A tip of the hat to today’s Sunday Star…
I’ve been bagging on the Sunday newspaper a lot, citing its lack of news content. Hey, if they want to keep up – in a small town way – with the Sunday New York Times, the Star needs to at least make its filler features somewhat newsy. For example, by adding investigative pieces.
As usual today, there’s no real front page news, but at least Mike Hendricks piece about a rival Negro Leagues museum in Birmingham, Alabama and (yet) another feature milking the so-called controversy over building a billion dollar airport (that won’t cost local taxpayers a dime) had news flavorings.
That said, I’m not sure what to say about today’s third front pager, a ditty about a small town Missouri store that sells Peach Nehi Floats every summer.
There is no Nehi Corporation anymore, the company changed its name in 1955 to Royal Crown after its popular Royal Crown Cola. Anyhoo, the peach floats are supposed to be kind of a big deal. That is if you don’t mind making a nearly two-hour, 105 mile drive from KC to Iconium, Missouri to get one.
Today’s huge, front page story chronicles the fact that the store sells 20,000 of these babies every summer. Seriously? A measly 20,000 Peach Nehi and vanilla ice cream floats and the Star dispatches an investigative team to “cover” the news.
The Associated Press got this same story out of its system 10 years earlier. Except back then, they were selling 25,000 of them a summer, so there’s an attrition angle to the phenomenon, in that it’s apparently on the wane.
Which naturally, the Star failed to point out.
I’ll take a look at Hendricks’ Negro Leagues yarn tomorrow, since it deserves more fleshing out.
The people at Travelocity are freaking. If another NLBM opens up in Birmingham the KC cash cow is dead.
Travelocity estimates that .36589 people travel to KC each year specifically to see the NLMB.
You’d draw more people if you’d fill it full of Glazer’s old hairpieces.
The NLBM should have been made a touring exhibit aeons ago, like the exhibits that come to Union Station. If they had business people running the place instead of greedy self serving holier than thou grifters the damn thing would be a cash cow and probably have circled the globe 5 times by now. Any idea how many more grifters that could support? Your in Jackson, Sharpton, Rangle, Clinton territory.
Stupid people do stupid things, every day and we reward them for it in KC.
We should build a Statue of Stupidity here. A pants on the ground gangbanger for the lower half. Upper half a cross between Manny and Sly with a Glock in one hand, that unloads 21 rounds every hour on the hour, and KCMOSD application in the other.
YO! You tired poor broke #sses
You homeboys yearning to be free. The wretched refuse of your destroyed communities. Send these beeyotches to me in KC or I’ll bust a cap up in yo #zz. Aight?
Pants on the ground, rugs on the wall.
All things considered, it does seem rather lame
I never really figured out why they decided to build a baseball hall of fame museum but did not include a nostalgia baseball field attached to it.
The Star did fail to say that one could buy a confederate flag at the Iconium store.
Coming up in further installments of the “Hearne Blows The Lid Off The Sunday Star” series:
1) Coupons: are they REALLY worth clipping?
2) The decline of Parade Magazine: why I miss Howard Huge.
3) The facts about Peanuts: I remember seeing these strips before!
Aww man I love Scotts General Store. I grew up in that place pretty much as a Boy Scout. Go down there in the winter and the place changes a LOT. Flash lights and junk food are replaced with native american fiber optic desk lamps, wolf paintings on silk, and dreamweavers with feathers. But what allways bugged me? No fucking condoms!