Glazer: Chiefs Face Critical Test & This Week’s Picks

AFLart28Big road game for the Chiefs Sunday…

The Buffalo Bills have always been tough on our guys up there and this game is crucial for both teams. Kansas City sits with a 5-3 record as do the Bills, so the winner moves into the likely a postseason group.

A 6-3 Chiefs team sounds dangerous to me.

Our guys have some big games coming up, Seattle at KC next week and Denver and San Diego at home. A win Sunday will convince many NFL observers that KC is for real. I’m in the group that thinks this year’s 5-3 team is much better than last year’s phony 9-0 team.

Why?

Balance. Thus far this squad has the league’s best defense, the number one pass D ,and nobody has scored a rushing TD on KC yet. Nice.

The Chiefs running game is second to none and QB Alex Smith is not making mistakes or turnovers. It’s the best we’ve looked since 1997. Wow. However we have a long way to go, and winning at Buffalo will go along ways to give the Chiefs confidence and credibility. Continue reading

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Leftridge: Fans Revolt After Chiefs Announce London Game

NFL: International Series-Detroit Lions at Atlanta FalconsYesterday, the Kansas City Chiefs announced that they’d join in the NFL’s aggressive push for global domination by playing a game next season against the Detroit Lions in London, England. Unsurprisingly, the announcement was met with calamitous fury from “Chiefs’ Nation,” which is a thing.

Mullets convulsed in furious anger and Zubaz were shitted indignantly. Far and wide, white trash uncles took to Facebook and other social media platforms to extoll their displeasure with a mixture of misspelled cusswords and thinly veiled threats of physical violence.

“WAY TO GO ROGER GLADELL U PEACE OF SHITT I HOPE YOU DIE OF DICK CANCER U ASSBAG!”

“If the Cheifs think Im will going to sit back and let them take My team to England They got another thing comeing!”

“I’ ve held season ticket’s for Fourty years and IF THEY THINK THERE GETTING ANOTHER PENNY FROM ME THEIR DEAD. WROGN.”

But like so many other instances of sports-related outrage, these sentiments are mostly unwarranted and fairly ridiculous. Continue reading

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Paul Wilson: “I Got The Message, I’m Not Changing a Thing.”

Screen Shot 2014-11-06 at 4.38.50 PMTime to do a little tea leaf reading…

The midterm elections are over, but what does it all mean? Other than it almost seems as if someone other than the American electorate cast most of the ballots Tuesday. How else to explain polls that polls show Congress with less than an 11% approval rating and 96.4% of them getting reelected.

If 89% of us disapprove of the job they’re doing, exactly who voted for them?

This is the first year I felt completely without a legitimate choice of candidates.

There’s such an inherent arrogance among the people running and the process that the cynical voice in my head was screaming, “Heres’ the salt, there’s the wound, start rubbing!”  Continue reading

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Sounds Good: Lucinda Williams @ Liberty Hall, Empty Moon @ Replay

Friday, November 7th

Lucinda Williams at Liberty Hall in LawrenceLucinda_Williams_1_-_Farm_Aid_2004_-_lg.6561915

This beloved songstress returns to Liberty Hall with a new record in tow, the double disc entitled Down Where the Spirit Meets the Bone.  Damn, that’s a grizzled-ass title.  The cover art even features a painting of a knife stabbing through a heart.  But that’s kind of Williams’ thing.

Paul Williams of Slant.com gave the record 4 out of 5 stars, and had this to say:

“For a musician who can be as withholding as Williams (she tends to wait several years between relatively short albums), the generosity of Down Where the Spirit Meets the Bone is a welcome change. “There are only so many things you can write about, love, sex, death, redemption,” she says in the press notes. She’s packed them all into this album, which could’ve easily come off as didactic, but instead seems sincere and wise, perhaps because Williams has accumulated the experience to effectively pull off such a multidimensional project. Continue reading

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Jack Goes Confidential: ‘Interstellar’—Psychological Mind Bending Melodrama

interstellar-2014-movieIf there is a single word that best describes INTERSTELLAR it would  be AMBITIOUS…

Ambitious in the movie’s approach of marrying human emotions and sci-fi physic theories. And if there’s a central theme, it has to be, do not go gently into that good night—which is repeated several times throughout director Christopher Nolan’s new epic.

