A Salute to A-hole Driver in Prairie Village

3AM presents Real Men of Genius
Real Men of Genius!

Today we salute you... Mr. Douchey Entitled Prairie Village Teen Driver.
My daddy bought me bitchin' Honda!

You own Mission Road in your own mind, and you’re not afraid to prove it by texting your friends a selfie from the driver's seat every five minutes.
Yellow light means floor the accelerator…

You know nothing make you manlier than drag racing a cyclist. And when you swerve into the bike lane, you cockily yell "You're welcome!"
Eat my dust, stoopid cyclist!

And while your over-worked pops has to pay your speeding tickets and your higher insurance rates, being pulled over by the Prairie Village police every time you hit the road is something those Lancer chicks really dig.
They love the bad boy!

So wave the green flag and put the pedal to the metal, oh swoop-haired future ambulance occupant. Because even though you’ll never make it to Victory Lane, that over sized spoiler on your 1990s Honda looks really boss!

Mr. Douchey Entitled Prairie Village Teen Driver!

tagged: Kansas, Prairie Village, driving, teens, humor, salute

Snow Country for Old Men

Suburban living for the 21st century male has several key milestones.

There's the point where you decide to pay a guy to take care of your yard because who needs that aggravation?

There's the point where you switch from a propane grill to a wood chunk charcoal smoker (dude, don't even bring that charcoal brick stuff around my house. What do you think this is, Gladstone?).

And then there's the day when you get your power snow thrower.

Of these three, I think the final one represents the furthest stage of "maturity." I mean, it seems like a bit of an extravagance. You're spending a couple hundred bucks or so on an appliance that you'll use maybe once or twice a year? But when you have a snow event the likes of which we had this week, you damn well are grateful that you have a snow shovel that you can plug in or power up and just walk behind to clear your driveway. That goes double if, like a majority of the guys on my block, you have "advanced experience in the role of life."

Me? I kind of take it as a point of pride that I haven't yet crossed that threshold. I'm still young. I'm able bodied. I ain't 'fraid of a little cold white stuff, and shoveling it off my driveway is my manly duty, a rite of passage each winter that, like the out-taking of the trash and the smashing of the spiders, proves how important I am to this family.

So I wasn't at all daunted when I opened the garage door Thursday afternoon to attack the thick layer of white stuff in my driveway. Hell, I was kind of looking forward to it!

Before: A tabula rasa

10 inches exactly

Then, I moved the first shovel full. This was a heavy snow.

And when I say it was a heavy snow, I don't just mean there was a lot of it. Don't get me wrong, there WAS a lot of it, but it was also quite wet and heavy. This was going to be a tougher job than I was expecting.

Frost thing's first. I shovel a path from the garage door to the end of the driveway. Whew, this is tough. Next, shovel out the rest of one side of the driveway.

Halfway done with half the driveway

By the time I'm halfway done with half the driveway, I've worked up quite a sweat -- a manly sweat, mind you. I can see that I'd better do little advanced planning for the post-shoveling recuperation.

I'm going to need this later...

I shed my coat and get on with the job. Soon, I've got half the driveway cleared. That's enough to get one of our cars out of the two-car garage, just in case we have some kind of emergency (like running out of Scotch). I've also got a helluva backache, which makes that Scotch emergency all the more likely.

After

It all got me wondering just how much snow I moved. We had our driveway and sidewalk replaced last summer, so I know that the area I shoveled is about 907 square feet (130,608 square inches). Multiply that by the 10 inches of snow over the whole thing and you end up with 1,386,080 cubic inches of snow, or 802.13 cubic feet¹. That all converts into a pretty seriously stiff back the next day.

But numbers aside, I was prepared to reward myself for a job... well... done.

Time for a cold one

Also, I'm totally going to get a snow thrower before next winter.

1) All math calculations done by the Internet and may be subject to my complete ineptitude at mathematics.

  tagged: winter, snow, Kansas, shoveling, beer, snowstorm, blizzard, weather

YouTube Tuesday: It all began with a god named Thor

Today's edition of YouTube Tuesday celebrates the good news that will send hipsters hopping all to way to Merriam in a couple of years.

