[chesterfield]
For awhile, anybody crunching the numbers for pizza in the metro needed only go up to 3.14. That’s pi, for the math-challenged among us, including Yours Truly. Pi also is the name of the popular bistro-style pizzeria, Pi, of which there are locations Downtown, in U. City and in Kirkwood. But soon another kind of pi is coming: a smallish chain with locations in Chesterfield and Richmond Heights, Pie Five. Wow! A pizza with five slices, for odd couples? No, knucklehead (and that, for once, would be me). Pie Five got its name for promising to get your pizza to you in five minutes or less. The store in Chesterfield is slated to open at 17215 Chesterfield Airport Road, just east of Boone’s Crossing, in May. The Richmond Heights store will be located at 1600 S. Hanley Road, across from The Home Depot. But, when? Soon, we hope. More Pie Fives than the two we mentioned could pop up ’round the metro eventually, maybe even like mushrooms. Meanwhile, if you have a real hankering for the corporate product, Pie Five is a subsidiary of Pizza Inn, known for its buffet-style pizza in-store. And, they deliver. But not this far. The closest Pizza Inns are in Jackson, Salem and Rolla.
[clayton]
At this juncture, word from a swivel chair in the county seat is that the county is officially out of the plan to fund a proposed new football stadium, on the riverfront and north of the dome where the Rams have been playing. Talk about a concept seemingly as up-in-the-air as a mission to Mars. Who knows how many more seasons our somewhat-beloved NFL franchise will remain in the StL? Will they be back in L.A. in time for vendors to charge upwards of $25 for ice water, which is still way less than the going rate in hell? Perish the thought, or good riddance? In any event, Steve Stenger, our new county exec, says he had a recent conversation with the governor that boiled down to: No tax money from county residents will be allocated to fund a new stadium. Stenger has left open whether the county council would one day ask voters to approve a tax increase. Depends on how many folks from the towns we talk about would be willing to dig any deeper for what a whole slew of them might consider a boondoggle. With the county out of the picture, at least for the time being, that leaves out the richest part of our region to dun any further. Pick your reaction: A. Harumpf. B. Yippee!
[kirkwood]
Becky Schoenig’s 2015 Ford Fusion disappeared from her St. Charles driveway on the last Monday in March. But not for long. It reappeared Wednesday, April 1. No, not an elaborate (and a little mean) April Fool’s prank. Crooks took it. But thank ‘car’-ma and Facebook for the rapid return of the black hybrid vehicle … complete with a new red racing stripe and raspberry-red rims. Schoenig, who owns the HotPot eatery, caffeinery and smoothie place at 11215 Manchester Road in Kirkwood, did something all-too-few people do on the social media site: She made it useful by promptly posting a picture of her missing car. (What? Not just what her kids had for breakfast? Really?) Small world that Facebook has made ours. A friend of a friend saw the ‘suspicious’ vehicle in Dogtown and alerted the cops. Thieves, apparently, returned the car, but not without the new detailing and other additions, like the heavy smell of cigarettes and pot. Schoenig’s hero? A biker, Martin Sexton. He now has a smoothie flavor at HotPot named after him, although he jokes that ‘Sexton On Wheels’ might better have been a local brewery product. And the lucky car owner has had her car re-detailed. No more evidence of smoking. And no, the red didn’t stay on. The crooks’ new paint job didn’t survive the car wash. Too bad these crooks didn’t work on the MTV show Pimp My Ride.
[maplewood]
Not everybody in Maplewood knows your name. So, the ‘tourism director’ in this fair city wanted to change that. Rachelle L’Ecuyer decided that each and every visitor should have a name tag. What’s more, an edible one, made out of chocolate (pictured above). Sound too good to be true? Well, it was … we received the news release on April 1, and when we clicked on the link inside, it said ‘April Fools!’ Ahem, we weren’t born yesterday—although many of us look like it was only 21 years ago— so we soon savvied that the marketers in Maplewood were at it again. What’s in a name? In this case, Kakao Chocolate. Yes, the chocolate name tag was real, but the initiative is a ruse. The impish L’Ecuyer and her ilk were behind this grand illusion. A few years ago on April 1, she kinda almost but not by a long shot hoodwinked us into believing that the streets department was going to start mixing asphalt with the scent of maple syrup. ‘Somewhere between Mayberry and Metropolis,’ indeed. Props to L’Ecuyer, whose official title is ‘community development director.’
[st. louis]
SLU is up to the ‘Grand Challenges’ presented by today’s rapidly changing world. The university’s Parks College of Engineering, Aviation & Technology is among more than 120 U.S. engineering schools that have committed to this transformative movement put forth by the federal government and the U.N. A letter of commitment from the engineering deans to President Barack Obama announced plans to educate a new generation of engineers expressly equipped to tackle some of today’s most pressing issues. ‘Grand Challenges’ were identified through U.S. and U.N. initiatives, and SLU officials say they were preparing students to address these monumental challenges before they became a top priority. Parks College has been one of the 20 founding schools participating in the Grand Challenge Scholars Program since its inception in 2010. One aspect is to educate students to be entrepreneurs, not mere technical experts. Research underway here ranges from a touchbased system for measuring blood-alcohol levels to providing clean water in underdeveloped countries.
[town & country]
Ferguson may be yielding some positive results that we may not have anticipated. I’m sure some of you have been pulled over for speeding by ‘the finest’ in small county communities like Charlack. Uh, where? It’s a tiny municipality notorious for its speed traps on I-170. Not to name more names, but it’s one of several towns that have been criticized for raising more than their share of operating budgets through specious fines. Well, Town & Country’s own John Diehl, Republican Speaker of the State House, hopes to put the kibosh on this. It is part of the shakeout from the Ferguson crisis over an unarmed black man’s shooting, when it also was alleged that the north county community was among those that excessively fine residents for ordinance violations. Diehl announced that the bill would address inequities by permitting a municipality to raise only a certain percentage of its budget through fines. At present, that ceiling is 30 percent; discussion in Jeff City could lead to lowering that percentage to 10. In addition, municipal court judges would no longer be able to ‘pile on’ by citing alleged offenders with additional fines, such as ‘failure to appear’ on a traffic charge.
[webster groves]
And now, for sports news … ‘Webster University won its third straight Final Four championship recently. The team is undefeated against all opponents for three years in a row …’ ‘Hey, wait,’ says someone. ‘By my calendar, it’s April. Isn’t March Madness, like, over?’ Well, someone, if you’d politely have let us finish, you’d know we were talking about Webster’s chess team. You see, Webster’s team is quite the phenom, and we’d wager that any single one of these intellectuals could single-handedly beat the uniforms off an entire NCAA basketball or NFL football team’s starting squad in a chess contest. Yeah, their front lines are itty-bitty and consist only of lowly pawns, but neither extreme height nor fancy footwork is what keeps these contestants in the game. Coach Susan Polgar would tell you her team’s strengths lie in somehow anticipating your next move, if not the one after that and maybe a few more for good measure. Polgar finds herself in quite the pantheon: She is the only female coach to have won five straight national championships in any sport. The three most recent came at Webster, the two before that were at Texas Tech. Her shadow looms large: One of the four teams competing in NYC in the Final Four (aka ‘the president’s cup challenge’) was Texas Tech. Notably, the other competitors did not hail from Yale, Harvard or M.I.T. Rounding out the field were University of Texas and the Baltimore County campus of the University of Maryland.