The storyline has Matthew McConaughey playing a former NASA test pilot, widower and father of two who has turned to farming after the agency’s massive cutbacks.

But the earth is slowly dying. The land is becoming a wasteland while only corn will grow and massive dust storms mark the eventual end to our planet as we know it.

That’s when McConaughey is coerced by the now secret NASA agency and his former mentor Michael Caine to command “the most important mission known to space travel.” Continue reading

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Calvin Sense: What Really Went Down in Yesterday’s Elections

Screen Shot 2014-11-05 at 2.22.30 PMThe midterm elections were not about race, gender battles or Republicans versus Democrats…

It was about the core beliefs of the majority of Americans in this country.

Americans are highly competitive and winners.

And they will not put up with allowing their citizens to be beheaded, telling their enemies not to cross a red line and when the red line is crossed doing nothing about it, allowing illegal immigrants to flow into America like a raging river and criticizing American Exceptionalism.

Yesterday’s election was not about race, which is exemplified by African-American Mia Love winning a congressional race in Utah. I will go into more detail in a later post on the principles that exemplify the beliefs of Utahans and Americans.

Love’s election demonstrates to African-Americans that if you represent the beliefs of the community you are a part of that community will elect you to office.

All of the Republicans that won support the beliefs of the communities in which they live in and the core beliefs of the majority of Americans.  

And that is why they won. Continue reading

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Paul Wilson: Sprint Has a Plan Allright, To Clean House

Everyone-has-a-plan-untilLet’s do a little math…

On October 17th Sprint announced it would lay off 452 employees from its headquarters. Add that to the 477 area employees laid off in March and that comes to 929 jobs lost in 2014 thus far. That leaves approximately 6,500 employees here in town.

Which means Sprint is now more landlord than occupant on its campus.

Sprint employees hoped that this last round of layoffs might bring the local job losses to a halt. And they were led to believe that was the plan. But in the words of Mike Tyson, everyone has a plan ’till they get punched in the mouth.

That punch landed Monday when Sprint announced it would lay off 2,000 more employees and cut its earnings forecast for 2014. If all goes as planned, it will lower the company’s payroll by $400 million. My sources tell me, this time out, those 2,000 will come from sales, service, project management and customer care.

Just as I predicted a few weeks back.

That we would see a shift to the Left Coast and more Softbank influence, remember?

Concurrent with last week’s announcement of cutting at least 65 IT and network engineers from the campus, the new CEO said the company would welcome up to 50 SoftBank Corp. engineers to help with its network.

Then, last week, Sprint named Softbank’s Junichi Miyakawa as its technical COO to oversee the completion of the network overhaul. Assisted by, of course, 50 of this own engineers from “home.”

“We’ve decided to make some leadership changes. More changes are coming,” Claure warned. Continue reading

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Hearne: American Royal Turns Foutch Brothers Into ‘Ouch Brothers’

Screen Shot 2014-11-04 at 1.19.49 AMNow it can be told…

The first thing that sprang to mind last week when I learned that the Foutch Brothers had mysteriously and abruptly withdrawn their bid to save Kemper Arena by turning it into a regional youth sports facility was a question; was there something fishy going on?

Did somebody buy the Foutch Brothers off?

Little did I know that pushy-beyond-belief supporters of the American Royal had sicced their lawyers on the F bros, threatening in a manner of speaking to sue them back into the Stone Age.

If at first you don’t succeed…litigate,,,or at least threaten to.

And I thought bullying was the province of school kids.

An interesting passage from the Kansas City Star story on the subject:

“The American Royal plan is strongly endorsed by 75 prominent Kansas City business executives, including Mariner Kemper of UMB Bank, Neal Patterson and Cliff Illig of Cerner Corp., and Terry Dunn from JE Dunn Construction. Kemper is the chairman of the American Royal board.”    

Great, the bigshots – most of whom likely live in Jayhawk Country – are muscling the deal. Continue reading

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Valentine: Why Not Call It, The Seinfeld Election?

