Wednesday, June 18, 2008   —   Grimace was the original "bad guy" of McDonaldland. It was he who stole hamburgers. However, McDonald's was sued by the makers of the bizarre hallucinogenic 70's cartoon H.R. Pufnstuf for copyright infringement - apparently Grimace resembled one of their own villains. As part of the settlement, McDonald's was allowed to retain the Grimace character, but he had to become "good". Thus a new villain was created - the Hamburglar. I forget the name of the pirate character.

Is It Sting or Is It Bart?

Our friends Bart and Heather drove to Kansas City last week to see us and, coincidentally, also had tickets to see The Police. I'm sure we were the higher priority, but we'll take what we can get. They emailed me yesterday and told me about Bart's life-changing haircut over the weekend.

Bart says, "that while getting my haircut over the weekend, I told my stylist about the The Police concert. When she finished my hair, she turned me around in the chair to see how it looked. At that point I told her that I was really impressed with the ultra-cool picture of Sting she had hanging over her mirror. She laughed and said, 'That is no picture of Sting, that’s an ultra-cool picture of you!'"

Heather explains, "Oh brother. This all stems from when Bart was 15 years old and a girl in a record store told him he looked like Sting. Oh, the things we cling to from our youth."

The haircut lead to an afternoon amateur photo shoot of Bart posing as Sting. There is a wee bit of a resemblance, I admit, but I'll let you be the judge. :-)

The Problem of Two Kansas Citys

⊕ Click Image to EnlargePhoto via ScottSpy

Last week we went to see The Police at the Sprint Center who are on the North American leg of their impressive Lets-Get-Back-Together-Because-We-Can-Make-a-Bazillion-Dollars Tour. Unsurprisingly, they were still really good.

What was surprising was that Sting didn’t mention his name once, instead giving all his onstage props to guitarist Andy Summer and drummer Stewart Copeland. Considering that The Police broke up because Sting’s head got big enough to fill a stadium on its own, he probably talked them into doing the tour by saying that he’s more humble now and that it’ll be all about you guys and the band - not me.” Well, that and the bazillion dollars.

I have three observations. The first is that Sting is tiny, but in remarkably good shape for a man his age. The second is that out of the thousands of people there I counted less than five people under 30 years old. That may have something to do with the ticket prices as much as the era The Police are from. The third observation is that Sting named the name of the city he was in correctly: Kansas City, Missouri.

Three weeks ago we saw Glen Hansard and Markéta Irglová perform at The Uptown Theater. They’re Irish and had never been to Kansas City and were on a tour promoting their Academy Award winning album “The Swell Season” from the movie “Once”. In his thick Dublin drawl, Glen proudly said that it was great to be in Kansas. After a low chorus of grumbling from the audience he was corrected by someone and said, “Missouri? Kansas City is in Missouri?” There was a bit more confusion as someone pointed out that there is a Kansas City, Kansas, too.

This identity problem extends beyond bands, too. In the early 1990s, I remember there was a brief flap when Alex Trebek during an episode of “Jeopardy!” gave an answer for his contestants: “This city is a suburb of Kansas City, Missouri” with the correct answer being “Kansas City, Kansas” as though it were a novel trivia question. The Kansas-side people weren’t happy being called a suburb.

A Modest Proposal

All of this points to a deeper problem of having a city name that is the same as that of another state. People know that New York City is in New York. By the same logic, Kansas City should be in Kansas, which it is, except for the other Kansas City.

Kansas City, Missouri should change it’s name to Missouri City, Missouri. The problem is that a Missouri City exists already. This small town, however, was originally called Atchison, which I propose is what it should revert back to again. This, in turn, would create confusion with Atchison, Kansas, a city named for a Missouri Senator. So if we rename Atchison, Kansas… Oh, nevermind.

At the Jim Slattery Senate Kickoff

⊕ Click Image to Enlarge

I went to see Jim Slattery launch his bid to become a U.S. Senator for Kansas yesterday at the KU Edwards campus in Overland Park. He was doing a whirlwind announcement beginning the day in Topeka, then Wyandotte County, and later in the day in Wichita. I asked him if he planned on breaking speed limits to race from one place to another and he laughed and said, “that’s what planes are for.” Of course.

I had never been to an event like this before. When I arrived, the cameras were still setting up and the TV camera people unapologetically placed themselves in front of everyone who had come to see him speak. I guess there’s some logic to it, seeing as how more people would see this on TV than in person, but I wondered if fewer people come to live speeches because the experience is so overwhelmingly one of standing behind a mountain of A.V. equipment.

By the time the event started there were maybe 50-60 people there including his family and a couple of staff members. He was introduced by Lt. Governor Mark Parkinson who talked, unsurprisingly, about the need for change. Then, flanked on his sides by his family, Jim Slattery spoke convincingly about how since he’s been out of politics things have gone to hell in a handbasket (my words, not his) and we needed to tackle the national debt and handle national security better.

Later in the day, I heard that Senator Pat Roberts, who is seeking his third Senate term, issued an ad criticizing Slattery for his work as a lobbyist in Washington. “He stopped working for Kansas 14 years ago and made millions for himself,” the ad says.

But I can tell you first-hand that’s not true.

The company I work for, based in Overland Park, contacted Jim Slattery three years ago to help us. We designed a radical new technology called Air2Air that helps power plants conserve large amounts of water. But the technology we designed is really big and no customer wants to spend a few million dollars on something that’s never been built before no matter how promising the science is.

We asked Jim Slattery to help us because we’d heard that he helps out Kansas companies.

Jim’s work in Washington helped raise the issue of water conservation and the importance of sustainable water supplies, resulting in stronger incentives for water conservation in the Energy Act of 2005.  Subsequently, we successfully received a grant from the DOE to perform a test of this technology in a full-sized power plant.

It was a fantastic success and now we have inquiries and requests from all over the world. So, as a lobbyist, he helped a Kansas company thrive and helped the U.S. energy infrastructure, which is what our politicians should be doing. Maybe Senator Roberts needs to take a lesson from Jim Slattery.