Few billboards in town that were not bought up by the multilevel marketer Google Fiber.

Seeing this billboard inspired me to open my own all-natural breast cancer prevention clinic. During the daylight hours, women are welcome to receive a preventative dose of sunlight on my driveway, absolutely free. Please arrive topless for the best effect.

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I could totally turn this blog into a display of old pictures and still be happy with it. Browsing through the old photos always makes me wonder why people’s faces changed so much since the 40’s and 50’s. When was the last time you saw a person who looked like this:

“Roy Allison Roberts (more photos) was a managing editor, president, editor and general manager of The Kansas City Star who guided the paper during its influential period during the Presidencies of Harry S. Truman and Dwight D. Eisenhower”. Looking at Mr.Roberts’s photo I get a sense of a determined decisive person who knows what he is doing. Granted, this impression may be completely wrong, he may have been a total incompetent, but that’s what I think when I look at the picture.

Now let’s take a look at the face of the current publisher of Star Mark Zieman. For all I know, Mr.Zieman may be a future Nobel Prize Laureate but his face doesn’t exactly exude business confidence, assurance, decisiveness and drive. Maybe he is a nice guy and a great person but who do you want to represent your business at a tough time – a man who looks like a nice guy, or a man with a face of a bulldog who looks like his is ready to kick your ass and shove that cigar you-know-where if things are not done, deadlines are not met and orders are not followed.

Even getting fired is more acceptable from a Mr.Roberts-looking guy, than from a an insincerely apologetic person who looks like Mr.Zieman. No amount of cigar smoke can compensate.

Does the path from bosses like Mr.Roberts – tough, larger-than-life personalities, to people like Mr.Zieman – nicer, more intellectual types, reflect the transformation of businesses like Kansas City Star from an influential force in the city to a thin folded stack of paper with color photos and crappy articles? I don’t know the answer but I thought it was a neat theory.

This concludes my amateur face-character analysis session. Make sure to look at the other photos of Roy A.Roberts where is featured on the cover of the Time magazine or pictured talking to President Truman.

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Let me preface this by saying: I despise ugly video-bloggers. If you don’t look like this but still have something important to say, please do everyone a favor and type it; your wife lied to you when she said you were handsome, you are not. That said, my charity participation gives me a temporary excuse to use any means possible to collect the money and help out the people with prostate cancer.

So far my team has almost $500 collected and even more pledged. Thanks to your generous support and your sudden unexplained interest in Google Ads on this website I collected $50 so far and another $90 was donated to me and the team as a direct result of my various forms of begging for money on Facebook, Twitter and in person. As a cheap person I feel your pain, but extend your hand and feel the pain of prostate cancer (not there…little lower…still  lower…to the left…right here…ooooh) and you will understand why I defaced my own face by growing a mustache.

As the Month of Movember progressed along, my uncanny resemblance of a certain celebrity became obvious.

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8W-dD-hSPgc

I am sure after seeing this you immediately recognized my mustache-double, but below is a clue for the slow ones among you.

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Don’t know how to break bad news to an unfortunate father-to-be? Southwest Boulevard offers a good conversation starter:

Just drive him past this billboard and tell him your pregnancy test looked just like the one in the photo this morning.
Good luck with “your options”…

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Couple of weeks ago unbeknown to you the Russian population of this Metro Area has doubled for a few days. A surprising number of Russian-speaking coaches, parents and participants arrived to Kansas City for the U.S. Fencing North American Cup Tournament. There were of course many others (some of them even Americans :-)) but the number of foreign languages spoken at the Bartle Hall that weekend was indicative of a huge European influence on the sport of fencing. Among the participants was my niece from New York City which gave me a good reason to see the sport for myself. I spent two days at Bartle Hall watching and taking pictures, and while my photos are nothing to write home about, the people with good cameras probably had better things to do, so this is all I have.

Fencing may not be as popular as other sports but it’s lightning fast, physically demanding, psychologically challenging and beautifully choreographed. It doesn’t hurt that fencing may be an asset for college admissions. For kids like mine who don’t seem to enjoy team sports this is an attractive option. There are a few local clubs in Kansas City, one was started by a famous Russian Coach who since moved on to become a head coach at Ohio State and the other one still has a Russian Coach.
Here are just a few out of almost 300 photos I took with my slow camera.

In this video I slowed down the motion a little just to demonstrate ballet-like quality of fencing.

httpvh://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xPDpdezHTx0

This video is a short clip of one of the final bouts.

httpvh://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-H2nCganaWc

By the way, commonly used word touché originates in fencing (not to confuse with the Yiddish word tuches which means something entirely different).

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