"Sales [at the city-owned grocery store] were okay at first, but after the pandemic, crime rose and sales began to plummet."

"Police data show assaults, robberies and shoplifting in the immediate vicinity have been on an upward trend since 2020.... At a community meeting last year, Pierson played videos of security incidents so graphic he gave a warning in advance — a naked woman parading through the store throwing bags of chips to the ground, another person urinating in the vestibule and a couple fornicating on the lawn of the library in broad daylight.... [P]olice Maj. Chris Young said that even an 'overwhelming presence' of officers in recent months didn’t significantly decrease incidents.... Part of the problem is the city’s lack of a jail, Young said. The left-leaning council closed the previous facility in 2009 as a cost-saving measure... and so people arrested for minor crimes are quickly released... and head back to the same location, Young said. 'We typically have the same group of offenders every week that are recognizable by face and by name, just loitering and hanging out,' he said. 'A small percentage of people are ruining it for the rest of the community that deserves to go to their grocery store and their library.'"

From "Kansas City poured millions into a grocery store. It still may close. More cities and states are experimenting with the concept of city-owned grocery stores, but these experiments often don’t account for social issues" (WaPo).

This article is, I assume, prompted by Zohran Mamdani's pledge to open 5 city-owned grocery stores in NYC if he is elected mayor.

The Kansas City store lost $885,000 last year and "Despite a recent $750,000 cash infusion from the city, the shelves are almost bare."

"Myself and the first lady are both fine. I was tested. Those results, the preliminary results, has come back as a positive test. . . . Right now, I feel fine — no symptoms of any kind."

Said Mike Parson, the Governor of Missouri. He looks rather old, but he's only 65.

"I just don't understand," says the St. Louis Chief of Police, who breaks down and cries.

For the sudden descent into weeping, go to 2:50. It comes as he thanks God that the 4 police officers who were shot did not die. He recovers quickly and cries out: "Can we make sense of this? Can we make something out of something?"

Throwed rolls.

I learned about the throwed rolls at Lambert's Cafe...



... from the Oxford English Dictionary, which has this in the sidebar today:

"Throwed" — unless you're talking about "throwed silk" — is "colloq. or nonstandard," the past tense of "throw," and one of the quotations selected by the OED is:

1995 Midwest Living Apr. 185/1 Fun family restaurant and home of ‘throwed rolls’ (for laughs, owner Norm Lambert tosses warm dinner rolls around the cafe to customers).

The oldest published use of the word the OED found is:

1861 H. M. G. Smythies Daily Governess I. xiii. 113 He was a selfish brute, and she a throwed-away angel.

"Mizzou’s Interim President Promises to Address Racism Immediately."

It's law professor Michael A. Middleton, who says: "The time has come for us to acknowledge and address our daunting challenges and return to our relentless adherence to the University of Missouri’s mission to discover, disseminate, preserve, and apply knowledge." Good luck!

"We will no longer participate in any football-related activities until President Tim Wolfe resigns or is removed due to his negligence toward marginalized students’ experiences."

"On Sunday, MU football coach Gary Pinkel seemed to throw his entire team’s support behind the protests, tweeting a picture of his players along with the protest’s #ConcernedStudent1950 hashtag and the message: 'The Mizzou Family stands as one. We are united. We are behind our players.' After meeting with the team this morning, it is clear they do not plan to return to practice until Jonathan resumes eating."

From a new article in The Washington Post titled "With $1 million at stake, U. of Missouri’s president now taking protests seriously."

For reference: here's the post from 2 days ago where we first talked about the hunger strike.

UPDATE, Monday morning: Wolfe resigns.

"The swastika appeared overnight, drawn with human feces on a college dorm’s brand new white wall...."

"Now a graduate student says he is on a hunger strike and is willing to die unless the school’s president steps down."

“I already feel like campus is an unlivable space,” said [University of Missouri student Jonathan L. Butler, 25], who is African American. “So it’s worth sacrificing something of this grave amount, because I’m already not wanted here. I’m already not treated like I’m a human.... It’s just gotten to the point on campus where it’s really not safe for black students or really all marginalized students. Me personally, I won’t feel safe on campus until there is an urgency that things need to change and be taken seriously. It’s just a very hostile environment for black students... We are facing a lot of negativity and oppression on a daily basis... And then you students go to a diversity forums, you see them write letters, you see them write e-mails and send tweets and do all these things, we bare our souls and tell very painful stories but … our lives are still not valued. At some point, after spending all that energy telling people that I deserve to be recognized as a human, like my existence matters, at a certain point you are putting people in a corner and you keep poking them with a stick, things escalate until people feel like they are hurt."

