses which should bind us together for a better world. Without such inspiration we would rapidly deteriorate and finally perish. But in our troubled times, the right of men to think and worship as their conscience dictates is being sorely pressed. We can retain these privileges only by being constantly on guard in fighting off any encroachment on these precepts. To retreat from any of the principles handed down by our forefathers, who shed their blood for the ideals we all embrace, would be a complete victory for those who would destroy liberty and justice for the individual.

In river rescues, members of the Kansas City Fire Department rescue squad yell profanity-laced threats at victims before they get to them. If they don't, the victim will grab on to them and push them under the water in a mad scramble to stay afloat. "We try to get their attention. And we don't always use the prettiest language," says Larry Young, a captain in the rescue division. "I hope I don't offend you by saying this. But if I approach Mrs. Suburban Housewife and say, 'When I get to you, do not fucking touch me! I will leave you if you touch me!' she tends to listen.

Cowgirl Interlude (Bonanza Jellybean) She is lying on the family sofa in flannel pajamas. There is Kansas City mud on the tips and heels of her boots, boots that have yet to savor real manure. Fourteen, she knows she ought to remove her boots, yet she refuses. A Maverick rerun is on TV; she is eating beef jerky, occasionally slurping. On her upper stomach, where her pajama top has ridden up, is a small deep scar. She tells everyone, including her school nurse, that it was made by a silver bullet. Whatever the origin of the extra hole in her belly, there are unmistakable signs of gunfire int he woodwork by the closet door. It was there that she once shot up one half of an old pair of sneakers. "Self-defense," she pleaded, when her parents complained. "It was a [sic] out-law tennis shoe. Billy the Ked.

Gone to Kansas City, Nick thought. For all I know, that could be it, too. Everybody left on the poor sad planet picked up by the Hand of God and either rocked in the everlasting harms of Same or set down again in Kansas City.

I rent a small brick bungalow within a loop of other small brick bungalows, all of which squat on a massive bluff overlooking the former stockyards of Kansas City. Kansas City, Missouri, not Kansas City, Kansas. There’s a difference.

We got off the bus at Main Street, which was no different from where you get off a bus in Kansas City or Chicago or Boston—red brick, dirty, characters drifting by, trolleys grating in the hopeless dawn, the whorey smell of a big city.

An asteroid or comet traveling at cosmic velocities would enter the Earth’s atmosphere at such a speed that the air beneath it couldn’t get out of the way and would be compressed, as in a bicycle pump. As anyone who has used such a pump knows, compressed air grows swiftly hot, and the temperature below it would rise to some 60,000 Kelvin, or ten times the surface temperature of the Sun. In this instant of its arrival in our atmosphere, everything in the meteor’s path—people, houses, factories, cars—would crinkle and vanish like cellophane in a flame. One second after entering the atmosphere, the meteorite would slam into the Earth’s surface, where the people of Manson had a moment before been going about their business. The meteorite itself would vaporize instantly, but the blast would blow out a thousand cubic kilometers of rock, earth, and superheated gases. Every living thing within 150 miles that hadn’t been killed by the heat of entry would now be killed by the blast. Radiating outward at almost the speed of light would be the initial shock wave, sweeping everything before it. For those outside the zone of immediate devastation, the first inkling of catastrophe would be a flash of blinding light—the brightest ever seen by human eyes—followed an instant to a minute or two later by an apocalyptic sight of unimaginable grandeur: a roiling wall of darkness reaching high into the heavens, filling an entire field of view and traveling at thousands of miles an hour. Its approach would be eerily silent since it would be moving far beyond the speed of sound. Anyone in a tall building in Omaha or Des Moines, say, who chanced to look in the right direction would see a bewildering veil of turmoil followed by instantaneous oblivion. Within minutes, over an area stretching from Denver to Detroit and encompassing what had once been Chicago, St. Louis, Kansas City, the Twin Cities—the whole of the Midwest, in short—nearly every standing thing would be flattened or on fire, and nearly every living thing would be dead. People up to a thousand miles away would be knocked off their feet and sliced or clobbered by a blizzard of flying projectiles. Beyond a thousand miles the devastation from the blast would gradually diminish. But that’s just the initial shockwave. No one can do more than guess what the associated damage would be, other than that it would be brisk and global. The impact would almost certainly set off a chain of devastating earthquakes. Volcanoes across the globe would begin to rumble and spew. Tsunamis would rise up and head devastatingly for distant shores. Within an hour, a cloud of blackness would cover the planet, and burning rock and other debris would be pelting down everywhere, setting much of the planet ablaze. It has been estimated that at least a billion and a half people would be dead by the end of the first day. The massive disturbances to the ionosphere would knock out communications systems everywhere, so survivors would have no idea what was happening elsewhere or where to turn. It would hardly matter. As one commentator has put it, fleeing would mean “selecting a slow death over a quick one. The death toll would be very little affected by any plausible relocation effort, since Earth’s ability to support life would be universally diminished.

Now then, Mr. Crab," said the zebra, "here are the people I told you about; and they know more than you do, who live in a pool, and more than I do, who live in a forest. For they have been travelers all over the world, and know every part of it." "There's more of the world than Oz," declared the crab, in a stubborn voice. "That is true," said Dorothy; "but I used to live in Kansas, in the United States, and I've been to California and to Australia--and so has Uncle Henry." "For my part," added the Shaggy Man, "I've been to Mexico and Boston and many other foreign countries." "And I," said the Wizard, "have been to Europe and Ireland." "So you see," continued the zebra, addressing the crab, "here are people of real consequence, who know what they are talking about.

JENNIFER ENGSTROM (the Angel at Kansas City Repertory Theatre, 2015): I feel like we are in a bizarro Part 3 of Angels in America, and the ghost of Roy Cohn is sweetly caressing the nuts of an American president who rides naked on horseback with Vladimir Putin.

I’m not one to insist that a man can’t possibly make it without a lot of formal education, since my own formal education pretty much stopped when I graduated from Independence High School in 1901. And then there was a twenty-two-year gap, while I worked on a farm and as a railroad timekeeper and served in the Army and did a lot of other things, before I started to attend night classes at Kansas City Law School - and I left there in 1925 and never got a degree. But I’ve tried to increase my knowledge all my life by reading and reading and reading,

Many of us can't go home again, whether home is Seville, Cabo Sur, Nastas, Havana, or Kansas City. Thus, we must recognize that home really lies in the eternal peace, dormant or conscious, that dwells in each human heart... Quote from "Ms. Quixote Goes Country", a truthful novel.

