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May 3rd could be the busiest day on your social calendar…if it weren’t also finals season. So here are at least 3 ongoings around St. Louis we meant to write about (and one more we already have) but haven’t gotten around to during finals.

• Webster University will be hosting a Global Ecology Conference, which looks a lot more interesting than that sounds. Starting at 10am learned people will be giving lecture until 5pm, including visiting professor Kumar who has organized the conference. Or you can skip class and show up for vegetarian dinner with local eats, cocktail, and famous vegan and Ohio congressman Dennis Kucinich. The whole day is only $15 for students (free for Webster Students) or $25 for the general public.
• Some enterprising business folk have organized a fiesta on Cherokee Street so that we can celebrate Cinco de Mayo (on the 3rd of May). And a couple other spots around town will be hanging up pinatas and serving cervesa this Saturday.
• Free Comic Book Day is on Saturday. Check the site for the closest participating store near you, but we would suggest running but Star Clipper in the Delmar Loop, who will host live appearances by a pair of superheros. And while you’re there, be sure to check out the display from the 3rd annual Munny Show and pick up your free comic book.
• Kinematifest, Webster University’s first animation and interactive media festival.  Films will be screened almost immediately following that Ecology Conference Dinner

Keep up with local events, even when we don’t have time to write about them - subscribe the 61revised.com events calendar.

Calling all tree-huggers, earth-muffins, granola-munchers and anyone who just thinks this planet of ours is pretty swell!

The 19th annual St. Louis Earth Day Festival will be held this Saturday, April 20th on the grounds of The Muny in Forest Park.

From the St. Louis Earth Day website:

“In Your Own Back Yard,” this year’s festival theme, highlights local initiatives and practical environmental advice that can be implemented in communities throughout our region. The festival will be a channel to connect festival goers with conservation groups, local and regional energy initiatives, native gardening, local food producers, and promote the ideas of healthy, active, low-impact living!

Earth-loving events will include booths from your favorite eco-conscious vendors, hands-on educational activities, an All-Species Parade, a Peace Garden, and various forms of delightful entertainment.  The festival goes from 11:00am to 6:00pm and is free and open to the public, even the “well-behaved and leashed” canine public!

If you feel the earth shaking in St. Louis this Saturday it might not be another aftershock; it might be the walls of racial division crumbling during a moment of silence.  At noon on April 19th there will be a 2-minute moment of silence in St. Louis to honor the memory of MLK and for greater racial and economic justice in this city, as part of a larger fair taking place that day.  St. Louis Dream Keepers is a newly formed coalition of students from several colleges and young professionals dedicated the achieving racial harmony.  You might want to learn more at the fair, which will take place from 11am-5pm on Saturday along Compton Avenue near Laclede around the campus of Harris-Stowe State College.

And if you’re still a little shocked after the quakes, you should take on your fears at the Blood Drive organzied by the Zombie Squad this Saturday April 19th from 11am-4pm.  We’ve detailed Zombie Squad’s proactive approach to disaster awareness before, but even before a natural disaster the supply of blood is already running low in the metro area.  Part of keeping that dream alive is to fight against the undead of course…  We don’t think it’s too much to ask our readers to roll up a sleeve at the St. Louis Police Officers Association building in South Hampton, where we can shake up the status quo for the good this weekend.

Despite the water-soaked and unusualkly muddy earth, kickball enthusiasts of all shoes and stripes came out last Sunday afternoon to play. As they’ll be doing every Sunday at 4pm on the fields of Eden Seminary, students of Webster University will play in temas of 6 to 8 in this league organized by Campus Activites and fraternity Delta Upsilon (Webster’s new, first fraternity).  You can sign up for teams at the University Center front desk, or just for kicks show up any Sunday through May 4th 2008 and cheer on your favorite team.

Word on the street is that other kickball teams are forming around the Saint Louis area this spring and summer.  The St. Louis Kickball Association (www.skarocks.org) has already gone through their fourth week of play, bringing htem halfway through the season already.  Residents of Des Peres are starting their own Tuesday evening co-rec Kickball League starting April 8th, although as much as half your team of diamond runners may indeed come from other townships.  And we’ll keep adding games to our calendar as we find them.

Although we’re all busy working on our thesis papers, even in the midst of APA-style reference building you’re going to want to step outside a bit this final essay season.  One such opportunity for a disertation of a thesis lecture of sorts will come from Aaron Belz, who will be giving a reading of his work on Tuesday.  This super-senior of the St. Louis literary scene, if you consider the Regional Arts Commission a school of sorts, will be giving a reading this upcoming Tuesday April 1st starting around 8pm.  His course, Observable Readings, has become a real fixture of the literati scene around town. Here’s how a much more capable writer, Mr. Belz himself, described why you should attend his lecture:

The show is free, and there will be wine. Free wine. Wine for which you will not have to pay. In little clear plastic cups!!

To those of you who are or might be attending my reading at Regional Arts Commission next Tuesday evening: I’ve accepted a position at a college in L.A. and will be moving out there in July. This might be the last time I get to see some of you in a while, so I hope you’ll come let me shake your hand and raise my eyebrows at you in a slightly creepy way. Remember - the reading is free, and so is the wine.

So besides the free beverages for persons of age to consume such beverges you’ll be served with readings of prose, poetry, and reading from The Bird Hoverer that have brought this writer critical acclaim.  And acceptance into school.  So if you’re looking to increase your graduate promises, you should be there too.  Or just because you’re not a slave to your studies this semester, free as bird.

The ice is thawing and the grass is peaking through the snow, leaving behind a trail of fallen branches and litter trapped beneath the permafrost.  It’s that time of year again - spring cleaning.  Which means it’s time for Operation Brightside to begin Project Blitz.

Instead of dropping bombs, Project Blitz aims to drop bulbs, or at least plant flowers, along with a block by block cleanup of our neighborhoods.  This annual cleanup of city streets, and collection of our homes’ recyclable appliances (among other things), is coming to a neighborhood near you starting on Saturdays between March 29th and May 17th - check their website for details.  It might be easy being green, but sometimes the best place to start is by rolling up you sleaves and cleaning up your neighborhood.

You can learn more about the purpose of this spring cleaning blitz on their website, or in the post we wrote about last year’s Blitz.

It could rightly be pointed out that the etymology of STL stems not from an airport or an abbreviation, but maybe from the baseball Cardinals logo who where such an abbreviation is found on their hat.  Of course it’s that time of year again when grown people obsess over young men and it’s not called pedophilia - Spring Training in the Cardinal nation.  It seems like even your most anaerobic geek (like me) even gets a little giddy talking about world series prospects, so I can only imagine what actual fans of that sport and “our team” must be going through this time.

Every once in awhile I get a glimpse into this vast world of online sports forums, but only recently did I discover one of the most popular blogs - Future Redbirds.  I asked my usual friends who keep up with these kind of things for some (ahem) inside baseball info, and found a friend who used to work with this uber-popular site’s founder; he tells me that writer is actually within the Cardinals organization. So I shouldn’t surprised when I found this incredible story there.

It turns out the Cardinals are asking their fans to help them out by recommending prospects for their scouts this year.  Which is great news for all those baseball fans online who love talking about prospects anyway.   Hey, it beats all the bad news bears we’ve heard about those players lately.

In related news another friend of ours, albeit with more “Sporty” inclinations, decided to write about another local sports team.  Unfortunately he did not necessarily have uplifting news from the SLU Women’s basketball team.  With so much attention having been paid to SLU’s fancy new basketball arena being built down the street, it’s interesting to consider what will happen to this old sports palace.  And speaking of college basketball, it’s almost that time of year again…