Sure, every major city in the world already has an IKEA store, but how many metros are there that have an IKEA AND a Nebraska Furniture Mart? It's all part of my plan to make KC the furniture capital of the world!

The lyrics are even better...

tagged: Kansas City, Merriam, IKEA, Jonathan Coulton, YouTube Tuesday, video, music

Puntification

I don't know about you guys (and if you're one of those snobby foodie-types, I don't really care), but I really like Blue Koi.

We always get good service there. The owner and/or manager always greets us warmly. I like the noodles. I like the rice. I like the Awesome Sauce, and I really like the roast duck.

But this post isn't about food.

Like many food spots, Blue Koi displays work from a rotating roster of local artists. I like this idea in general, kind of an appetizer for your soul while you wait for your table. And I've never had a spiritual dish at Blue Koi that I didn't enjoy.

And a few months ago, there was a very tasty treat indeed.

On display in the entry way were canvases of crude cartoony characters doing various activities which didn't seem to make sense upon a brief initial glance. Because they were cartoons, and because we were with another couple with whom we were in conversation, I didn't pay them much attention. But when we were seated at out table (me, directly facing the painting) and awaiting our dinners after ordering, I had a little more time to study the images.

"Heard it through the grape vine"

I was looking at a group of what looked like The California Raisins. They were in a cave, with fire all around and a river of red liquid. They were holding devil's pitch forks. And in a moment it clicked. It's a visual representation of the idiomatic expression "Raisin Hell." Brilliant!

One by one I studied the dozen or so paintings on the wall with new interest. They're the work of Overland Park artist Joe Self, and before our table is served with entree's we're all studying the paintings with surprise and delight.

I honestly don't know how I'd never seen these before. The friendly manager at Blue Koi notes our interest, and brings us a couple of complimentary wall calendars featuring many of the visual puzzles. This is totally the kind of thing my dad would get into.

Self has made his paintings available for purchase at his website. At a minimum, you should buy a coupe of the wall calendars to pass around and keep in your cube. That's what I did.

See if you can solve this one!

tagged: art, pun, painting, Joe Self, Overland Park, Kansas, Humor

The Rite of Autumn

It's almost time again for my favorite time of year, autumn.

Time of relief from the oppressive summer heat, and a spiritual harvest from sports drought of the preceding months. Football season, son.

I've never been one to do any kind of season preview. I'm a sports appreciator, not a pundit. But I do read a lot of previews, and none have been better than the Big XII preview written by one of my favorite authors, Cormac McCarthy…

3) Kansas State: The old man is bent forward studying the ground. A secret to be gleaned from the turf. His time with the wildcats has not been easy. Struggle. Work. Victory. Struggle. A betrayal he once believed would be impossible. An exile while a clownish prince claims his throne. Years spent in the wilderness of the plains scrabbling for scraps and water while his republic fell into disrepair with no one to save it or pull the charter from the ashes while the prince fiddled and his palace burned to the ground. A coup. Reascension.

He knows his time is not long now. He uses time wisely, efficiently. His troops are ragged, pulled from wild and unknown places with uniforms of unnamed rank and single color. Junior colleges. The old man looks up. Squints against the gloom that grows darker with each moment.. Pulls his tattered windbreaker closer about his shoulders. Run the qb counter, he says into his headset.

You can read his thoughts about the rest of the Big XII football teams (and also KU) here.

tagged: Football, K-State, Big XII, Cormac McCarthy, sports, autumn

Song of Sap and Flyers

We were screaming at each other when we pulled into the docking bay* of the mother ship around dusk after a quick away mission to St. Joe.

But we weren't screaming at each other because we were angry (at least, not this time), it was because that's the only way we could communicate over the incessant high-decibel droning of the summer cicadas.

We, the adults, were used to it. My Supermodel Wife and I are both native Kansans and grew up with this particular genre of music as the soundtrack of late summer doldrums. But a precocious three-year old toddler has no such tolerance, and demanded an explanation in the form of a pitched "What's that NOISE!"