ToTheMoon

Original art by Mark Valentine

The talking heads love the Seinfeld comparison…

It is hard to find issues in any of the campaign ads. They’re all  about nothing.  Over $4 billion spent on invisible issues.

On the other hand, it’s easy to understand.

Democrats have an unpopular leader. President Obama is at a historically low approval rating, so they fare not mention his name. The Democrats biggest accomplishment is ObamaCare.  Yet it has too many negatives to bring up, so the main thing they’re running on is some variation on why you should hate Republicans.

However it seems out of touch to talk about the war on women when we have actual life threatening things on the horizon.

Republican’s ads are issueless as well.

Their strategy seems to be not interrupting an opponent who’s damaging himself. Continue reading

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Hearne: October 2014 KC Radio Station Rankings

jasperscheers

JJ Mirabile

They’re up, they’re down…

Who’s on first? Who’s on third? Who should have tried to make it home before Salvadore Perez bought the farm?

Will The Buzz ever knock off The Rock, and why did its ratings barely rise when management was expecting a pretty good bump after all the publicity it got for its foolhardy, million dollar lawsuit loss?

Will adult contemporary station KCKC (formerly known as Alice) ever attain a meaningful ratings liftoff?

And wouldn’t it be cheaper for former talk radio titan KCMO AM to just admit it could care less about trying to successfully program a radio station, and convert the signal to an All Jasper’s All of the Time foodie format and let the Mirabile Family use the frequency to start kicking KMBZ‘s butt like in the good old daze?

And will The Bridge toss in the towel and merge with KKFI FM and hire The Pitch‘s Charles Ferruzza to host the morning drive simulcast?

Those questions and more remain unanswered in the wake of the October 2014 radio station ratings for listeners 6 and older, Monday through Sunday, 6 a.m. to midnight. Continue reading

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Donnelly: Sporting KC Play Smarter Not Harder but Kronberg Sinks the Ship

Kronberg vs NE DL

Eric Kronberg

Given the way the last several months of their season played out, it was no surprise that Sporting Kansas City fell 2-1 in a one-and-done play-in game at the New York Red Bulls last week.

What was surprising about the game was that KC actually looked fairly effective for the first time in ages, taking a 1-0 lead into the 77th minute.  How did they do it?  By throwing their high press, work-work-work style out the window, that’s how.  Something they should have done a long, long time ago.

In a season that saw Sporting play in three different competitions (US Open Cup, CONCACAF Champions League, MLS regular season), not to mention the extended absence of multiple players for the World Cup, and a slew of injuries that riddled the squad, it would have made sense to try and keep legs a bit fresher.  To back off the maniacal high press that requires KC’s players to sprint wildly at the ball no matter where on the pitch it is located.  To slow things down a touch, instead of playing the “system” no matter what the situation was.

Maybe this season’s drastic slide is what it finally took for KC boss Peter Vermes to recognize this?

We can only hope. Continue reading

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Hearne: October Radio Ratings Range from Spooky to Pathetic

Splash_Page_Masks_PoliticalSince when does October not include Major League Baseball‘s ALCS, the World Series or Halloween

Since right now, courtesy of Nielsen’s radio ratings. That’s because the “October” rating book runs from September 11 to October 8.

Meaning a whole lot of USDA choice Kansas City Chiefs and Kansas City Royals  action did not make the ratings cut. So while both KCFX FM (which carries the Chiefs) and 610 Sports (which carries the Royals) likely left a whole lotta ratings upside on the table for what we will be calling the November ratings.

Make sense? of course not, but when in Rome…

In any case, 610 Sports had a nice jump while vying for the division championship with Detroit and smoking the Oakland A’s on the last day of September. And, sources say, the Chiefs radio listenership tends to be pretty constant rather than up and down with the what one might call the fortunes of war.

In any case, it’s hard to imagine that 610 won’t be in for a significant surge, as well as The Fox if the Chiefs can stay the current course. On top of which, according to Inside radio, KCFX enjoys the highest share rating of any local station carrying the home team in NFL football.

