Missouri town asks University of Kansas to get rid of mascot

The tiny Missouri town of Osceola has a simple request.

It wants the University of Kansas to drop its mascot, the Jayhawk.

Oh, and another thing: Get rid of that big K.

“No citizen of the City of Osceola or the alumni of the University of Missouri shall ever capitalize the ‘k’ in ‘kansas’ or ‘kU,’ as neither is a proper name or a proper place,” Osceola’s Board of Aldermen ordered in a resolution passed last week. The resolution marked the upcoming 150th anniversary of a Civil War raid in which an abolitionist Kansas militia — “a group of domestic terrorist(s) referred to as ‘the jayhawkers’” — burned down four of the city’s five buildings and executed several Osceola residents.

The resolution, it may shock you to learn, probably won’t change anything, as its framer already knows.

“I don’t expect them to do anything,” resident Rick Reed, who brought the resolution before the aldermen, told the Columbia Daily Tribune, referring to university officials. “They are so arrogant and uppity.” 

Here is the Tribune’s account of the raid:

"On Sept. 22, 1861, Osceola was a prosperous city of 2,500. The town lived on Osage River commerce and was split between Unionists and secessionists. U.S. Sen. Jim Lane led his band of about 2,000 “jayhawkers” in the Kansas Brigade to the city for a two-day orgy of looting, arson, drunkenness and murder. A dozen men were executed on the town square. When the attackers left — taking away all the property and livestock they could move — the town was a smoking ruin, and fewer than 200 people remained. The town has never again had as many people as it did before the raid."

The Civil War ostensibly ended in 1865, yet lives on as a bitter rivalry colloquially known as the “Border War” between the University of Missouri and the University of Kansas — or “kU,” as Osceola now officially calls it. (Disclosure: This reporter is a University of Missouri graduate, bound here to follow Los Angeles Times style.)

“Have you seen the Jayhawk?” University of Kansas director of university relations Todd Cohen asked this reporter, who has, in fact, spotted the Jayhawk at several football games against the Missouri Tigers. “The Jayhawk is a big blue bird that wears boots. We don’t think that anybody would confuse that with a terrorist. But we admit to terrorizing Missouri on the basketball court for some time now.” (True.)

This seems to be a common refrain. Another University of Kansas representative made a similar comment to the Columbia Daily Tribune.

Cohen was also quick to point out that KU is located in Lawrence, Kan., which was burned to the ground by rebel Missourian William Quantrill in an 1863 raid undertaken as revenge for the Osceola raid. The attack was memorialized in Ang Lee’s 1999 film, “Ride with the Devil,” and remains a politically incorrect point of pride for a few cantankerous Missouri fans.

And no, Kansas will not be changing its mascot.

“It’s all in good fun,” Cohen said.

Maybe.

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--Matt Pearce in Kansas City (…Missouri)
twitter / mattdpearce

Photo: The town of Osceola, Mo., has taken issue with the University of Kansas mascot, the Jayhawk, even aside from the basketball team's treatment of the University of Missouri's team. Credit: AP / Charlie Neibergall, File

'Jersey Shore' gets tax rebate from state of New Jersey

Call it Snooki Capitalism.

New Jersey legislators are pitching a fit after the state’s Economic Development Authority approved a $420,000 tax rebate this week for the first season of MTV’s “Jersey Shore.”

“Let us just hope against hope that New Jersey taxpayers don’t end up paying for Snooki’s bail the next time she is arrested,” state Sen. Paul Sarlo told the New Jersey Star-Ledger, referring to one of the show’s stars. “What a terrible, terrible and misguided waste."

“Jersey Shore” — either an engrossing reality show or the end of Western civilization as we know it, depending on whom you ask — received the rebate retroactively for 2009 as part of a legislative program intended to drive business to the state by exempting a portion of filming expenses. (MTV did not immediately return a request for comment.)

The show qualified for the program not because of its content, but by meeting a program rule requiring that at least 50% of production expenses happen inside New Jersey. It was one of six productions to receive the rebate, including “Law & Order: SVU,” which got a $9-million rebate, and two live-wrestling events titled “Hell in a Cell,” which got $400,000.

"There is no discrimination [for] content unless it’s considered pornographic or obscene," Erin Gold, a spokeswoman for the development authority, told The Times. She added: “We just administer the program."

That would mean that the show got a 20% tax break for the costs of filming inside New Jersey between August 2009 and September 2009 — i.e. a tax break for the cost of filming first-season moments such as Snooki getting punched in the face at a Seaside Heights bar.

“The governor’s opinions about 'Jersey Shore' and its New Yorker cast are well-known,” Gov. Chris Christie’s office said in a news release. “They are phonies and the show is a false portrayal of New Jersey and our shore communities. He has also been clear about his belief that film tax-credit programs are not the most effective way to spur economic growth throughout the state.”

Not everyone agrees, including Seaside Heights Mayor P. Kenneth Hershey, who told the Star-Ledger: “The boost to the economy certainly shows. When they are here this place is busy. A lot of the business folks here appreciate that.”

Production spending in New Jersey totaled $2.1 million, according to documents obtained from the development authority by The Times.

Another number of note: "Jersey Shore's" total production costs — including production outside New Jersey and not including post-production costs — was $3 million, according to state documents. (Between July 2008 and April 2009, it cost $69.5 million to make a season of "Law and Order SVU.")