So while the light held out, we braved the still-triple-digit heat to check out the oak trees in our front yard. We found the empty larval shells by the hundreds. When I gently plucked one from the bark, attached it to my finger and advanced it toward my daughter to give her a closer look, she repelled in disgust at the alien-looking thing.

We talked about how these critters live most of their life underground, sucking sap from the tree roots. Then in the summer, they dig their way out, clamber up the nearest tree and literally crawl out of their own skins. I told her how they transform, how they grow wings and fly up into the leaves. How the boys start to sing to try to find a girlfriend and that is what that crazy 108 decibel noise is that we're hearing.

"And what happens when they find their girlfriend?"

"Well, they start a family."

"How?"

"Well… er… Check it out, you can take a stick and poke the shells off of the tree..."

So we spent the next few minutes playing mini-wiffle ball with a stick and cicada shells until we came across a cicada shell that was … still moving. The little guy was crawling slowly up the tree trunk, still alien-looking and creepy, but tantalizingly close to the business end of the mini-wiffle stick.

"Can I hit it off?" she asked.

"No. Let's leave him alone so he can grow up and find a girlfriend."

It was a pretty easy sell since the thing really did look gross. I mean, not that I'd look much better after spending my childhood years two feet underground.

Fast forward to the next morning when I wake her up to get ready for the day. The first thing she asks is if we can go check on the cicada crawling up the tree to make sure he made it. Okay, I'm up for a follow up.

Luckily it's cooler out this morning, the sun is just starting to shine through over the rooftops of the subdivision. Our friend from the previous evening must have climbed even higher, but he's got dozens of friends who changed clothes overnight and left their dirties on the tree trunks. In fact, as we look at the four trees directly in front of our house, we see multiple (I called it "a moltitude" but the pun was lost on a 3-year-old) cicadas in various states of emergence.

Since most of us don't get up early enough to really examine the critters that are making that insane racket in the evenings, my daughter and I decided to take a few pictures and share the educational field trip we took to our front yard.

This guy is still in the process of "inflating" his wings.

* I know most people call it their "garage" — but that's for you hoity-toity French speakers. Nope, ours is either the docking bay or the car hole (depending on context).

tagged: Kansas, Kansas City, science, cicada, insects, summer, education, nature,

Hey! You! Get off-a my… whatever this is…

It's been so long since we've seen anything like this that I almost didn't recognize it. Nice to get a rain drop or two in the O.P., but I'm afraid it's too late for the majority of my so-called lawn.

PS — I used @rm's suggestion to use my sunglasses as a "nofilter" filter for my mobile phone camera. It worked pretty well, though I still think Instagram is dumb and it ranks only behind that contrived 45-degree angle as most annoying photographer clichés.

tagged: weather, cloud, photography, Rolling Stones, Kansas, Johnson County

YouTube Tuesday: No Joy

I didn't realize until today that Joyland had closed.

Not that I'm surprised. I just haven't thought about Joyland Amusement Park one way or another in ages. As a kid, my parents took us there two or three times, making the hour's trip from out hamlet to the city of Wichita for a diversion of bumper cars, Ferris wheels and carnival games (as I recall, I wasn't old enough to go on the roller coaster).

Anyway, as this video shows, the amusement park has undergone significant decay since it closed nearly 10 years ago.

Much like our culture in general.

No Joy from Mike Petty on Vimeo.

tagged: YouTube, Tuesday, Joyland, amusement park, Wichita, Kansas, decay

As Seen in Kansas: Paul Boyer Gallery

Anyone taking a trip through the northern third of Kansas is probably taking Highway 36.

It's not as speedy and high-octane as I-70, on which I've never seen a speed limit enforced (at least, not once you get passed Topeka). And Route 36 certainly doesn't have the historical cachet of its venerable cousin Route 66.

In many ways, Highway 36 is just a utilitarian point-A-to-point-B strip of tarmac. But it still has it's fair share of interesting side excursions for those not too busy to get off the beaten path.

One of my favorites is the Paul Boyer Gallery in Belleville, Kansas.

According to the museum, Boyer began carving and working with small machines as a child in Michigan. But when he lost a leg during an accident at the age of 35, he threw himself into carving, drawing and sculpting to help occupy his time.

