KC Confidential

It’s been over a year since departing sports scribe Greg Hall made fun of my Fiat…

Imagine.

And what was that one dude’s name – Rogger – who wanted to bed my girlfriend on a losing bet he made about when Kansas City’s first Fiat dealership would open.

Then of course there were the Mini Cooper devotees who couldn’t get over that the new Fiat 500 got better mileage, had a better ride, sold for on average $4,000 less than similarly equipped Coopers and was seven inches shorter but still had a 50 percent larger trunk and substantially more backseat legroom.

The Cooper was a bit faster, they argued and they were right, but that was about it.

Well, now I’ve done the unthinkable and sold my limited Prima Edizione Fiat. Continue reading →

Hard as it is imagine, I had an epiphany while watching Expendables 2…

It came to me at the Alamo Drafthouse Mainstreet downtown during the theater’s Van Dammage promotion. The Alamo gang wheeled out four cheesy Jean-Claude Van Damme action films as foreplay for the new Expendables.

Suffice it to say, it was a total dude fest. Continue reading →

Remember the Nine Great American Companies that will never recover a few weeks back?

Well, Best Buy is way too nouveau to qualify as a “great American company,” but it’s big enough and bad enough off to join Sprint, JC Penney and the seven others on the endangered species list.

Not to mention that the fur’s been flying in the business press where Best Buy’s concerned.

Take the headline in Business Week a couple days back: “Analysts take skeptical view of Best Buy.”

Or the dust up over Best Buy’s hiring of a French dude with a hospitality pedigree and no retail experience to head the company. Continue reading →

No way this wasn’t going to happen…

Sooner or later some of the big boys were bound to take chainsaws to former Kansas City Star sports columnist Joe Posnanski. It was inevitable.

People here for the most part, were expecting the worse from Posnanski, where his Joe Paterno bio was concerned. Because we know him so well. No way would kind-hearted Joe lay the pipe to the fallen Penn State football coach after sucking up to him to get a reported $750,000 book deal and practically living with Paterno’s family for however many months.

Posnanski’s book deal that had the words “puff piece” written all over it. Continue reading →

A funny thing happened the other day on the way to the office…

I was talking with my real estate agent about what kind of car he was going to buy after he unloads a $2.5 million-plus mansion in Fall Creek in Lawrence, and when I suggested he look at a 42 miles-per-gallon Lexus CT Hybrid he paused and said; “I can’t buy a hybrid, I’m a Republican.”

For the purposes of the following discussion, Uptown Theater main man Larry Sells would like to set that sentiment aside. Conserving natural resources shouldn’t be a matter of party politics, it’s about sustaining things near and dear to everyone in this country…as in the earth. Continue reading →