Without an ability to veto the funding, as the governor’s office has said, the outrage may now be a moot point anyway; the show, entering its fifth season, seems poised to stay for the long haul, and the tax program, set to expire in 2015, already has a full slate of productions lined up to receive credits.

“This will be the only award for 'Jersey Shore' or their production company,” Gold said.

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--Matt Pearce
twitter.com/mattdpearce

Photo:  The cast members of MTV's "Jersey Shore" pose at their television home in Seaside Heights, N.J. Credit: Mel Evans / Associated Press

Missouri River takes farmland, as nation watches fires, storms

It’s been a tough summer for Middle America, which has been raked by a devil’s parade of tornadoes, droughts and wildfires that have only made hard times harder.

But amid all of these is a multibillion-dollar disaster it seems no one's talking about — a massive flood engorging the Missouri River Valley that began in June, stretched through more than a half-dozen states and may last until October.

Hundreds of thousands of acres have been flooded or damaged, including some of the nation’s best farmland along the river’s floodplains in northwestern Missouri, which were expected to yield gorgeous crops of corn and soy before the waters came. Iowa faces tens of millions of dollars to repair I-29, one of the state’s main arteries for interstate traffic. Damage to levees and dams could reach $1 billion.

And as river levels slowly drop, residents across multiple Midwestern states now find themselves competing for relief funds from an increasingly strained and tight-fisted federal government that’s staring down a record number of billion-dollar disasters this year.

Missouri’s lieutenant governor faces stripper issues

It started with a photo published in St. Louis' Riverfront Times -- a cellphone snap of Missouri's Republican lieutenant governor, Peter Kinder, grinning with former Penthouse Pet Tammy Chapman at a pantless bar in St. Louis.
 
The shot initially prompted an awkward nondenial from Kinder's office. (Kinder is unmarried.) "I really highly doubt the lieutenant governor is going to a bar where they don't wear pants on a night when they don't wear pants," Kinder's spokesman told the Riverfront Times, which runs ads for the bar that proclaim "Every night's a pantless party."

But then Chapman told the Riverfront Times that Kinder had indeed been at the pantless bar earlier this year.

She added that Kinder, the GOP's odds-on favorite for Missouri's 2012 gubernatorial race, used to be obsessed and physically aggressive with her in the 1990s, when she was a stripper. She said that when she saw him again -- when the photo was snapped -- he asked her to live in a campaign-financed condo.

Kinder denied the condo and harassment charges, but it didn't much matter; the nation's latest sexless sex scandal -- the most recent in a series featuring New York Reps. Anthony Weiner and Chris Lee -- was already on.

Though the general election is still more than a year away, the controversy has cast a pall over the GOP's hopes of retaking the Missouri governor's office, currently held by an unusually popular Democratic governor, Jay Nixon.

Mementos scattered by Joplin tornado gradually returned home

Part of the struggle of recovering from disasters is not just rebuilding for the future, but also preserving the past.

Two months ago, after an EF-5 tornado took Joplin to the brink of annihilation — damaging or destroying roughly 8,000 structures and killing 160 people — Missouri resident Abi Almandinger started collecting lost photos and mementos, and posting them on Facebook in the hope that they'd somehow find their way back to their owners.

A Los Angeles Times story about her at the time began:

"On Friday morning in tornado-ravaged Joplin, Abi Almandinger was running perhaps the most peculiar search-and-rescue mission in town.

The 38-year-old Carthage, Mo., woman was looking not for victims, not for a wallet, purse or pet, but for strangers' lost photos and mementoes.

At Christ's Church, just a few blocks outside Joplin's disaster zone, pastor Tim Chambers gave Almandinger some things people had found on the church lawn, including a water-warped Polaroid of a young woman dated Christmas 1979 — and a wrinkled and yellowed discharge letter for Staff Sgt. Floyd E. Huff, dated Dec. 21, 1945, and signed by Harry S. Truman." Read more.

Since then, Almandinger has reconnected thousands of photos and documents with their owners — including Huff’s discharge letter.

"Somebody in California [who saw the story in the L.A. Times] called a distant cousin in Arkansas, who called a distant cousin in Colorado — who happened to be Floyd Huff’s son," she said.

She delivered the memento by hand, a moment captured by an NBC affiliate in Kansas City.

"I feel so honored just to be able to give them back just a small piece of their family history," Almandinger said of her work with tornado survivors. "They all want to tell me their stories, but it’s difficult to hear about the tragedies they’ve had to go through."

She tries to make her deliveries by hand, on Tuesdays. This Tuesday, for example, she said she'd been "in tears all day." The delivery of a single 8.5 x 11 photo of local woman's son hit her particularly hard.

"I come to find out that both of her parents died in the storm, and I found her son is going to be a senior in high school," Almandinger said.

The recovery in Joplin is far from over, and so is her mission: She said she’d keep uploading and delivering lost photos for "as long as it takes."

Her original Facebook page is now accompanied by a separate album of success stories. 

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-- Matt Pearce

Twitter / mattdpearce

Photo: A discharge letter signed by Harry Truman was among the mementos found scattered about after the Joplin tornado; Abi Almandinger has now found its rightful owner. Credit: Matt Pearce / For the Times