The result has been a life's work in animated sculptures, or cartoons brought into the kinetic art world. And though many so-called "art experts" would look down their noses and derisively call his work "folk art," in my humble opinion Boyer is one of the artistic treasures of Kansas.



Many of his sculpture do focus on the humorous. He has fashioned a style of big-nosed, saggy-breasted hillbilly characters to be the target of his mischievous sense of humor. That's on the surface. But what lies beneath is a dizzyingly complex set of clockworks that would give any steampunk fan squeals of delight.

And on what I consider his finest pieces, those complex mechanics become the art itself.

My personal favorite is a set of models of mechanical wings. I think the piece is titled (something like) "Flight of Man, Flight of Bird," and it wonderfully demonstrates the grace and subtlety of Boyer's artistic vision.



I've tried to capture it and a couple of my other favorites in this quick video, but my videographer skills pretty much suck. Anyway, you really must visit yourself to get the full effect. There is a minimal admission fee to the gallery, which is operated by Boyer's daughters and is open May through September, Wednesday through Saturday from 1-5 p.m.

tagged: Kansas, travel, Belleville, Paul Boyer, art, folk art, motion

As Seen in Kansas: The Western Home

One of the truths that I hold to be self-evident is that places aren't boring, people are.

As a life-long Kansan maybe that's just some kind of defense mechanism. But I've traveled a fair bit both domestically and abroad, and I find that no place it boring as long as you're curious.

Take, for example, the middle of nowhere.

It would be tempting to look at a flat, mostly blank spot on the map, such as Smith County, Kansas, (the entire population of which numbers fewer than the available parking spaces where I work) and conclude that there can't possibly be anything of interest there.

But with a good guide and sincere curiosity, I've found that even such places as these have interesting nuggets to yield. And, to steal a line from Bill Cosby, if you're not careful, you might learn something.

One of the nuggets of interest we checked out on our recent visit there was a small, ancient cabin in the woods.

The cabin, of basic construction and even more basic amenity, is notable for it's original occupant, Dr. Brewster Higley, né Brewster Martin Higley VI, a homesteader originally from Ohio.

Higley's primary claim to fame is a poem he wrote in 1873 after moving to the Kansas prairie and building cabin by a small creek. The poem was called The Western Home, and it so captured life on a pioneer homestead that it was set to music and became a popular folk song.


The Kansas Legislature adopted it as the official state song in 1947.


The cabin, as it stands today, in the midst of a wild cannabis grove near a wooded creek, has been reinforced with stone, cement and angle iron. There is also a gigantic circular saw blade that I'm pretty sure wasn't part of the original structure.


But much of the original log structure is still there. You can see axe marks in the wood and the rusty square nails from the era.


It's difficult to imagine being the original occupant of this house. Indeed, most people these day's have nicer garden sheds. I'm fairly certain that nobody today would be inspired to think of "home" given a life in these accommodations. The interior has barely room for a single mattress, let alone a queen sized bed. The "kitchen" consisted of a small, camp-sized wood-burning stove and the air conditioning was provided by half-inch gaps between the logs (though I assume these were patched when people were actually living here).

I guess it's possible that Dr. Higley's poem may have been more aspirational than inspirational — not so much an ode to his little hovel, more of a longing for something nicer. Still, it's impressive to consider the hardy folk like Dr. Higley (and perhaps more impressively, Mrs. Dr. Higley) who chose this lonely, primitive lifestyle in pursuit of their American dream.

tagged: Kansas, Smith County, Brewster Higley, cabin, Home on the Range, pioneer

My next million dollar idea: Continental Golf

A few weeks ago I posted a few random items from my fictional bucket list. Some of those things I've already done. Some I'm still working on.

One in particular, I'm completing today.

I had this idea of creating a sport, in part, to gain a small measure of immortality (perhaps due to an aforementioned existential dilemma) . Consider James Naismith, who invented basketball while working in New England. Sure, you'll hear KU fans say he invented basketball at KU, but I think it's pretty well established how delusional KU fans are.

Anyway, to back to the story, the working name for my new sport is Continental Golf. Let me esplain...

