Old guy

Thank you Pistol

I see you are not a sensitive person then. So now that we have reached agreement on something, I suggest we drop this line of debate. Can you agree about this as well?

Very informative hsmith, I hope you get your kids into Burroughs. Otherwise, if I was you I would personally check the Metro school before getting my kids in it. Remember "The Big Short" movie about the crash of 2008? Well all of those worthless mortgage backed securities were certified at AAA ratings by Moodys and the SP. What do you think makes the places that rate schools more trustworthy than Moodys or the SP were? Even better, why don't you repeat your own life history and send them to Normandy where your mother now has the power to see they get in. You know by your own life experience that they will be well cared for and receive a lot of educational perks as long as their grandma is in there. Reading about your life history and pilgrimage made me shed no tears, for I had my own pilgrimage through life starting at a hell of a lot lower level than you did. And nope, I did not have a school administrator mom pulling me into public magnet schools or a premium high school like yours did. I did fine with my education and work phase, note the word DID was used in this context. Now I have become an irrelevant boomer good only for my stash of money. As sshoe said the boomers control what can be called "a lot of money" that they have hoarded through years of hard work and disappointments. I called it "a lot of money" in a weak attempt to avoid hurting your sensitivities which appear to be many. Politicians, planners, and our own kids salivate after this money, but they do not like the rest of the package that goes with it. Too bad millennials do not understand this. And just so that you know it and do not think I am making this stuff up, this is the post I am referring to. Please deny that you ever never received special treatment as a student of Kirkwood High. I also assume that you did not live in Kirkwood at the time you went to high school, did you?

I will say something that of course you will find very funny: It is not viable to move a family with kids to an area that cannot provide decent public schools. You either wind up doing the work of schooling your kids yourself or have to pay for private schooling which are quite expensive. Of course, an even better solution to this problem is to mooch the money from the elderly and useless boomer grandparents of your children. In a nutshell, the conundrum of how to pay for these issues may come around to plundering people you consider obsolete and ridiculous except for their financial resources. HA! well planned I would say. Now enlarge the planning scenario expanding it to a much vaster scale. Is the process described above not similar what planners do in real life? Planners do what they do and then cover their mistakes or boo boos by 1) blaming others that were involved in ways that differed from what they wanted to get, or others that did not wish participate in the process, and 2) Finding new sources of money to fund the boo boos by getting it, usually via taxation, from those ridiculous and obsolete people that actually did work hard to get and save the money in the first place. By the way I see you have exactly the same desire to make alternate facts to support whatever deeply held ideas you have about subjects, as I and everyone else does. We are not so different from one another, do you realize that? So, to finish this pleasant and entertaining exploration of real life, let's find who is to blame for the present "alternate facts" universe. I firmly believe we may ultimately blame Al Gore since he was the self proclaimed father of the internet, the single tool that caused the proliferation of belief based news that we know and love presently. Good bye Walter Cronkite, HELLO belief based news. Welcome to the XXI century where image and followers are all important! Truth has become a matter of individual preference, the miraculous wonder produced by the net. Believe whatever you want, then find others that believe the same thing as you do. Shut the door on people of opposing views. Then find the money to pay for your beliefs elsewhere, preferably from the government (which after all prints money), or from someone else that may be taxed for it. This is reality as we live it, a real pretty picture pregnant with possibilities, and with vast new horizons that open up to those who know how to use the potential of the net. Finally to give you a highly placed source that agrees with what I said about internet based "news" I bring you no other than Claire McCaskell, US Senator for Missouri, who said the following at a meeting I attended, to quote: "Nowadays people follow the news to get affirmation (of beliefs, my addition) rather than information." Toots my good man, hope you can get your kids into Burroughs. Enjoy the NEW WORLD where everything is possible.

I know you are a planning professional, but I am going to tell you that Chicago's real problems are primarily of a financial and fiscal nature. They simply have multiple obligations they cannot pay for, period. They have enrolled the whole state's finances in a bailout that is more of a bandaid in nature and that will not only not bring back fiscal and financial prosperity to Chicago, but will wreck it for the rest of the State. That is a major problem any way you want to approach it. I am also not an expert about the history of Chicago's development, the information I used that you now claim is wrong came from yourself primarily. However there is no point in continuing this discussion any longer. Chicago is Chicago and St. Louis is St. Louis, I really care a lot less, if anything, about Chicago than about St. Louis (the whole area not the City of course).