You know better than anyone that nothing lasts. Nothing good. Nothing bad. Everything lives. Everything dies. Sometimes cities just fall into the sea. It's not a tragedy, that's just the way it is. People look around them and see the world and say this is how the world is supposed to be. Then they fight to keep it that way. They believe that this is what was intended - whether by design or cosmic accident - and that everything exists in a tenuous balance that must be preserved. But the balance is bullshit. The only thing constant in this world is the speed at which things change. Rain falls, waters rise, shorelines erode. What is one day magnificent seaside property in ancient Greece is the next resting thirty feet below the surface. Islands rise from the sea and continents crack and part ways forever. What was once a verdant forest teeming with life is now resting one thousand feet beneath a sheet of ice in Antarctica; what was once a glorious church now rests at the bottom of a dammed-up lake in Kansas. The job of nature is to march on and keep things going; ours is to look around, appreciate it, and wonder what's next?

When Larry Sherman designed the Kansas City gun experiment, he was well aware of this problem. “You wouldn’t tell doctors to go out and start cutting people up to see if they’ve got bad gallbladders,” Sherman says. “You need to do lots of diagnosis first before you do any kind of dangerous procedure. And stop-and-search is a dangerous procedure. It can generate hostility to the police.” To Sherman, medicine’s Hippocratic oath—“First, do no harm”—applies equally to law enforcement. “I’ve just bought myself a marble bust of Hippocrates to try to emphasize every day when I look at it that we’ve got to minimize the harm of policing,” he went on. “We have to appreciate that everything police do, in some ways, intrudes on somebody’s liberty. And so it’s not just about putting the police in the hot spots. It’s also about having a sweet spot of just enough intrusion on liberty and not an inch—not an iota—more.

What did the ’70s feel like? As recalled by Bebe Buell, a singer and onetime habitué of that fabled hipster magnet Max’s Kansas City: “Everybody’s eyelids were very heavy. I used to chuckle to myself, thinking, ‘That’s the cannabis eye, the quaalude eye’ — the look people get when they’re feeling no pain.

Compared with Iowa, Kansas City was a strange world. The Halls where she worked was in the most elegant place she’d ever been at that point, a made-up town for shopping, a Fifth Avenue on the prairie (when she got to the real Fifth Avenue, she wasn’t very impressed, because the Country Club Plaza had spoiled her).

In Boston right around the same time, another criminologist did a similar study: Half the crime in the city came from 3.6 percent of the city’s blocks. That made two examples. Weisburd decided to look wherever he could: New York. Seattle. Cincinnati. Sherman looked in Kansas City, Dallas. Anytime someone asked, the two of them would run the numbers. And every place they looked, they saw the same thing: Crime in every city was concentrated in a tiny number of street segments. Weisburd decided to try a foreign city, somewhere entirely different—culturally, geographically, economically. His family was Israeli, so he thought Tel Aviv. Same thing. “I said, ‘Oh my God. Look at that! Why should it be that five percent of the streets in Tel Aviv produce fifty percent of the crime? There’s this thing going on, in places that are so different.’” Weisburd refers to this as the Law of Crime Concentration.6 Like suicide, crime is tied to very specific places and contexts. Weisburd’s experiences in the 72nd Precinct and in Minneapolis are not idiosyncratic. They capture something close to a fundamental truth about human behavior. And that means that when you confront the stranger, you have to ask yourself where and when you’re confronting the stranger—because those two things powerfully influence your interpretation of who the stranger is.

It's hard for people now to remember just how enormous the world was back then for everybody, and how far away even fairly nearby places were. When we called my grandparents long distance on the telephone in Winfield, something we hardly ever did, it sounded as if they were speaking to us from a distant star. We had to shout to be heard and plug a finger in an ear to catch their faint, tinny voices in return. They were only about a hundred miles away, but that was a pretty considerable distance even well into the 1950s. Anything farther - beyond Chicago or Kansas City, say - quickly became almost foreign. It wasn't just that Iowa was far from everywhere. Everywhere was far from everywhere.

But Hemingway had had the advantage of an excellent training on the Kansas City Star. Its successive editors had compiled a house-style book of 110 rules designed to force reporters to use plain, simple, direct and cliché-free English, and these rules were strictly enforced. Hemingway later called them ‘the best rules I ever learned for the business of writing’.

We knew that proactive policing was a legitimacy risk for the police, and I stressed that repeatedly,” Sherman said.3 Even more crucially, this is why the Kansas City gun experiment was confined to District 144. That’s where the crime was. “We went through the effort of trying to reconstruct where the hot spots were,” Sherman said. In the city’s worst neighborhood, he then drilled down one step further, applying the same fine-grained analysis that he and Weisburd had used in Minneapolis to locate the specific street segments where crime was most concentrated. Patrol officers were then told to focus their energies on those places. Sherman would never have aggressively looked for guns in a neighborhood that wasn’t a war zone.

When shall we start?” asked the Scarecrow. “Are you going?” they asked, in surprise. “Certainly. If it wasn’t for Dorothy I should never have had brains. She lifted me from the pole in the cornfield and brought me to the Emerald City. So my good luck is all due to her, and I shall never leave her until she starts back to Kansas for good and all.” “Thank you,” said Dorothy,

Far from being a national crisis of affordable housing, outrageous rents and astronomical home prices are largely confined to a relatively few places along the east and west coasts. Rent per square foot of apartment space in San Francisco is more than double what it is in Denver, Dallas, or Kansas City, and nearly three times as high as in Memphis. Home prices show even greater disparities.

In the empty Houston streets of four o’clock in the morning a motorcycle kid suddenly roared through, all bespangled and bedecked with glittering buttons, visor, slick black jacket, a Texas poet of the night, girl gripped on his back like a papoose, hair flying, onward-going, singing, “Houston, Austin, Fort Worth, Dallas—and sometimes Kansas City—and sometimes old Antone, ah-haaaaa!” They pinpointed out of sight.

And outside Watts, a dozen more shootings produce a dozen more weeping families that have to struggle stoically through their black grief or that can stand behind microphones and declare their black anger, and the bodies pile higher and higher and higher, and so does the frustration with the impunity 'because,' says the district attorney in St. Louis in Kansas City in Staten Island in Dayton in Gary in Albuquerque in Oakland, 'you can’t indict an algorithm.

I could move away. Yes, I could go far away and never step foot in New York City again. Where would I go? Kansas. Yes, Kansas. No one ever says, “Hey, let’s leave New York to go to Kansas.” That means no one I know will move there.

