Category: kansas city

My home­town, the city of foun­tains, home of the Roy­als and Chiefs. Birth­place of great BBQ, Char­lie Park­er, and me.

Categories
kansas city music

HTML5 disturbingly close to bringing a tear to my eye

Aw, man. It just got a lit­tle dusty in my office at Coop­er. See­ing my old child­hood home in Lea­wood, Kansas will do that, espe­cial­ly when the Arcade Fire pro­vides the sound­track and when Google engi­neers work with a music video direc­tor to cre­ate the experience.

8710 Lee Blvd - Wilderness downtown

The pho­to above is from an "inter­ac­tive video" called "The Wilder­ness Down­town," and it's actu­al­ly as tech­no­log­i­cal­ly inter­est­ing as it is emo­tion­al­ly-provoca­tive. (It's espe­cial­ly emo if the Google Maps satel­lite imagery from your home looks appro­pri­ate­ly old and nos­tal­gic; see image above). Any­way, it's referred to as an "exper­i­ment" with Google's Chrome brows­er, which is prob­a­bly why, at times, it start­ed to feel like a show­case of whizzy HTML5 ele­ments — win­dows get launched and shuf­fled around; you're asked to scrib­ble on the screen; graph­ics are ani­mat­ed and lay­ered. I don't know, maybe I'm just the right mix of cheese­ball and geek, but it kind of worked for me.

Categories
baseball kansas city

Royal-ly sucking

Zack Greinke's lock­down pitch­ing dur­ing the bot­tom of the fourth inning of tonight's All-Star game made me won­der: When was the last time a Roy­al looked great in an All-Star game? Of course Bo Jack­son's epic home run to lead off the 1989 All-Star game comes to mind. Roy­als Review help­ful­ly offers a brief his­to­ry of Roy­al par­tic­i­pa­tion in the All-Star game over the past decade.

  • 2008: Joakim Soria named, pitched one and two-thirds innings of score­less relief. 
  • 2007: Gil Meche named, did not play.
  • 2006: Mark Red­man named, did not play.
  • 2005: Mike Sweeney named, struck out as a pinch-hit­ter in the 7th.
  • 2004: Ken Har­vey named, struck out as a pinch-hit­ter in the 3rd.
  • 2003: Mike Mac­Dou­gal and Sweeney named, nei­ther appeared.
  • 2002: Mike Sweeney named, replaced Paul Kon­erko at 1B in the 7th inning, flied out to right in the 9th inning.
  • 2001: Mike Sweeney named, replaced Jason Giambi at first in the 8th inning, flied out to right in the 8th inning.
  • 2000: Jer­maine Dye vot­ed to start, Mike Sweeney named. Sweeney pinch-hit for James Bald­win in the 4th, reach­ing on an error. Sweeney did not appear in the field. Dye walked once and struck out.

Yeah, not so illustrious.

Categories
kansas city the ancient past

Kansas City / Home for the holidays

Flickr photo


I love Flickr, but the good times are killing me. It's got too many amaz­ing high-def and beau­ti­ful­ly com­posed pho­tos. How do they do it? After doing some research, I decid­ed to step up my game and picked up a fan­cy­pants cam­era. Above is one of the first pic­tures I took with it, a panora­ma of down­town Kansas City from the Lib­er­ty Memo­r­i­al. The bent hori­zon is the result of a cheap‑o fish-eye attach­ment that I bought on Ama­zon. I used the 30D/­fish-eye set­up through­out the hol­i­days, as you'll see in this set, and while I had fun, I also had the inevitable real­iza­tion that an equip­ment upgrade doesn't auto­mat­i­cal­ly result in glo­ri­ous, high-def pho­tos. Back to the draw­ing board. Or the dark room. Or the Inter­net forums. While I was in KC, I sam­pled some of its finest. I vis­it­ed some home­grown let­ter­press print­ers (Ham­mer­press), ate some leg­endary BBQ (Fiorella's Jack Stack in Mar­tin City and Gates on Main), and made a pil­grim­age to a bas­ket­ball tem­ple (Allen Field­house, to wit­ness KU's run-and-gun thump­ing of Boston Col­lege). All in all, a mer­ry and bright time.