Factor in a combination of the Chiefs slow start and a fire and brimstone run by the Royals and the current Chiefs surge could return KCFX to No. 1. Continue reading

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Glazer: Ladies & Gentlemen, I Give You The Best Chiefs Team in 20 Years

justin-houston-nfl-carolina-panthers-kansas-city-chiefs2-850x560

Justin Houston

Hardly anybody has been talking about the Kansas City Chiefs this season…

Even here in KC, where the media led by yours truly decided they were done this year after one game. Until in today’s Kansas City Star the team’s bandwagon has been mostly rider free. Mostly because of the World Series and the Royals obviously.

But hold it, this Chiefs team at the moment is the best we’ve had in 20 years.

That’s right, head coach Andy Reid has worked  magic!

He’s even got me believing and I’ve had nothing but horrible things to say about this organization for year…until now.

Okay,the Chiefs beat a weak New York Jets team at home 24-10 – not overly impressive,

And hey, they’re 5-3 and just a game back of Denver.

Plus they get to they play Denver and the Chargers at home.

Seriously the way the Chiefs are playing this team can beat anyone. Continue reading

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Hearne: Why This Year’s Post Season Run By The Royals Matters Little

billy-butler

Billy Butler

Local sports media (and jock sniffers) couldn’t wait to set the Royals World Series defeat aside and laud the arrival of a new golden age of baseball in Kansas City…

It’s story that’s been written before, long before the Royals post season successes last month. Sportswriters are homers by nature and it’s their job to focus on the cup half full. Which is fine, except that it usually glosses over the half empty part.

Starting with that once the World Series began it was hard to miss the fact that so-called Royals stars like Alex Gordon, Eric Hosmer, Salvadore Perez and Mike Moustakas fell short of the mark when the going got clutch – Moustakis batted .217, Dyson .200 and Gordon .185.

And now the one player who – to me anyway – epitomizes this team’s heart and soul – Billy Butler – is all but getting kicked to the curb with little reassurance from the club despite his stated desire to retire a Royal.

Which goes hand-in-hand with another of the team’s Achilles heels.

Owner David Glass. Continue reading

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Leftridge: The End of Billy Butler

butleroneI was disappointed that the Kansas City Royals lost the World Series, and now I’m kind of sad because it looks like they’ll be bidding farewell to one of the better hitters in team history.

Although it comes as no surprise, the team announced today that they will decline the $12.5 mil 2015 option on designated hitter Billy Butler. And as much as I like Butler, the move only make sense. $12,500,000 is a lot of money to pay anyone, let alone a guy who doesn’t play a position on the field and doesn’t hit very many home runs.

It’s still a little sad, though.

Before today’s move made him a free agent, he was the longest tenured player on the roster. Continue reading

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Hearne: Dissecting The Pitch ‘Best Of KC’ Awards

1670828-inline-ice-angel-0130Who doesn’t like a good tip?

Like, you should check out this new band, restaurant, etc, But at some point there is such a thing as to much of a good thing. And in the case of the 1014 Pitch Best Of KC  issue, it begins with the overtly pretentious lead in to the awards- an astonishingly stereotypical ode to somewhat tired cliches and narcissism. Check it:

“We are not morning people. Shut up — you aren’t, either. We like sunrises as much as the next Eagle Scout, we guess, but we prefer a sunset the color of a two-cherry Manhattan. We like Manhattans. We like a beer and a steak and a beer. We like to watch the sun go down behind the Kauffman Center for the Performing Arts. We like to watch early evening’s commuters look a moment at the Boulevard headquarters when it lights up. We like the blue glow of the Roasterie’s plane. We like to congratulate ourselves for doing what we set out to do today, give or take the grocery store and having to leave the Nelson-Atkins before we were ready. There’s tomorrow, too, and sometimes we like tomorrow better. We like to talk with our friends about where we might go for drinks, for dinner, for drinks again. We like plays. We like First Friday in the Crossroads and in the West Bottoms. We like club shows and dive bars. Some of us like our chances with someone we met tonight. Some of us like our chances with someone who keeps going home with us. We like that so much of what’s best to eat and drink and see and do and think about in the daytime can be done — sometimes better still — at night. We like night anywhere. But we love the nighttime most right here, when the best of Kansas City glows just right.”

