Heidi’s recent post about the plague of abandoned pants here in river city got me to thinking about my days working Downtown and some of the freaks that were fixtures, especially since my bus stop at 12th and Main seemed to be freak central. Burb dwellers and Easterners, bring it!

ABCDE ABODE - Some sort of branding freak got a hold of a stencil and painted it all over Downtown, as well as on his own line of T-shirts. A couple of tags are under Bartle Hall near Broadway and I-70. A Bible verse is of course included (Can I have an Amen?) but it escapes me right now.

Flag bearer - This guy carries a big flag with Jesus on it, and runs around the streets in a shiny track uniform. He even pops into the food courts at City Center Square and Town Pavillion for a quick lap.

Preacher man - A little bit of Times Square in KC, this guy lugs his PA system to 12th and Main and sermonizes for all the passers by.

Toynbee - Even here in the flyover states we got game with the latest bizarro phenom, mystery tiles placed in streets around North and South America.

Last night was an execellent show at Davey’s Uptown with The Meat Purveyors. They are great, punkish bluegrass band from Austin, fronted by a foul-mouthed broad who threw back lots of drinks but managed to stay just vertical enough to finish out the set

Several cool apps are available to enable your Mac to interact with your Bluetooth mobile phone.

• Salling Clicker is the most famous of the bunch. It has several options for using the phone to control a computer, and works with most Sony Ericsson phones and some Series 60 phones from Nokia and Siemens.
• Romeo is a Salling alternative for Sony Ericsson phones.
  
• PhoneAgent and PhoneManager are a pair of phone utilities for Sony Ericsson and Nokia, respectively. Features include contact management, picture and ringtone upload/download, and phone customization.
• BluePhoneMenu is a small caller ID app that also shows the phone’s signal strength and battery level.

“This week, both John Kerry and Wesley Clark are making campaign appearance with the guys who saved their lives in Vietnam. Meanwhile, president Bush is campaigning with a guy that once took a math test for him.” -Conan O’Brien

Thanks to Digital Catharsis, here is a roundup of late night comedy quotes from Moist and Meaty.

Finally switched this heap o’ junk over to WordPress, from my own home grown system. Home ownership and summertime fun leaves little time for extra-curricular geekery. WordPress is a great new blog system built on PHP and MySQL. It’s super easy, stable, doesn’t use Perl, and is adding features very quickly. Also includes the usual suspects like comments, RSS feeds, blogrolls, etc.

Some photos for your desktop. Various random snapshots from around Kansas City, California, and Europe. Enjoy….

The new liberal radio network is now up and running. It's only on a few stations so far, but the live feed is available online and on XM satellite radio. Al Franken is of course great. Be sure to check out Randi Rhodes in the afternoons. It was great listening to her ream Ralplh Nader. Web site and audio feed are at www.airamericaradio.com and Al Franken has new weblog at ofrankenfactor.com.