Most confidence games depend on the mark not knowing they’re being conned. The Kansas City Shuffle depends on the mark knowing it. Not only do they have to see you coming, they have to figure out your entire plan before it happens.” “Problem being,” Corman said, “they’re working to stop the wrong con. You get ’em looking left, while you rob ’em blind on the right.” “We can’t take the coin out of the building,” I said, “but Royce can. So let’s give him a reason to do it.

The Hobo One day while strolling through the great park in Kansas City, he and his mother saw a young woman get her foot caught in the tracks at a railroad crossing. The woman’s husband was desperately trying to free her because a train was bearing down on them. The train was travelling far too quickly to stop before the crossing. As Heinlein and his mother watched the terrifying situation unfold, a hobo suddenly appeared and immediately joined the husband’s futile effort to pull the woman free. But tug and twist as they might, they could not get her foot unstuck. The train killed all three of them. In his description of the vagabond’s effort Heinlein observed that the hobo did not so much as look up to consider his own escape. Clearly, it was his intention either to save the woman or to die trying. Heinlein concluded his account of the nameless hero’s action with this comment: “This is the way a man dies,” but he then added, “And this is the way a man lives.

Here are some of the towns I played last year: Carmel, Indiana; Hutchinson, Kansas; and Huntsville, Alabama. I even played Peoria. So why not limit my dates to easy-to-reach cities like Toronto, Chicago, and Reno? Easier still, why not just retire?

We don’t even know what kansas is anymore.” Mayland said that in the histories some held it to be a real place, some a mythical city, and others still an enlightened state of being. Evar leaned towards agreeing with those who thought it was a state.

In many of these subsidy programs, no jobs are created. Instead the state income taxes are given to companies that agree to move jobs from one state across the border to another, as AMC Theatres agreed to do in moving its headquarters from Kansas City, Missouri, to Leawood, Kansas, just ten miles away. AMC will get to pocket $47 million withheld from its workers, a boon to its major owners: J. P. Morgan, Apollo Management, the Carlyle Group and the firm Mitt Romney cofounded in 1984, Bain Capital Management.

A woman living in a Kansas City suburb may think Tunisia is another planet, and her life has no connection to it, but if she were married to an air force navigator who flies out of the nearby Whiteman Air Force Base, she might be surprised to learn that one obscure Tunisian’s actions led to protests, that led to riots, that led to the toppling of a dictator, that led to protests in Libya, that led to a civil war, that led to the 2012 NATO intervention, that led to her husband dodging antiaircraft fire over Tripoli.

After you flew across the country we got in bed, laid our bodies delicately together, like maps laid face to face, East to West, my San Francisco against your New York, your Fire Island against my Sonoma, my New Orleans deep in your Texas, your Idaho bright on my Great Lakes, my Kansas burning against your Kansas your Kansas burning against my Kansas, your Eastern Standard Time pressing into my Pacific Time, my Mountain Time beating against your Central Time, your sun rising swiftly from the right my sun rising swiftly from the left your moon rising slowly from the left my moon rising slowly from the right until all four bodies of the sky burn above us, sealing us together, all our cities twin cities, all our states united, one nation, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.

The Lawrence Sherman who went to Kansas City is the same Larry Sherman who had worked with David Weisburd in Minneapolis a few years earlier, establishing the Law of Crime Concentration. They were friends. They taught together for a time at Rutgers, where their department chairman was none other than Ronald Clarke, who had done the pioneering work on suicide. Clarke, Weisburd, and Sherman—with their separate interests in English town gas, the crime map of Minneapolis, and guns in Kansas City—were all pursuing the same revolutionary idea of coupling.

In early August, Bill Virdon was fired and replaced by Billy Martin. Virdon’s dismissal left Elston with mixed feelings: He was glad to be reunited with Billy, his old friend and teammate, but once again he was hurt because he had been snubbed for the job he so badly wanted. We loved Billy. At heart, he was a nice person, very generous. Billy’s problem was that he was an alcoholic. One time we were in Kansas City for the playoffs; he joined us for breakfast and ordered eggs and scotch. When Billy was drunk he could be a pretty rotten person; he got into fights. But

You shouldn’t kiss me like that unless it means something to you.” Max’s lip trembled beneath her thumb. A deep groan rose from his chest. And then he was pushing to his feet, pulling her with him. His mouth covered hers, hot and wet and full of a driving need she answered kiss for kiss.

Why are you stopping people in places where there’s no crime?” Weisburd says. “That doesn’t make sense to me.” Sherman is just as horrified. “At that hour of the day in that location, stopping [Sandra Bland] for changing lanes is not justifiable,” he said. Even during the initial Kansas City gun experiment—in a neighborhood a hundred times worse than Prairie View—Sherman said that the special police officers made their stops solely at night. That’s the only time of day when the crime rate was high enough to justify aggressive policing. Sandra Bland was pulled over in the middle of the afternoon.

Consider this oddly neglected fact: the West was acquired, conquested, and largely consolidated into the nation coincident with the greatest breakthrough in the history of human communication. The breakthrough was the telegraph. The great advances that followed it, the telephone, radio, television, and the Internet, were all elaborations on its essential contribution. The telegraph separated the person from the message. Before it, with a few exceptions such as a sephamore and carrier pigeons, information moved only as fast as people did. By the nineteenth century, people were certainly moving a lot faster, and indeed a second revolution, that of transportation, was equally critical in creating the West, but before the telegraph a message still had to move with a person, either as a document or in somebody’s head. The telegraph liberated information. Now it could travel virtually at the speed of light. The railroad carried people and things, including letters, ten to fifteen times faster than the next most rapid form of movement. The telegraph accelerated communication more than forty million times. A single dot of Morse code traveled from Kansas City to Denver faster than the click it produced moved from the receiver to the telegrapher’s eardrum.

But think back to those statistics from North Carolina. If you go from 400,000 traffic stops in one year to 800,000 seven years later, does that sound like focused and concentrated policing? Or does that sound like the North Carolina State Highway Patrol hired a lot more police officers and told everyone, everywhere, to pull over a lot more motorists? The lesson the law-enforcement community took from Kansas City was that preventive patrol worked if it was more aggressive. But the part they missed was that aggressive patrol was supposed to be confined to places where crime was concentrated. Kansas City had been a coupling experiment.