I do wonder why so much effort is wasted in finding the cause for things going wrong and in assigning the blame to an individual or individuals. I wonder if it might not be much better to try and find out what went right what worked and build upon it. I suppose that in order to do that we must stop feeling victimized by all that goes wrong, and start feeling satisfied by all that goes right. There, this is an expanded explanation for the glass half full and the glass half empty theory.

And what is it that makes Detroit deserving of such an honor as being the city expected to lose gobs of population in a regular basis, if I may ask? So, your desire is to have young people with kids move into the city? Good luck there. Bonwich is correct, that is what makes fake news fake news. A loss of 6,263 people out of 9.5 M is loss 0.065% which is negligible, any interpretation to the contrary is fake news, in other words uninformed opinion or someone shooting from the hip to print something with minimal information and maximal fiction. Have I ever described my Facts / bull**** ratio in this board, assigning any significance to a population loss like the one described has a very low facts to bull**** ratio.

Fine, I wanted to quote your own words to demonstrate that the administration of both Chicago and St. Louis have a lot in common and leave a lot to be desired in terms of performance and development. People are literally fleeing both places. This is not so in other cities, many of which are also socialized and single party as you describe for St. Louis and Chicago. Boston is a land locked city (cannot expand its area but is a sea port) that remains fresh and vibrant, I have not been in Cinncinnatti for a long time but I recall it as having a very nice city life, Minneapolis and St. Paul are growing nicely and are very clean and even manicured cities. One of my daughters went to college in Pittsburgh, which has not fully recovered from the loss of the steel industry there but which had a very nice atmosphere. St. Louis, and (apparently) Chicago are not doing as well or progressing as well as these cities. Nope, people are pulling up stakes and moving out, oftentimes just beyond city limits or metro area limits for Chicago. Worse, businesses are fleeing the City as well. Please ask yourselves why do people live in West County and the answer is, of course, because they do not want to live in St. Louis, they do not want to pay the extra taxes the city gathers, they do not want to be exposed to what from West County's point of view looks like a high level of crime and violence present in the city, (or is all of this claptrap and fake news just designed by nefarious people to defame St. Louis?). Just ask yourselves this one question please: Despite whatever wishes the mayor of the City and the West County administrator may have, and however they may have agreed at least in principle to work towards a merger of both entities, any merger will require, by necessity, a favorable vote from the the residents of both the City and the West County. I really do not see the chance of a snowflake in hell that the people living in West County will vote in favor of a merger with the City. No, sir I do not think this will come to pass in my (possibly longer than you expect hsmith) lifetime. So, dream your dreams, and place the blame for the continuing disaster affecting both St. Louis and Chicago where ever you may wish to place it, from Fed regulations to school systems. And something else for you to ponder, the government of Massachusetts, at all levels, including city and local, is overwhelmingly single party and it is much farther out to the left in the political spectrum than whatever level they have in St. Louis or Chicago. Despite this and despite the fixed area of the City of Boston, the City is really a gem. It is not a political philosophy or a single party type of issue whatever it is that is negatively affecting St. Louis as you seem to think it is. Also kindly keep in mind that Boston is very highly segregated, blacks do not like whites and whites do not like blacks, Italians hate Irish and are hated by the Irish in return, and so on and so forth, and yet the city works and there is real Christian harmony between the population groups that (in their hearts) hate one another. Do you see real Christian harmony between the population groups in St. Louis? Remember this too, an ultra left wing politician in Oklahoma may spouse similar views as a conservative republican does in Massachusetts. Ta DaH! Live and let live. Life and love is a many splendorded thing (of course you do not remember Nat King Cole) with multiple unexpected turns everywhere. St. Louis is no worse than many places but it is locked into a downward spiral. In aviation terms it is in a stall. If it does not get out of the stall it will crash with absolute certainty, and you will not have the help you crave from your loving neighbors out west to end the stall either. This is you own show baby, live it and love it, feel victimized, assign blame here and there, but get it solved otherwise it will only get worse. You are on your own.