You see, there's a sport played all over the country called golf. Essentially, you hit a small ball with a long club in an effort to make it land in a hole some distance away. Score is kept by tallying the number of hits — or strokes — it takes a player get the ball into the hole. The goal being to get as low a score as possible over the course of 18 holes.

My adaptation of this is similar, except that instead of 90 to 500 yards separating the start and finish of a hole, it could be 100 to 600 miles or more.

You see, I envision each hole taking the length of an entire state. One would tee off, for example, in Leavenworth, Kan., and play west to finish by putting into a hole near Horace, Kan.


View Larger Map

So you would end your first hole, then continue into Colorado, teeing off in, say, Cheyenne Wells, and finishing in, maybe, Dove Creek. You would continue, so on and so forth, until you had played the entire course, which obviously would be composed of up to 18 different states.

Obviously, this is a more extreme version of traditional golf. But hey, I enjoy the challenge.

As with conventional golf, we'd have to establish a "par" for each hole, and I'm thinking we might rely on the sport's pioneering players to help with this. We might find it necessary to count every 10 hits as a stoke, and then use a decimal system for scoring. Kansas, for example, might have a par of 440.0 which would be roughly 4,400 in conventional golf strokes (if you're a big hitter).

Colorado, though shorter, has a pretty big bunker in the form of the Rocky Mountains, so you'd need to account for that in the par rating. But you get the idea.

As for equipment, I see us using pretty much the same items as regular golf as far as balls, clubs, gloves etc. Although we should consider trading in the battery powered golf cart for a diesel powered Hummer. Or maybe a good quarter horse if you're a sport purist.

Now, the beauty of this sport is that while it may not be practical for your average Joe to take a few weeks off every year to go play a hole of Continental Golf, I'm thinking ahead to the digital spin off.

Imagine the appeal of taking my new game, putting it on an Xbox or even a Wii, juicing it up with some Google Earth mojo and launching an online Continental Golf league. You get to multiply the appeal of golf by the joy of travel and tourism, and I get to take a tasty little cut out of every purchase.

So, who wants to be in my first foursome. I'm thinking we tee off in late April?

tagged: Sports, golf, tourism, travel, James Naismith, Kansas, Colorado

Random Photo XLI: Beneath the pale glow of a street lamp

Couple of pictures of last night's snowfall.

I like the first one with the exception of the ugly pickup truck in the background. I wish I had moved to the left a few paces so I could crop it out…

Also, the snowflakes weren't as pronounced as I wanted them to be. I think they were just too small by this time to photograph the way I wanted them.

I did get this one, though, which I think is kind of interesting…


tagged: random photo, Kansas, winter, snow, night, picture, weather

New dirt on The Mission Dirt Pile

From what I could tell, the little tidbit of news didn't get much play earlier this week. At least if it did, I didn't see it in the usual local newscasts, websites and Twitters I follow.

Just a short few paragraphs from the Kansas City Business Journal that popped up in my RSS feed reader indicating that there might finally be some movement in the development of what has become known as The Mission Dirt Pile.

When the Mission Dirt Pile was first created, I was living a couple of blocks north in Roeland Park, a cute little inner-ring suburb peopled by families just starting out, elderly couples (and singles) who are dying out and your random urban chicken enthusiast.

We really liked living in the RP. Characters like the crazy pot-smoking retired lady a few doors down just added to the texture of the neighborhood. So we were pretty happy with the then Mission Center Mall property was slated to be demolished.

It was quite something to see the old mall go through the stages of deconstruction on my way home from work each day.

The proposal was to replace the mall with a "lifestyle" center that would include a high-rise boutique hotel, condos and street level retail. Somewhere along the way large aquarium was thrown in for good measure.

Keep in mind this was back in 2006, a more innocent time in America. A healthier General Motors was reporting losses of only $8.6 billion, AIG gave a sincere apology to government regulators for its deceptive business practices, and the Blue-ray Disc format was introduced to American consumers.