KANSAS CITY JAZZ: RECOMMENDED LISTENING Count Basie, “Jumpin’ at the Woodside,” August 22, 1938 Count Basie and Lester Young, “Oh, Lady Be Good,” October 9, 1936 Count Basie, “One O’Clock Jump,” July 7, 1937 Billie Holiday (with Lester Young), “I Can’t Get Started,” September 15, 1938 Kansas City Seven (with Lester Young), “Lester Leaps In,” September 5, 1939 Kansas City Six (with Lester Young), “I Want a Little Girl,” September 27, 1938 Andy Kirk (with Mary Lou Williams), “Walkin’ and Swingin’,” March 2, 1936 Jay McShann, “Confessin’ the Blues,” April 30, 1941 Bennie Moten, “Moten Swing,” December 13, 1932 Mary Lou Williams, “Clean Pickin’,

Did you know that Walt Disney was fired from the Kansas City Star because his editor felt he “lacked imagination and had no good ideas”? How about the fact that when Marilyn Monroe was trying to start her career, modeling agencies told her she should consider becoming a secretary? Steve Jobs was pushed out of the company he had co-founded because the board felt he was wasting the company’s resources working on expensive projects that did not have enough potential. In other words, not everyone will understand your value or see your greatness. But here’s the good news: It doesn’t matter. You don’t need everyone to pay attention and you certainly don’t need everyone to like you.

It’s too late now. The game’s been won by companies who don’t give two shits about community character or decent jobs. Congratufuckinglations, America! We did the deal. Now we’ve got an unlimited supply of cheap commodities and unhealthy food and crumbling downtowns, no sense of place, and a permanent under class. Yay. The underclass isn’t relegated to urban ghettos either. It’s coast to coast and especially in between. Take US 50 west from Kansas City to Sacramento or US 6 from Chicago to California and you’ll see a couple thousand miles of corn, soybeans, and terminally ill towns. It looks like a scene from The Walking Dead. If there’s such a thing as the American Heartland, it has a stake through it.

Yet if the gross national product measures all of this, there is much that it does not include. It measures neither the health of our children, the quality of their education, nor the joy of their play. It measures neither the beauty of our poetry, nor the strength of our marriages. It pays no heed to the intelligence of our public debate, nor the integrity of our public officials. It measures neither our wisdom nor our learning, neither our wit nor our courage, neither our compassion nor our devotion to our country. It measures everything, in short, except that which makes life worth living, and it can tell us everything about our country except those things that make us proud to be a part of it. ROBERT F. KENNEDY, KANSAS CITY, 1968

I think I’d felt that as long as I avoided looking for the tickets, they would be there; it was only if I searched the archive that they’d disappear, as if the past were up until that point indeterminate, that I might outrun it. Do you know what I mean? We had to pay a lot of money to get the tickets for the next day; luckily they still had seats, although I suppose there are usually seats to and from Kansas City. It was kind of like that, recovering the memory of what my father had done. The knowledge was always there, I carried it in my body, but I didn’t know what I knew, although I knew I knew something and that I dreaded knowing it fully, dreaded it as if only coming into the knowledge, into the memory, would make the event that I was repressing real.

Eager to reestablish their brand as the “King of Beers,” the company’s board of directors had authorized August Jr., the superintendent of the brewery, to buy several teams of Clydesdale draft horses “for advertising purposes.” Gussie, as he was called, purchased sixteen of the massive 2,000-pound animals for $21,000 at the Kansas City stockyards. He also found two wooden wagons from back in the days when the company employed eight hundred teams of horses to deliver its beer, and set about having them restored to the exacting standards of his late grandfather, brewery founder Adolphus Busch, who liked to conduct weekly inspections from a viewing stand, with his son August at his side as all the drivers passed in parade, hoping to win the $25 prize for the best-kept team and wagon.

Oh fool, oh desolation!" said the Prince of Kansas. "Ill give you ten women to accompany you to the Place of the Lie, with lutes and flutes and tambourines and contraceptive pills. I'll give you five good friends armed with firecrackers. I'll give you a dog—in truth I will, a living extinct dog, to be your true companion. Do you know why dogs died out? Because they were loyal, because they were trusting. Go alone, man!

We were working on the idea about dogs’ Internet searches, and first we debated whether the sketch should feature real dogs or Henrietta and Viv in dog costumes (because cast members were always, unfailingly, trying to get more air time, we quickly went with the latter). Then we discussed where it should take place (the computer cluster in a public library, but, even though all this mattered for was the establishing shot, we got stalled on whether that library should be New York’s famous Main Branch building on Fifth Avenue, with the lion statues in front, a generic suburban library in Kansas City, or a generic suburban library in Jacksonville, Florida, which was where Viv was from). Then we really got stalled on the breeds of dogs. Out of loyalty to my stepfather and Sugar, I wanted at least one to be a beagle. Viv said that it would work best if one was really big and one was really little, and Henrietta said she was fine with any big dog except a German Shepherd because she’d been bitten by her neighbor’s German Shepherd in third grade. After forty minutes we’d decided on a St. Bernard and a Chihuahua—I eventually conceded that Chihuahuas were funnier than beagles. We decided to go with the Florida location for the establishing shot because the lions in front of the New York Main Branch could preempt or diminish the appearance of the St. Bernard. Then we’d arrived at the fun part, which was the search terms. With her mouth full of beef kebab, Viv said, “Am I adopted?” With my mouth full of spanakopita, I said, “Am I a good girl?” With her mouth full of falafel, Henrietta said, “Am I five or thirty-five?” “Why is thunder scary?” I said. “Discreet crotch-sniffing techniques,” Henrietta said. “Cheap mani-pedis in my area,” Viv said. “Oh, and cheapest self-driving car.” “Best hamburgers near me,” I said. “What is halitosis,” Henrietta said. “Halitosis what to do,” I said. “Where do humans pee,” Viv said. “Taco Bell Chihuahua male or female,” I said. “Target bull terrier married,” Viv said. “Lassie plastic surgery,” Henrietta said. “Funny cat videos,” I said. “Corgis embarrassing themselves YouTube,” Viv said. “YouTube little dog scares away big dog,” I said. “Doghub two poodles and one corgi,” Henrietta said. “Waxing my tail,” I said. “Is my tail a normal size,” Viv said.

