61revised.com

While summer vacation beckons for me, there is yet a week’s worth of material I must digest for the civic minded folk of St. Louis.  This weekly feature, which will indeed catch up with it’s original Sunday morning regularity (eventually), should perk up your ordinarily haphazard repertoire of websites.

• Remember our surprise on being included alongside some of our favorite “other sources” across town?  Imagine that doubled being name dropped by our friend @ A to Z blog (that’s one of the RFT’s blogs ya know).  We were just glad to see my notoriously out-of-focus, no-flash photography be conductive to a news post of our own, much less earn us recognition.  Then it helped us make some new friends, and meet some other friends.  Check out the new and separate “Listening to…” blogroll for more details.
• Speaking of out of focus photos, we’d be amiss to ignore our friends on FlickR, since so many of them seem to forget their cameras when we bring ours.  We’re pretty lucky to have snagged some photos before other FlickR members, but it’s not as if  dibs must be called.  Frankly we’d link you all, except everyone of us seems to document something in particular (mine is pay phones).
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It’s almost been a year since last summer’s devastating storms blew out power during a heat wave, and it’s been over six months since the ice storms did the same in the bitter cold.  But do you ever find yourself asking “what would I do if a mob of vicious flesh eating undead persons swarmed through my neighborhood during the middle of a blood shortage?”

We always thought we could just call out Beetlejuice or the Ghostbusters, but the Zombie Squad seeks to correct those popular survival misconceptions during this year’s Disaster Awareness Fair.  These defenders from the undead will be working alongside the Red Cross, Fire Dept, and other rescue agencies to help educate you at the Schlafly Tap Room & Brewery on Locust.  And while formal donations of blood will not be taking place, there will instead be informative presentations on zombie attacks and other equally likely disaster survival techniques on Saturday, July 21st.  And beer (hooray)!

Alongside the representative groups, you’ll want to stick around for Frontyard Features which will be playing Mad Max and Shawn of the Dead (more on that later) with instructional videos and PSAs in between.  Of course, should you make it through the flesh-devouring horde of zombies on the way in, you’ll want to bring surplus canned food for you and your friends to Feed My People.  Every 5 cans of food is good for a raffle ticket c/o REI, which give you a chance to win the Zombie Squad merchandise you’ll need to survive that night.  Until then, just stay tuned to the Emergency Alert System…

Word is starting to come out that this next month’s Arch City Chronicle will be its last in print.  This might seem a little inside baseball to talk about, since even Dave Drebes links to a KWMU report on the website.  For now though, it looks like the the ACC will be an online-only publication for our St Louis political junkie fixes.

What I can’t help but think about is how the ACC’s own website treats the news:  In a short update on the Other Sources page of the site, Dave links to the KWMU story with the headline “Local Paper Will End”.  Pretty strange to leave such a big announcement with such little fanfare… Perhaps this is a testament of how quickly things are changing in online journalism, in that visitors to the website need not notice this transition.

UPDATE (after the bump below)

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