More importantly, the country was in the midst of a real estate boom the most thought would never end. So when developers presented the renderings of The Gateway lifestyle center, most of us were pretty excited about it. It was reported at the time that some people even put down deposits on some of the condo units before ground had even been broken.

Of course, we all know what happened to the real estate market, not to mention the rest of the economy. All that was left of The Gateway development was a giant mountain of dirt and broken dreams.

Well, fast forward to last Monday when we learned that the development group has new partners and may be close to resuming work on the project, possibly breaking ground as soon as next summer.

According to the article in the Kansas City Business Journal, the developer, The Cameron Group LLC, received an extension on a critical deadline that allows them to retain $63 million in sales tax revenue bonds for the project.

[Cameron Group's] Tom Valenti said his new partners, which include RED’s Tim Schaffer and Caymus’ Dave Harrison, add credibility to the project.

“Having RED and Caymus being involved sends a message to the community here that this is real and it is going to happen,” Valenti said.

Valenti said the Gateway project will be built in two phases, beginning with the aquarium and apartments.

It all sounds very promising. Certainly a nice retail/business district will bring in more revenue than a big pile of dirt. Definitely it will look much nicer, though the opossum's and foxes that now live there might have some objections.

Of course it remains to be seen whether we are near enough to the end of the current recession for this to actually happen.

I guess we'll know by the end of the summer.

tagged: Roeland Park, Mission, Mission Center Mall, The Gateway, Mission Dirt Pile, development, The Cameron Group

The Hunt, Part 3: Parting shots

Capturing a good photo of the elusive white squirrel proved more challenging than I had originally expected.

I can only assume that growing up a white squirrel in a gray squirrel's world must be a lot like Johnny Cash's Boy Names Sue. You either have to become very quick and elusive, or you get eaten by hawks.

That being the case, it wouldn't have taken me this long if I hadn't had some of the defections among my crew. When my plan to trap the beast met with mixed results, I decided to hire a couple of guys to help out with this little project. But one by one they abandoned me the the quest.

First, Ishmael decided go to back to teaching when the school year started again. Then Starbuck decided to go open a chain of coffee shops (Hope he's doing well with that. There's a lot of competition in that sector these days.) And Queequeg had to quit when one of his new tattoos became severely infected.

Be that as it may, I persevered. Camera in hand, finger on trigger, er, shutter release as I passed through the beasts feeding grounds daily. I spotted it often, but as I've said before, a clear focused image remained out of my grasp for weeks.

Until one still, lazy afternoon in the late summer, after the season's heat had broken, but the sun was still bright, I decide to take a leisurely stroll up up the street. Almost out of habit, I'd taken my camera.

I walked casually up the street to the squirrel's feeding grounds. Sure enough, there he was. I stopped for a moment, not evening bothering to raise my camera. I knew from experience that in a split second it would bolt up the tree or into the bushes, so why bother taking off the lens cap.

But for some reason, this time was different. I don't know why. Maybe Moby had grown accustomed to my face, or scent, or whatever, because I'd stopped by so often. Maybe at this point he sort of considered me the squirrel equivalent of a friend (a squirrelfriend?).

Perhaps he was just tried of the whole game, tired of continually being pursued and running away. It could be that in his tiny squirrel brain, life just wasn't worth living when your always on the run.

Whatever it was, this time he didn't bolt right away. He sat there, still as a statue, his little black eyes watching me. He twitched his tail a few times as I raised my Nikon and removed the lens cap. He put his paws to his mouth, nibbled a bit on an acorn, then proceeded to ignore me.

By now of course, I'm clicking away like mad, capturing as many frames as I can with Moby posing like a Vogue model during fashion week. After weeks of hunting, the actual moment of capturing the prey was exhilarating.

The photo session seemed to go on for hours, but I'm sure it only lasted for a minute or two if even that. Soon, it seemed the white squirrel's survival instincts took over. After a quick glance back at me, he took two long hops and landed on a tree trunk.

He ran a lap around the base of the tree, and then instantly shot up into the branches of the of the oak canopy 30 feet above me.

tagged: white, squirrel, Moby, Starbuck, Queequeg, Ishmael, wildlife, suburban, animals, Johnson County, Kansas

The Hunt, Part 2: The Trap

I previously vowed to capture an image of the elusive White Squirrel at any costs. Little Moby seemed somehow to have sensed this, and his appearances became more rare in the days following my utterance bloggerance.