On April 30, 1921, President Warren G. Harding appointed Reily, a former assistant postmaster in Kansas City, governor of Puerto Rico as a political payoff. Reily took his oath of office in Kansas City, then attended to “personal business” for another two and a half months before finally showing up for work on July 30.24 By that time, he had already announced to the island press that (1) he was “the boss now,” (2) the island must become a US state, (3) any Puerto Rican who opposed statehood was a professional agitator, (4) there were thousands of abandoned children in Puerto Rico, and (5) the governorship of Puerto Rico was “the best appointment that President Harding could award” because its salary and “perquisites” would total $54,000 a year.25 Just a few hours after disembarking, the assistant postmaster marched into San Juan’s Municipal Theater and uncorked one of the most reviled inaugural speeches in Puerto Rican history. He announced that there was “no room on this island for any flag other than the Stars and Stripes. So long as Old Glory waves over the United States, it will continue to wave over Puerto Rico.” He then pledged to fire anyone who lacked “Americanism.” He promised to make “English, the language of Washington, Lincoln and Harding, the primary one in Puerto Rican schools

A fost odată Louis Armstrong, cântând la frumoasa lui trompetă în noroaiele din New Orleans. Înaintea lui fuseseră muzicienii trăsniţi care mărşăluiau la paradele oficiale şi transformau marşurile în ragtime. Pe urmă a apărut swingul şi Roy Elridge, viguros, viril, scoţând din trompetă valuri de forţă şi logică şi subtilitate - se apleca asupra ei cu ochi sclipitori şi cu un zâmbet minunat şi trimitea sunetele prin radio să legene lumea jazzului. Sosise apoi Charlie Parker, care copilărise doar cu maică-sa într-o căsuţă de lemn din Kansas City, unde cântase la saxofon alto printre buşteni, repetând în zile ploioase, mergând în oraş să-i vadă pe bătrânii interpreţi de swing Basie şi Benny Moten cu a lor Hot Lips Page şi celelalte, Charlie Parker plecând de acasă şi sosind în Harlem, întâlnindu-se cu nebunul de Thelonius Monk şi cu celălalt smintit, Gillespie, Charlie Parker la începuturile carierei sale, când cânta învârtindu-se în cerc. Puţin mai tânăr decât Lester Young, tot din K. C., un scrântit de geniu, sumbru, a cărui muzică acoperea toată istoria jazzului. Când îşi ţinea saxofonul în sus, în poziţie orizontală, scotea cel mai formidabil sunet. Pe urmă părul îi crescu şi deveni mai leneş şi saxul îi coborî mai jos, ajunse în sfârşit să-l ţină vertical, şi acum, când purta pantofi cu talpa groasă ca să nu mai simtă cărările tari ale vieţii, instrumentul îi zăcea rezemat de piept, iar el sufla lejer şi scotea fraze tot mai simple. Aceştia erau copiii bopului din noaptea americană.

Then came the so-called flash crash. At 2:45 on May 6, 2010, for no obvious reason, the market fell six hundred points in a few minutes. A few minutes later, like a drunk trying to pretend he hadn’t just knocked over the fishbowl and killed the pet goldfish, it bounced right back up to where it was before. If you weren’t watching closely you could have missed the entire event—unless, of course, you had placed orders in the market to buy or sell certain stocks. Shares of Procter & Gamble, for instance, traded as low as a penny and as high as $100,000. Twenty thousand different trades happened at stock prices more than 60 percent removed from the prices of those stocks just moments before. Five months later, the SEC published a report blaming the entire fiasco on a single large sell order, of stock market futures contracts, mistakenly placed on an exchange in Chicago by an obscure Kansas City mutual fund. That explanation could only be true by accident, because the stock market regulators did not possess the information they needed to understand the stock markets. The unit of trading was now the microsecond, but the records kept by the exchanges were by the second. There were one million microseconds in a second. It was as if, back in the 1920s, the only stock market data available was a crude aggregation of all trades made during the decade. You could see that at some point in that era there had been a stock market crash. You could see nothing about the events on and around October 29, 1929.

For a hitter, there’s no thrill quite like a late inning, game-changing home run. Unless, that is, the shot is called back. On July 24, 1983, Kansas City superstar George Brett was riding high after hitting a two-out, two-run homer in Yankee Stadium. The future Hall of Famer’s blast changed a 4–3 ninth inning deficit into a 5–4 Royals lead. The joy soon faded, though, when New York manager Billy Martin asked home plate umpire Tim McClelland to inspect Brett’s bat. Earlier in the season, Yankee third baseman Graig Nettles had noticed that Brett seemed to use more pine tar than the rules allowed—and Martin had saved that choice information for just such a moment as this. McClelland measured the goo on Brett’s bat, finding it exceeded the eighteen inches allowed. Brett was called out, erasing the home run and giving the Yankees a 4–3 victory. The Royals were incensed by the ruling, which was later overturned by American League president Lee McPhail, who said “games should be won and lost on the playing field—not through technicalities of the rules.” Baseball’s official acknowledgment of the “bigger picture” is reminiscent of Jesus’ approach to God’s laws. Arguing with hypocritical Pharisees, Jesus once said, “You give a tenth of your spices—mint, dill and cumin. But you have neglected the more important matters of the law—justice, mercy and faithfulness. You should have practiced the latter, without neglecting the former” (Matthew 23:23). Our concern for the letter of the law should be balanced by an equal concern for the spirit of the law. If you’re inclined to spiritual pickiness, don’t forget the “more important matters.

Mr. Clutter enjoyed the chore, and was excellent at it—no woman in Kansas baked a better loaf of salt-rising bread, and his celebrated coconut cookies were the first item to go at charity cake sales—but he was not a hearty eater; unlike his fellow-ranchers, he even preferred Spartan breakfasts. That morning an apple and a glass of milk were enough for him; because he touched neither coffee or tea, he was accustomed to begin the day on a cold stomach. The truth was he opposed all stimulants, however gentle. He did not smoke, and of course he did not drink; indeed, he had never tasted spirits, and was inclined to avoid people who had—a circumstance that did not shrink his social circle as much as might be supposed, for the center of that circle was supplied by the members of Garden City’s First Methodist Church, a congregation totaling seventeen hundred, most of whom were as abstemious as Mr. Clutter could desire.