You may well have a valid point there brianstl. The population in the County is aging and its housing stock is also aging (the city's housing stock is much older than the county's though). However, there is a lot buying tear down property to build new housing in some areas like Kirkwood and Town and Country; and there is also much buildable land still available further out west in the County. You cannot telecommute unless there is readily available net access in the area you are building, something that is iffy in the western reaches of the County. The idea that adding areas by annexation is the way to maintain prosperity of a city is also incorrect. Chicago is teetering on the edge of bankruptcy despite its growth (or perhaps because of its growth). There are also cities, like Boston, which cannot grow by annexation, but which have managed to maintain vibrant and alive neighborhoods in the downtown area and are currently thriving. Every city is different and none responds in exactly the same way to measures taken to maintain their prosperity.

Before you deal with a General Sherman's approach make sure you visit Columbia South Carolina. The main drag out there (bordering the State University) is extraordinarily wide. When you ask the natives how come it is so wide they just shrug and say "that is where Sherman went through." Whatever is left behind using a General Sherman approach will probably be of little use for years, it will just be adding yet more blighted areas to the city. Nope, the Sherman burned earth approach is not advisable as something that would benefit the city.

Whooo, now I can die happy right where I am and leave to my kids the chore of selling property and moving to another county.

Like Billiken Rich said, a merger of the City and St. Louis County will signal it is time to move to St. Charles or Jeff County. No problems there.

This is an interesting problem hsmith, St. Louis is indeed a shrinking city. In some ways its buildings downtown appear to have been destined for a much larger and prosperous city, something like you see in Vienna which was built as the capital of an empire which has since disappeared. Maybe accepting that there is an overabundance of free space (certainly the case for the place the new hospital is being built at) and designing accordingly (clashing with prior urban styles) is not such a bad idea.

What are you intrigued about hsmith? When a woman gets pregnant her uterus receives a tiny fetus starting as a couple of cells joined together. It grows and becomes a baby during pregnancy. As it grows, the lady's belly grows enormously (that is why they need maternity clothing). The growth of the baby, plus placenta, plus amniotic fluid takes a lot of space and the uterus and belly stretch out beyond their size many times. Superficially this causes stretch marks and possibly areas of discoloration on the skin over the belly. When the baby is born some of the stretch marks remain and the skin and abdominal wall become flabby. The breasts swell with milk to feed the new baby towards the end of the pregnancy. Once the lactation is done they also become a bit flabby and may also develop stretch marks. The pictures do not show the breasts of the lady in enough detail but the skin of the abdomen does not show a prior pregnancy carried to completion. Some of the changes described are or become permanent. It is not easy for a mother to fully regain her figure after the birth of a child, this gets more evident with each child they have. We do know, by the pictures, that this girl had not had a full term pregnancy prior to the time the pictures were taken. According to what's his name's statement the baby was already born some time ago, unless these pictures predate the birth she had never carried a full term pregnancy by the time of the pictures. Wombs and pregnancies have been around for a long time, what aspect of artificial womb technology are you talking about and why would anyone want to use it?, the old fashioned way is a lot more entertaining to both parties.

She is quite a specimen of the female gender, no question about it. However that shows very little in terms of marital bliss and longevity. Take for example Tiger's wife. She also had a world class figure and look at where Tiger is at now. Is McBroom following in Tiger's footsteps? Oh and Catherine's belly, as shown in the pictures, shows no visible evidence of her ever having carried a pregnancy to completion. Just saying.

goonaha are you also a seminarian as Travis says he is?

For those of you still concerned about the lack of proper and up to date SLU merchandise, just look what I found today at Costco (in the Manchester and 141 area)

You are probably correct, my bad

You may be absolutely correct kshoe, in which case I am sorry and retract what I said.

I hate to bring this up but I recall Watson had a history of changing his mind, cannot remember if he also changed high schools as well. I may be wrong here. If this is what happened and what made him quit OSU he might not be a very good choice for us. I do think he is a very good player, but dislike instability and erratic behavior.

I do not wish to upset anyone but I think it is time that roy and big bill fan start considering the merits of ignoring one another.

That is why all of these predictive ranking systems are less than perfect, statistics are a science that works for very large numbers of similar events, it is not really applicable to individual cases.

I think that if Ford had been the HC when he was being recruited he might have come here. Unfortunately the HC was Crews at that time, enough said, he simply could not come here. I am convinced that Tatum had very positive feelings for SLU and for St. Louis and would have liked to stay here but it simply was not possible for him to do so.

I vote to name him Bubba or BB

Sure, why not.