KC Confidential

The handwriting’s on the wall…

And sooner, rather than later. Vaunted KU basketball coach Bill Self is not long for this world – that being Lawrence – says sports handicapper Craig Glazer of Stanford & Sons.

“It just makes sense, he’s pretty much done all he can do there in college basketball,” Glazer says. “We all know his marriage is in trouble and probably won’t survive. And he just has that NBA persona. He’s great with the media. He’s an attractive person. And KU probably has more players in the NBA than anybody else in college basketball.

“Bill has a knack of getting all these one-and-done, 18 year-olds who go on to the NBA and get drafted in the first round. He’s become almost a professional, college coach. He’s the king of one-and-done players like Andrew Wiggins. The McDonald’s All Americans want to play for Bill Self because he’s proven that his teams are very good and they get lots of national attention. Continue reading →

As sleepy smaller cities go, Lawrence ranks right up there with the best of em…

At least when it comes to murder. That is until last summer, says Lawrence police spokesman  Sgt. Trent  McKinley.

“Since July we’ve had five homicides,” McKinley says. “And we had a couple that miraculously did not end up resulting in deaths but were very, very serious. Prior to that we went a couple years without any.”

Leading to the obvious – yet unanswerable question – why?

“I’ve been asked that several times lately,” McKinley says. “But in all of these – with the exception of the one in March that we don’t know yet – these were people who were known to each other.”

In other words, just the luck of the draw.

That said, some locals point the finger of blame westward. Continue reading →

What’s that expression?

Don’t believe anything you read (or hear) and only half of what you see. Sounds like a perfect fit for what Stanford & Sons main man Craig Glazer says he was told about The Jones Pool downtown this past weekend at the Woodside Health & Tennis Club in Westwood.

“Apparently they closed the business quietly right after the summer,” Glazer says. “I know they must have had some issues, because last summer I didn’t hear anything about it. No promotions like the one I got Jimmie “JJ “Walker to host two or three summers ago. And some Chiefs players had a couple of events there that I went to, but I didn’t hear anything last summer, it was really quiet. And I was talking to a staffer at Woodside and he said, ‘Did you hear that the Jones Pool closed?’ And he told me they’re going to turn it into some kind of 24Hour Fitness thing.”

Hold it right there Continue reading →

A year ago KU was suffering from a bad case of, is Bill Self‘s marriage on the rocks…

Here’s what I wrote about it last summer on Lawrence Confidential:

“That Kansas basketball coach Bill Self allegedly had been kicked out of his seven-figure Lawrence home by wife Cindy and was holed up in one of the town’s ritziest condo buildings.

“And that – almost more astonishing than even that – he allegedly had been seeing one of my nearby neighbors in West Lawrence.

“That’s the talk anyway and it’s the talk of the town.”

Talk of the town, indeed. Continue reading →

Still no return calls from the KC Jeweler alleged to be in dire straights with the law… 

Which is understandable in that while it’s believed something is going down behind the scenes, as experts have explained, these sorts of things can unfold in many different ways over considerable periods of time. And were KC Confidential to literally barge in, in the middle of things, who knows what direction the situation could spin off into.

As for how the story came to light, another Kansas City jeweler claiming to be owed money by the jeweler in question was the source. Continue reading →

From first to worst?

There’s a reason Kansas City will not be getting the 2016 Republican Convention and it’s a lousy one, insiders say. Because KC mayor Sly James – a Dem by any other name – kicked “public affairs and corporate campaigns expert” Cathy Nugent – a Republican – to the curb in the city’s bid to land the big dance for the Cowtown.

“I don’t think Kansas City has a chance in hell of getting the Republican Convention now because of the way they played the game,” says one prominent civic leader. “They didn’t play the game ethically. They took an individual who spent two years trying to get the Republican Convention for Kansas City and then the mayor fucked up and got somebody else and took the process in house with another local Democrat and hired Kit Bond‘s wife to be a token Republican.” Continue reading →

Guilty as charged…

Regular readers know every now and so often I saddle up and take a look at what’s left of Kansas City’s one-and-only alternative newsweekly, The Pitch. And, full disclosure, I did lead the charge during the Pitch’s key formative years evolving it from a record store rag into a news and entertainment weekly prior to a certain someone breaking their word and hanging me out to dry.

However those days are long gone and at this stage of the game there continues to be a genuine concern for the well-being and survival of The Pitch, and thus the future of alternative news and entertainment journalism in KC. Oh sure, we’ve got the Internet and me and Tony and Greg Hall and Jim Fitzpatrick and a smattering of comers and goers here and there.

And while that’s likely the future in some sense, none of us – not even all of us combined – come close to providing the wide spectrum of more comprehensive, quality reporting and content that even what’s left of The Pitch provides.I say, “what’s left,” because at only 36 pages a week and a scant 16 pages of what appear to be paid ads (well under the 50 percent minimum needed for survival), the handwriting’s on the wall.

Continue reading →

Think clash of the titans…

For more than 20 years inventor dude Mike Valentine‘s radar detector the Valentine One has more-or-less been the undisputed champion in the speeding ticket avoidance industry. An industry that came of age during the Richard Nixon administration in 1974 via the The Emergency Highway Energy Conservation Act which required states to enact a 55 miles-per-hour speed limit to receive federal funding for highway repair.

Now suddenly, according to a Car & Driver magazine’s latest radar test, the company Valentine helped start, Escort has overtaken the longtime champ.

Or has it?

“This magazine’s recent comparison of radar detectors reached an odd conclusion- that the elimination of false alarms ‘provides a higher level of real-world protection’ than you’d get from detailed information about those alarms,” Valentine writes in a full page ad in the April issue of Car & Driver. “I disagree strongly. Here’s why. GPS false alarm blocking systems fail the Murphy’s Law test.” Continue reading →