Greetings and welcome to The Keltic Woodshop. Established since November of 2003 in Kansas City, Missouri, The Keltic Woodshop specializes in custom cabinetry, furniture, and unique fine wood products in a personalized old fashioned handcrafted way. We are a small shop that strives towards individual attention and detail in every item produced. The Keltic Woodshop of Kansas City specializes in the following products: Custom Cabinets and Furniture: We use worldwide exotic woods. Our custom cabinets and furniture contains Russian Birch, Brazilian Cherry, African Mahogany, Asian Teak, Knotty Pine, Walnut, Red Oak, White Oak, and Bolivian Rosewood just to name a few. Custom orders are available. Handmade Walking Sticks: Our walking sticks include handcrafted, lightweight, strong, durable, handpainted, handcarved, Handapplied finishes and stains, Alaskan Diamond Willow, Hedgeapple, Red Oak, Memosa, Spalted Birch, and Spalted Ash. Custom Made Exotic Wood Display Cases: These are handmade from hardwoods of Knotty Pine, Asian Teak, African Mahogany, Sycamore, Aniegre, African Mahogany, and Black Cherry. We will do custom orders too. Pagan and Specialty Items: We have Red Oak and White Oak Ritual Wands with gems, Washington Driftwood Healing Wands with amethyst, crystaline, and citrine points, handpainted Red Oak and Hedgeapple Viking Runes for devination. We can make custom wood boxes for your tarot cards. Customer satisfaction is our highest priority. If you are looking for unusual or exotic lumbers, then we are the shop you've been searching for. The Keltic Woodshop stands behind and gurantees each item with an owner lifetime warranty on craftsmanship of the product with a replacement, repair, or moneyback in full, no questions asked, policy. We want you happy and completely satisfied with any product you may purchase. We are not a production shop so you will find joinery of woods containing handcut dovetails, as well as mortise and tenon construction. Finishes and stains are never sprayed on, but are applied personally by hand for that quality individual touch. the-tedswoodworking.com

a 1960 self-published broadside, A Business Man Looks at Communism, Koch claimed that “the Communists have infiltrated both the Democrat [sic] and Republican Parties.” Protestant churches, public schools, universities, labor unions, the armed services, the State Department, the World Bank, the United Nations, and modern art, in his view, were all Communist tools. He wrote admiringly of Benito Mussolini’s suppression of Communists in Italy and disparagingly of the American civil rights movement. The Birchers agitated to impeach Chief Justice Earl Warren after the Supreme Court voted to desegregate the public schools in the case Brown v. Board of Education, which had originated in Topeka, in the Kochs’ home state of Kansas. “The colored man looms large in the Communist plan to take over America,” Fred Koch claimed in his pamphlet. Welfare in his view was a secret plot to attract rural blacks to cities, where he predicted that they would foment “a vicious race war.” In a 1963 speech, Koch claimed that Communists would “infiltrate the highest offices of government in the U.S. until the President is a Communist, unknown to the rest of us.

In any discussion of serial killers, a few notorious names—those of the most prolific killers—always get mentioned. Ted Bundy admitted to killing thirty women, but it could well have been more. Gary Ridgeway, also known as the Green River Killer, was convicted of murdering forty-eight, but later confessed to others. John Wayne Gacy was convicted of killing thirty-three people. Jeffrey Dahmer was convicted of murdering and partially ingesting fifteen people. David Berkowitz, New York City’s “Son of Sam,” shot and killed six people. Less well known but significant are Dennis Rader, who killed ten people in Wichita, Kansas, and Aileen Wuornos, portrayed by Charlize Theron in the film Monster, who killed six men. Wayne Williams was convicted of killing only two men, but he is believed to have killed anywhere from twenty-three to twenty-nine children in Atlanta. Robert Hansen confessed to four murders but is suspected of more than seventeen. Juan Corona was convicted of murdering twenty-five people. Their crimes are all horrific, and the number of victims is heartbreaking. But all these most notorious serial killers stand in the shadow of Dr. Kermit Gosnell. Strangely, Gosnell appears in no list we have found of known U.S. serial killers, though he is the biggest of them all. In reality, Kermit Gosnell deserves the top spot on any list of serial murderers. He’s earned it.

Come here.” Without regard for modesty, she pulled off her T-shirt and wadded it up to stanch his wounds. He splayed his fingers on her bare stomach and grinned. “Honey, I’m afraid I can’t help you with that right now. Maybe later?” How could he joke and flirt when she was so afraid? “Max. You’re bleeding. Maybe dying. I don’t want to lose you.” “Come. Here.” He grabbed her and pulled her down into the grass beside him. He pressed a kiss to her temple and rubbed his grizzled cheek against hers. The sirens were getting closer. “Are you okay? Are you hurt?” “I’m fine. You’re the one who got shot. Twice.” “I’m gonna live through both. I’m a tough guy, remember?” “Damn it, Max—” “Rosemary March. Did you just swear? You know I don’t like hearing that from you,” he teased. He pulled her in for a kiss that lasted until a groan of pain forced him to come up for air. “You get under my skin, Rosie.” “Like an itchy rash?” she teased. “Like an alarm clock finally waking me up to the life I’m supposed to have. With you.” So when did the tough guy learn to speak such beautiful things? Tears stung her eyes again as she found a spot where she could hug him without causing any pain. “I know I’m not the guy you expected to want you like this, and I know you weren’t the woman I was looking for. Hell, I wasn’t even looking.” “Neither was I.” “But we found each other.” “We’re good for each other.” “I’m not an easy man to live with. I come with a lot of emotional baggage.” “And I don’t?” “You can do better than me.” Rosie shook her head, smiling. “I can’t do better than a good man who loves me. A man who encourages me to be myself and to be strong and who makes me feel safer and more loved than I have ever felt in my life.” “I do love you, Rosie.” “I love you, Max.” “What are we going to do about these feelings?” Max asked. “What do you want to do?” " Let’s give the Dinkles something to talk about.” “You’re moving in upstairs?” “And opening all the windows.” Rosie smiled. “Oh, I hope we give them plenty to talk about.