The linked article, in The Washington Post, describes some other incidents. The scrawler of the swastika is unknown. 

Commenting dispairingly and disparagingly...

... on the students at the University of Missouri Law School.

One man's mural is another man's wall.

The vice chairwoman of the Missouri Republican Party is photographed writing on a business card that she holds, for support, against a wall that happens to be a Thomas Hart Benton mural.

The mural... “A Social History of the State of Missouri” is one of the most famous murals painted by Benton, an American Regionalist artist who traveled the state in search of authenticity for his subjects. This 13-panel narrative work, completed in 1936, was intended to captured the Missourian spirit and history. It incorporated 235 individual portraits and everyday scenes, from settlers raising a log cabin to the famous James Brothers robberies to slave mistreatment....

A commenter at the NYT snarks: "This incident perhaps says as much about 'the social history of the State of Missouri' as the painting itself."

I like to visit state capitols and can see that I need to get down to Columbia Jefferson City, Missouri some time. [Columbia is a state capital, just not the capital of Missouri, even though the linked article has the dateline Columbia, Missouri.]

Images.

How can you be in a building with rooms like this...



... and think a wall is just a wall? At least she didn't pee on it. Or have sex up against it.

At the Actual Hollister Café...

... enjoy your Sunday morning.

ADDED: The post title is based on the title in the magazine on the table: "The Actual Hollister/A California town and its name." It's a nonfiction piece by Dave Eggers. You need a New Yorker subscription to read it. Excerpt:

The rise of the Hollister brand has been especially strange to me, because it was my great-great-grandfather T. S. Hawkins who helped found the town of Hollister. Growing up, I was confronted daily by his white-bearded face, in an old photograph that hung in our living room in Illinois. A few feet away, his rifle, which he carried from Missouri to California, rested over our mantel.

The real story of Hollister begins in Marion County, Missouri, twenty miles from Mark Twain’s home town of Hannibal, in 1836. This is when T. S. Hawkins was born, the eldest of nine children, his parents farmers, their people having travelled from Ireland and England and Scotland to the early Virginia settlements.

The Hawkins family lived in two adjoining log cabins with one roof covering both. The boys of the family slept in the attic, near the clapboard roof, and listened to the tapping of the rain in the summer. “The boards made a good roof to turn off the rain,” Hawkins wrote in his autobiography, “Some Recollections of a Busy Life,” self-published in 1913....

Love the double "L" in "travelled."

Is it possible to get "Some Recollections of a Busy Life"? Maybe!

"Two men indicted last week on federal weapons charges allegedly had plans to bomb the Gateway Arch..."

"... and to kill St. Louis County Prosecuting Attorney Robert McCulloch and Ferguson Police Chief Tom Jackson — the Post-Dispatch has learned."

In that light, consider the new New Yorker cover:

"Two San Francisco radio stations have put the kibosh on Lorde's song 'Royals' until the World Series is over."

"Why send any positive vibes to Kansas City?... Why not give the song a rest? No one is going to get hurt over it."

The weirdest part is that the song, which doesn't seem to be about baseball, was, according to Lorde, speaking last year, inspired by a 1976 photo of George Brett:

"I'd been kind of thinking about writing that song for a while and been pulling together a couple little lines here and there, and I had this image from the National Geographic of this dude signing baseballs... He was a baseball player and his shirt said Royals. I was like, I really like that word, because I'm a big word fetishist. I'll pick a word and I'll pin an idea to that."

Can this lady, a citizen of New Zealand, sing "The Star-Spangled Banner"? She's pretty much going to have to now, right?

"He had a sandwich in his hand, and they thought it was a gun. It’s like Michael Brown all over again."

Said a young woman who said she is the cousin of the teenager who was shot to death by a St. Louis police officer last night, touching off new protests. The 18-year-old, Vonderrit Myers Jr., had a gun, the police say, and he not only charged at the officer, he shot at the officer at least 3 times and was trying to keep firing, but the gun jammed. The cop shot 17 times.

Jackie Williams, 47, said Myers was his nephew... “My nephew was coming out of a store from purchasing a sandwich. Security was supposedly searching for someone else. They Tased him... I don’t know how this happened, but they went off and shot him 16 times. That’s outright murder.”...

An attorney, Jerryl Christmas, suggested, "There is no epidemic of black officers shooting white kids, but there is an epidemic of white officers shooting black kids." He said police are too quick to resort to deadly force....

"It's not the 'Hall of Universally Loved Missourians.'"

"It’s the Hall of Famous Missourians."