Nuff said? Continue reading

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Hearne: An Overdue Critique of The Pitch ‘Best Of” Issue

bestof_largeI’ve been putting this off all baseball season…

Baseball season for me being the month of October – or Okctober – as Dick’s Sporting Goods came within a World Series game of calling it. I’m referring of course to the annual Pitch “Best Of” folly.

Look, I get that the alt weekly is in sore need of cash at a time when the future of such publications are in serious doubt. Take the New York Times story in March that posed the question, “Are Alt Weeklies Over?”

Seriously, how lame and embarrassing it would be if Kansas City was stuck with just INK?

So at a time when the Pitch is lucky to choke out a third to half the pages and ads it did a just handful of year’s back, any port in the storm as the saying goes.

That said, there’s something inherently bogus and lame about kissing up to advertisers in such an arbitrary inauthentic way. Which unfortunately tends to take away to an extent from the more serious journalism that Pitch reporters like Steve Vockrodt work so hard to produce.

What’s wrong with the Pitch best of awards can be divided into three parts. Continue reading

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Glazer: Super Chiefs & This Week’s Picks

51I5R74EXpL._SY344_BO1,204,203,200_I rank the Chiefs a top three or four AFC team!

Wow, I was dead wrong about them early on. Chiefs  coach Andy Reid is a genius..so far. The league’s top Defense, best rushing team in the NFL and QB Alex Smith is a 3rd down monster with his legs.

Justin Houston is Chiefs first defensive star since DT!!!!

So yes, I was wrong.

The Chiefs have given up ZERO rushing touchdowns. Best Chiefs team since the 13-3 1997 loser to Denver’s Broncos in the playoffs under Marty.

I was wrong.

This is the story of the year if it holds up in the NFL. Continue reading

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Paul Wilson: The Weak in Review; Snake Love, Dead in Bed & Foot Fetishes

0ce51210c73ec09bdfdc9e547e11ea1585aacefecb75169b1aae56e272eb6cc9ANAL EEL ANTICS

We’re pretty much all familiar with run of the mill sexual fetishes, but here’s one that takes the cake…

Seems an unidentified man got a South American Lungfish stuck inside his anus after seeing it done on a porn video. I mean, why not? The gerbil thing is so 1990’s.

At least we can positively say this is one thing that has never happened in Craig’s bedroom, where the magic truly happens…

There was only one problem with said dude’s plan. Once all 20 inches of love got all up in his business, it kind of liked it there. Next MR. EEL decided to take a trip up the Hershey Highway, got hungry and ate through the mans colon, large intestine, finding its way into his body cavity.

The operating room was filled with “observers” (who can be heard laughing and gasping) as the fish or snake or whatever it is was finally pulled from the patient’s intestines. The eel was still alive at the time it was removed but died shortly after its removal.

WARNING: Video more GRAPHIC than what Chuck posts.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/10/30/eel-removed-from-bowels_n_6076118.html?utm_hp_ref=weird-news Continue reading

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Hearne: KC Opera Singer Slips, Wins Bet & Chevy Dealer Jinxes Royals

Screen Shot 2014-10-31 at 11.02.23 AMKansas City’s biggest non baseball World Series slip-up?

Call it a tie, between opera singer Joyce DiDonato – who warbled out the National Anthem opera style before Game 7 – and Molle Chevrolet in Blue Springs – that laid a pre Game One jinx on the Royals that depending on how superstitious you are may have cost the team the title.

In the case of Molle, the company purchased a full page ad in the World Series section of the Kansas City Star declaring in bold letters on a Royals blue backdrop, “If Kansas City Wins Tonight, We Will Pay Your Sales Tax Tomorrow!*”

Of course the Royals were slaughtered 7-1.

As for that asterisk at the end of Molle’s offer, apparently  the car dealer was hedging its bet in case the Kansas City Roller Warriors or some other lesser local team slipped in a win that night.

“Kansas City – meaning our Major League baseball team,” reads Molle’s caveat. Continue reading

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