Maybe nostalgia is itself the problem. A Democrat I met in Macon during a conversation we had about the local enthusiasm for Trump told me that “people want to go back to Mayberry”, the setting of the beloved old Andy Griffith Show. (As it happens, the actual model for Mayberry, Mount Airy, a bedraggled town in North Carolina, has gone all in on the Trump revolution, as the Washington Post recently reported.) Maybe it’s also true, as my liberal friends believe, that what people in this part of the country secretly long to go back to are the days when the Klan was riding high or when Quantrill was terrorizing the people of neighboring Kansas, or when Dred Scott was losing his famous court case. For sure, there is a streak of that ugly sentiment in the Trump phenomenon. But I want to suggest something different: that the nostalgic urge does not necessarily have to be a reactionary one. There is nothing un-progressive about wanting your town to thrive, about recognizing that it isn’t thriving today, about figuring out that the mid-century, liberal way worked better. For me, at least, that is how nostalgia unfolds. When I drive around this part of the country, I always do so with a WPA guidebook in hand, the better to help me locate the architectural achievements of the Roosevelt years. I used to patronize a list of restaurants supposedly favored by Harry Truman (they are slowly disappearing). And these days, as I pass Trump sign after Trump sign, I wonder what has made so many of Truman’s people cast their lot with this blustering would-be caudillo. Maybe what I’m pining for is a liberal Magic Kingdom, a non-racist midwest where things function again. For a countryside dotted with small towns where the business district has reasonable job-creating businesses in it, taverns too. For a state where the giant chain stores haven’t succeeded in putting everyone out of business. For an economy where workers can form unions and buy new cars every couple of years, where farmers enjoy the protection of the laws, and where corporate management has not been permitted to use every trick available to them to drive down wages and play desperate cities off one against the other. Maybe it’s just an impossible utopia, a shimmering Mayberry dream. But somehow I don’t think so.

By 1997, when Kansas City finally gave up, it had the most extravagant schools in the country, but the percentage of whites was lower than ever and blacks’ test scores had not budged.

I think the one thing that the Women’s March definitely proved was that this was not a coastal movement. There were marches that happened in the heartland. Like Oklahoma City has never seen a march that is 15,000 people strong, right? That is unheard of. Kansas saw marches of like 8,000, 9,000 people. South Carolina. Some of the biggest marches were actually not on the coast. Chicago was the third largest, with over a quarter of a million people. Saint Paul, Minnesota, was over 100,000. So we broke records in all of the different cities that we were in.

In Milwaukee, a city of fewer than 105,000 renter households, landlords evict roughly 16,000 adults and children each year. That's sixteen families evicted through the court system daily. But there are other ways, cheaper and quicker ways, for landlords to remove a family than through court order. Some landlords pay tenants a couple hundred dollars to leave by the end of the week. Some take off the front door. Nearly half of all forced moves experienced by renting families in Milwaukee are 'informal evictions' that take place in the shadow of the law. If you count all forms of involuntary displacement - formal and informal evictions, landlord foreclosures, building condemnations - you discover that between 2009 and 2011 more than 1 in 8 Milwaukee renters experienced a forced move. There is nothing special about Milwaukee when it comes to eviction. The numbers are similar in Kansas City, Cleveland, Chicago, and other cities. In 2013, 1 in 8 poor renting families nationwide were unable to pay all of their rent, and a similar number thought it was likely they would be evicted soon. This book is set in Milwaukee, but it tells an American story.

Embora criticado frequentemente por não ter estudado numa faculdade, seus sermões revelavam que ele lia muito, e sua biblioteca pessoal continha doze mil volumes, grande parte deles de obras dos reformadores e dos puritanos. Hoje essa biblioteca se encontra preservada no Seminário Teológico Batista Midwestern, em Kansas City, Missouri, nos Estados Unidos.

They would talk about the bridge game they had played the night before with two friends. The main topic of conversation had been a Kansas City murder in which a woman had killed her husband over a hand of bridge. “You be dumb,” Ace told Jane (as he reconstructed it years later for Jerome Beatty of American Magazine): “I’ll try to explain the finer points of bridge, and why murder is sometimes justified.

Happy people don't think about angels. And they certainly don't see them. As for holding extended conversations with angels, that's only for the truly, irretrievably miserable.

He pumps iron after work. While I’m fixing dinner, I hear him panting and groaning like he’s in labor.” —Myra, Kansas City, MO

In a letter, he described it as “a painfully big city wherein dwell practically no native sons of The Golden West, but a heterogeneous mob of movie actors and actresses and emigrants from Kansas, Nebraska, Iowa . . .

Kansas City Sunday, August 22, 1915 The country is flat and I can see as far as my eyes will let me.

Back in the eighties, the journalist Richard Rhodes nailed the place with just two words: Cupcake Land. To the irritation of local leaders, the nickname has stuck. Cupcake Land is a metropolis built entirely according to the developer's plan, without the interference of angry proles or ethnic pols as in nearby Kansas City. Cupcake Land encourages no culture but that which increases property values; supports no learning but that which burnishes the brand; hears no opinions but those that will further fatten the cupcake elite; tolerates no rebellion but that expressed in haircuts and piercings and alternative rock. You know what it's like even though you haven't been there. Smooth jazz. Hallmark cards. Applebees. Corporate Woods. (49)

And though there were far fewer radio opportunities for black bands than for their white counterparts, it was through remote broadcasts from the Cotton Club that the general public first heard of Duke Ellington and Cab Calloway. Earl Hines had become a radio favorite during a long stand at the Grand Terrace in Chicago in the mid-1930s. And it was on a radio broadcast from the Reno Club in Kansas City that Count (William) Basie was discovered by jazz critic John Hammond, who helped launch Basie’s career.

So he repeated the same made-up crap he had lived on then, about bubblegum machines and Cadillacs with fins, and endless sunshine, and drive-in movies and waitresses on roller skates, and cheeseburgers and cold Coca-Cola in green glass bottles, and baseball on AM radio, out of Kansas City, static and all.

Sinun pitäisi kasvattaa hoodia-kaktuksia”, minä ehdotan. ”Eikö se olisi terveellisempi tapa vähentää ruokahalua?” ”Luonnollisempi ilman muuta”, myöntää neiti Avautuja. ”Tosin en koskaan ole tajunnut tuota argumenttia. Puffadderin myrkky on luonnollista. Ientulehdukseen kuoleminen kolmekymmenvuotiaana on luonnollista. Tiedätkö, minkä takia khoi-kansa alun perin käytti hoodiaa? Teeskennelläkseen, etteivät ole kuolemassa nälkään. Aika skitsoa, eikö?