On the occasions when he would show up, he seemed jittery, even for a squirrel, and more wary of his surroundings. However, even as he became more careful, he seemed to extend his range. And a couple of times I found him foraging for nuts and grubs in my own front yard.
Thus, I added a tactic to my arsenal. If I could find a way to confine him, it would be an easier thing to photograph him. So I stopped by my local outfitter's store to procure a steel trap that would do the trick.

It was of a rectangular steel cage design, a trap door at either end triggered by tip plate in the center.
I masterfully baited the trap with wheat bran cereal held in place with a mortar of peanut butter. I placed it behind some shrubbery in our front yard and waited.

In the morning, a few days later, I received an excited message from my first mate. She said I need to go and check the trap.

It had been sprung.
Finally, I thought, putting on shirt as I made my way to the front yard... finally I'll have my chance. At long last I'll shoot a picture of the white squirrel and prove to the world (well, my immediate acquaintances anyway) that it exists.
When I Arrived in the front yard and inspected the sprung trap, I was surprised and disappointed. It did contain a varmint, and the beast was white(ish).

But rather than the White Squirrel, I found myself face to snout with a ghastly, coarse-haired, rat-tailed opossum.

It hissed at me as I lifted the trap from behind the bushes. I placed it on the gravel driveway to photograph it. I felt compelled to document the catch, even though this was not he quarry I was after.

I was simultaneously disgusted by and sorry for the pathetic marsupial. It was obviously well-fed and healthy. It was so large, in fact, that I wondered how it fit into the trap in the first place. But it was obviously frightened and confused, stuck so tight that it could scarcely turn it's head from side to side, let alone turn around in the steel cage.

It stared at me with black, beady eyes, like a cold cup of coffee, as I determined what was to be done with it. Finally, I decided to take it to the woods around a creek in a nearby park to set it free.

Laying a plastic trash bag down tin the back of our SUV, and placing the trap with opossum therein on top of the plastic, I drove to Roe Park. But as I drew close, I saw the park was crawling with suburbanites. The parking lot was full and the baseball and soccer fields were packed with people. Obviously, this was not a good place to release such a solitary specimen.

So I continued on. Presently I came to an area of new road construction, a bridge across a creek that was as yet lightly traveled. I put the steel cage near a stand of tall grass and opened the trap door to release the prisoner.

It wandered out into the grass and out of site. I put the trap back into the car, got into the driver's seat and prepared to return home. But as I turned the ignition switch, I looked up and saw the opossum trumbling along the road's curb.

Rather than make it's way toward the relative safety of the nearby creek, it had wandered back to the street. I snapped a few more pictures, then left as the opossum continued on toward the bridge and almost certain death under the wheel of the next passing car.

Opossoms aren't that bright.

tagged: white, squirrel, Moby, suburban, wildlife, animals, Johnson County, Kansas, opossum, trap

The hunt is on

Since spring I've been catching glimpses of him.

Driving up the street in the morning or coming home after work. A small white flash set against the dark green of the well-kept lawn a few houses up. A furry blur shooting into the shrubbery or up the opposite side of a giant oak tree.

The first few times I saw him, I wasn't even sure it was real. A trick of the lighting perhaps. Maybe just a piece of litter or debris blowing in the wind. But I kept watching. I kept looking each time I drove by the house near the top of the hill until I was sure I saw him.

The white squirrel.

I'd never seen a white squirrel before. I named him Moby. Yes, you're correct, a reference to the squirrely white 1990s-era techno music artist. I vowed to capture the white squirrel no matter what it took. But first I hit up the internet for a bit of research on my quarry.

It turns out that, while rare and uncommon, white squirrels aren't unknown in North America.

Although these squirrels are commonly referred to as albinos, most of them are likely non-albino squirrels that exhibit a rare white fur coloration known as leucism that is as a result of a recessive gene found within certain Eastern gray squirrel (Sciurus carolinensis) populations, and so technically they ought to be referred to as white squirrels, instead of albino.

