Commentary

When are we here in the Sunflower State going to bow to reality and change the Kansas nickname? After all, the “sun” in “sunflower” connotes bright, open light: “Ah, the Sunflower State! Why, this must be a place where a plethora of sunshine permeates the plains with perpetual political openness!”

The state of Kansas has a $290 million budget hole to fill.

All 165 state legislators are up for election this year, so the Legislature adjourned without finding a more permanent fix to recurring revenue shortages and left it up to Gov. Sam Brownback to make necessary spending cuts.

This commentary falls between Earth Day, April 22, and the anniversary of the Moon Landing on July 20. Both days mark a series of events that took place in 1969 and 1970, among them several efforts to create a flag to represent the planet Earth. There was already a flag for the United Nations as well as several concepts for a flag to represent the world or humanity in general. Now, just as people saw the earth from space for the first time, some wondered if there should be a flag for the planet as an entity rather than just a collection of peoples.

Richard Russo is a magnificent storyteller whose delightfully flawed characters are the people who often go unseen. In his new novel, Everybody’s Fool, Russo resurrects such characters from his beguiling 1993 novel Nobody’s Fool picking them up 10 years later, still in the fictional small upstate New York town of North Bath.   

As a student of online political writing, I’ve sometimes run across the term “arble-garble.”

This edition of A Musical Life originally aired on May 15, 2015.

-

William Flynn is assistant professor of jazz guitar at Wichita State University. He is involved in a variety of jazz-based musical ensembles including Driver, Friendly Skeleton, and The Songbook Project.

In the first place, The Huntsman: Winter's War, which is supposed to be some kind of sequel to Snow White and the Huntsman, which had Kristen Stewart as Snow White, has neither Kristen Stewart nor anybody else as Snow White, whose birth is announced at the very end of the movie. It also kills off just about anybody who might have a role in the real story of Snow White, so the creators of this strange trilogy are going to have to create a whole new cast for the third movie in order to get to the Snow White story at all.

I do not wish to be another of the hangers-on over the sad news of David Bowie's death. Like many others, his music has meant the world to me. I even tried to emulate him during his Thin White Duke period, only to realize that I couldn't afford the wardrobe and wasn't hip enough to carry it off, anyway.

Music festival season is already underway. SXSW 2016 has already happened, and by June we’ll be in full swing.