The feature of programs, that they are defined purely formally or syntactically, is fatal to the view that mental processes and program processes are identical. And the reason can be stated quite simply. There is more to having a mind then having formal or syntactical processes. Our internal mental states, by definition, have certain sorts of contents. If I am thinking about Kansas City or wishing that I had a cold beer to drink, in both cases my mental state has certain mental content in addition to whatever formal features it might have. That is, even if my thoughts occur to me in strings of symbols, there must be more to the thoughts then the abstract strings, because strings by themselves can't have any meaning. If my thoughts are to be about anything, then the strings must have a meaning which makes the thoughts about those things. In a word, the mind has more than syntax, it has semantics. The reason that no computer program can ever be a mind is simply that a computer program is simply syntactical, and minds are more than syntactical. Minds are semantical, in the sense that they have more than a formal structure, they have a content. To illustrate this point, I have designed a thought experiment. Imagine a bunch of computer programmers have written a program that will enable a computer to simulate the understanding of Chinese. So for example, if the computer is given a question in chinese, it will match the question against its memory or data base, and produce appropriate answers to the questions in chinese. Suppose for the sake of argument that the computer's answers are as good as those of a native Chinese speaker. Now then, does the computer on the basis of this literally understand Chinese, in the way that Chinese speakers understand Chinese? Imagine you are locked in a room, and this room has several baskets full of chinese symbols. imagine that you don't understand a word of chinese, but that you are given a rule book in english for manipulating these chinese symbols. The rules specify the manipulations of the symbols purely formally, in terms of syntax, not semantics. So the rule might say: take a squiggle out of basket 1 and put it next to a squoggle from basket 2. Suppose that some other chinese symbols are passed into the room, and you are given futhter rules for passing chinese symbols out the room. Suppose, unknown to you, the symbols passed into the room are called 'questions' and your responses are called answers, by people outside the room. Soon, your responses are indistinguishable from native chinese speakers. there you are locked in your room shuffling symbols and giving answers. On the basis of the situation as it parallels computers, there is no way you could learn chinese simply by manipulating these formal symbols. Now the point of the story is simply this: by virtue of implementing a formal computer from the point of view of an outside observer, you behave exactly as if you understood chinese, but you understand nothing in reality. But if going through the appropriate computer program for understanding CHinese is not enough, then it is not enough to give any other computer an understanding of chinese. Again, the reason for this can be stated simply: a computer has a syntax, but no semantics.

Even today, we tend to think of sake as a miserable hot, sour, yeasty drink we once tasted at the urging of an aunt who took us to a Japanese restaurant in Kansas City.

He’d been dreaming about Mrs. Armbruster’s class, fifth grade at Oliver North Elementary. They were about to be let out because LearningNet said there was too much Kansas City flu around to keep the kids in Virginia and Tennessee in school that week. They were all wearing these molded white paper masks the nurses had left on their seats that morning. Mrs. Armbruster had just explained the meaning of the word pandemic.

History of Kansas City, Kansas

Even though the sauce started with the basic ingredients---sugar and salt---there were endless varieties. In Kansas City, their barbecue was known for rich, robust sauce with a reduced tomato base. There was an area of the Carolinas known as the Low Country---she didn’t know why it was called Low Country---where they favored a light yellow mustard sauce. Here in Texas, folks went for heat---from jalapeños, serranos, or even fiery ghost chilies---the kind of deep, flavorful pepper that sent the waitstaff at Cubby’s scurrying for pitchers of beer and sweet tea by the gallon.

Follow-up Call (Script) Seller: “Hello Mr. Prospect, my name is Tom Freese, and I’m the regional manager for KnowledgeWare in Kansas City. I wanted to contact you about the CASE application development seminar we are hosting at IBM’s Regional Headquarters on August 26. Do you remember receiving the invitation we sent you? (Pause for a response) “Frankly, we are expecting a record turnout—over one hundred people, including development managers from Sprint, Hallmark Cards, Pepsi Co., Yellow Freight, Kansas Power & Light, the Federal Reserve Bank, Northwest Mutual Life, American Family Life, St. Luke’s Hospital, Anheuser-Busch, MasterCard, American Express, Worldspan, and United Airlines, just to name a few. “I wanted to follow up because we haven’t yet received an RSVP from your company, and I wanted to make sure you didn’t get left out.” Granted, this was a highly positioned approach, but it was also 100 percent accurate. I wanted prospects to know that IBM was endorsing this event. I also wanted to let them know that I expected “everyone else” to participate. I accomplished this by rattling off an impressive list of marquee company names that we were “expected” to attend. Most importantly, I wanted to make sure that they didn’t get left out.

It’s about enabling and empowering citizens.5 Kansas City, Missouri, eliminated fares on in-city trips in 2019, and fully embraced a new way of thinking. The Kansas City Area Transpor tation Authority’s own president and CEO, Robbie Makinen, signaled the shift: “We got to stop acting like we’re in the profit business, because we’re not. We’re in the people business. It’s our job to take care of people, and this [doing away with fares] is doing that.

I clicked the obituary, my heart pounding. " 'Alice Roussard passed away on February 8, 2008. She was 87,' " I read. Caterina tapped her fingers against the desk. "Bingo." " 'Alice is survived by her husband Benjamin and three daughters,' " I continued. " 'Lisette Greenfeld of Kansas City, KS; Vi Lipniki of Poughkeepsie, NY; and Rosaline Warner of Saint Louis, MO.' " "Ha! No wonder you were having trouble getting anywhere with Roussard. Benjamin had three daughters, all of whom changed their names." "Well, now we've got them." "Saint Louis is within driving distance, Etta. If we found a number or e-mail for Rosaline..." "It's certainly worth a try," I said, clicking to a new browser window. I typed in Rosaline Warner's name and hit Enter. "Would you look at that," Cat said when we reviewed the results. I couldn't help but chuckle as well. Link after link featured Rosaline Warner, the James Beard Award-winning pastry chef and proprietress of the Feisty Baguette. "Genetics," I said. "They'll getcha every time.

It’s Kansas City now,

There were more options in Nebraska than anywhere within an hour of Lebanon, Kansas, so we crossed the state line and went to a city called Hastings.

The eyewitness who saw the recent H-bomb test said that it was as if he were watching the end of the world. Indeed. And who in the world is empowered to initiate the events that would lead to that? Ultimately some individual man. For a current example of such a man, a Kansas City haberdasher who came to that power by way of the usually irrelevant office of vice president, brokered, in his case, by hacks in the back rooms of a Democratic convention. Or the other current example, a former Russian Orthodox seminarian who went on to the religious, racial, ethnic, and political murder of as yet uncounted millions of his own people. Moreover, one can imagine the present state of the world if the sophisticated scientists of Germany had been the first to develop an atomic bomb and thus put it into the hands of Adolf Hitler. But in all the ages to come, in all the countries that will acquire or develop these weapons, who knows what tyrants or fools or incompetents, what heartless egotists of minuscule and reckless intelligence, might come to power and gain control of these weapons?

He was a faulty judge of character, a prevaricator, a child at heart. He went everywhere unrecognized and lunched with Kansas City shopkeepers and merchants, calling himself a cattleman or commodities investor, someone rich and leisured who had the common touch.