Dr. Michael Stokes, a biology professor at Western Kentucky University, commented that the probable cause for the abundance of white squirrels on university campuses was due to them being originally introduced by someone:

We're not sure how they got here, but I'll tell you how it usually happens...When you see them, especially around a college campus or parks, somebody brought them in because they thought it would be neat to have white squirrels around.

Dr. Albert Meier, another biology professor at Western Kentucky University, added that:

…white squirrels rarely survive in the wild because they can't easily hide. But on a college campus, they are less likely to be consumed by other animals.

Armed with this information, I set about my hunt. I kept my camera in my car, a 200 mm lens attached. And as I passed by the yard each day, I kept my eye out for the opportunity to finally take a shot at the elusive prey.

Finally, my patience was paid off.

Here you can clearly see Moby's fluffy tail as he flees for cover in the shrubs at the side of the house.

Okay, as I look at that picture now, I can see that it might not be as clear to everyone where Moby is. Let me zoom it in a little for you...

There. See the tail sticking out from behind a branch? No? Still having trouble? Let me try this...

Okay. Perhaps the photographic evidence isn't yet as clear as I had thought.

But believe me, this isn't over. I shall not give up my hunt for the White Squirrel. I'll follow him into the neighbor's back yard if I have to. I'll follow him around the Horn, and around the Norway maelstrom, and around perdition's flames before I give him up.

tagged: white, squirrel, Moby, suburban, wildlife, animals, Johnson County, Kansas

Random Photo XXXI: Cloudscape

The thing about spring storms is that they can bring some pretty dramatic sky's. For better and worse.

This shot was taken from the top of a parking garage in southern Overland Park.

Click to enlarge.

tagged: weather, spring, cloud, storm, Kansas, Kansas City, earth

As seen in Kansas: Fr. Kapaun Memorial

Catholic leadership has been taking a lot of heat recently, and rightfully so. You can't give tacit (or even blatant) approval to pedophilia without getting some pretty serious backlash.

People just aren't going to put up with it. Nobody should.

I'm not Catholic, and I'm not going to make any excuses for any of that stuff. But I do think it's important to point out that there are a lot of people, Catholic and otherwise, that have contributed a lot of good to the world.

One person in particular was Father Emil Kapaun, a Korean War hero from the tiny Kansas hamlet of Pilsen.

Kapaun was the son of Czech immigrants, grew up on a small Kansas farm and graduated from Conception Abbey seminary college north of Kansas City.

He was serving as an Army chaplain in Korea when his army unit was overrun by a Chinese invasion force. Rather than retreating with the main Army force, he stayed behind with his battalion, ministering to wounded and giving medical aide.

Eventually, Kapaun and about 40 soldiers found themselves huddled in a trench surrounded by hundreds of Chinese. To the soldiers, who had heard rumors of the Chinese "take no prisoners" policy, surrender was suicide. But with the mortar rounds falling, Kapaun worked with a captured Chines officer to negotiate a surrender. He risked being shot in the back to stop the execution of wounded American soldiers at the hands of the Chinese.

Soldiers who survived the Chinese attack say Kapaun's negotiation and bravery is responsible for saving the lives of 40 men that day.

In the North Korean POW camp, Kapaun made it his duty to ministered to the other prisoners and keep up their morale. There are many accounts of him giving up his food rations and other personal items to fellow prisoners.

He died of exhaustion and pneumonia in the POW camp at the age of 35.

The Army awarded Kapaun the Distinguished Service Cross, and there is currently a bill in Congress to award Kapaun the Medal of Honor, the highest military decoration awarded by the United States government.

The Catholic Church declared Kapaun a Servant of God, and he has become a candidate for sainthood. If his canonization is approved, he will be only the third Catholic saint to be born in the United States.

In his hometown of Pilson, Kapaun is memorialized in a bronze statue depicting him helping a wounded soldier off the battlefield. There are also many schools, Army bases and chapels and other sites named in his honor throughout the state, country and even the world.

tagged: Kansas, history, Pilsen, Emil Kapaun, Korea, war, hero