After MU graduate student Jonathan Butler concluded his week-long hunger strike, my daughter Brooks posed an interesting question: What was his first meal when he resumed eating?
Here’s a freeze frame from a video of MU grad student Jonathan Butler enjoying his first meal after concluding his week-long hunger strike…The people want to know: Just what did that meal consist of???
I combed The Star and the Internet and found, in a Los Angeles Times story, that his last meal before launching his strike was half a waffle. I came across video of Butler smiling and eating his first post-strike meal (above), but nowhere could I find exactly what the meal consisted of…Was it a banana? A steak? Spaghetti? I tell you, journalists these days just don’t have the curiosity they used to. Damn shame…I’ll be interested to see if any of our resourceful commenters can find the answer. I’d offer a free pizza from Minsky’s as a reward, but I’m afraid 100 people would come up with the answer.
:: There’s an interesting side story to the Gary Pinkel resignation that The Star didn’t write about in either of its stories today — although I suggested it in an email last night to Tod Palmer, who covers MU sports for The Star…In his resignation letter, Pinkel said he had non-Hodgkin lymphoma and wanted to spend his remaining years with his family and friends. He was diagnosed with cancer last spring. Many people might not know that he married a woman named Missy Martinette on June 27. (He and his first wife, Vicki, divorced several years ago after more than 35 years of marriage.) It would appear, then, that Pinkel’s second marriage took place right on the heels of the diagnosis…Not a huge deal, but if a big-name, local coach says he’s resigning to spend more time with his family, wouldn’t a journalist worth his or her salt think it was relevant to at least give a capsule of his family situation? Again, where’s the reportorial curiosity? Or is it just that my curiosity’s working overtime? Maybe, but don’t really think so.
Pinkel and family in 2006: He and then-wife Vicki and their four children (first four from right in back row), their son-in-law (back left), and two grandchildren.
…with new wife Missy Martinette, whom he married in Naples, FL, June 27
:: Finally, I trust some of you saw the story about 80-year-old mobster — or maybe former mobster — Vincent Asaro getting acquitted of participating in the 1978 Lufthansa robbery, which was believed to have been the largest cash robbery in U.S. history at the time. (The great mob movie “Goodfellas” was based on the crime.) Now, your average defendant, upon being acquitted of such a crime, might break into tears or collapse in his chair. Not Asaro. He pumped his right fist in the air three times, like he’d hit the winning homerun in a World Series game. Then, outside the courthouse in Brooklyn he raised his hands in the air and shouted, “Free!” Moments later, as he got into a white Mercedes, he took a jab at the prosecution, remarking to one of his lawyers, “Don’t let them see the body in the trunk.”
Now that’s being acquitted in style…
Vincent Asaro — happy with good reason.
JimmyCsays: At the juncture of journalism and daily life in KC 
While you reflect on all of that, I’ll ponder on the so-called suppression of IS and how a terrorist organization, in a suppressed state, can carry out a coordinated attack such as the one we witnessed yesterday in Paris.
We have some real world problems going on in the real world right now, and all we can focus on are civil issues. While this nation stands divided over a misguided hunger strike by a privileged black student, the terrorists are feasting on the rest of the free world. Who do you think will be on the desert plate when they are done with Europe?
How’s this for a Saturday morning reflection?
“A thousand agonizing deaths on the terrorist excrement, and the pain of a thousand weeping cuts on all they have ever loved, cared for, touched, or been touched by.
May their deaths be as full of horror and anguish as the demented beliefs which have spawned them, and vomited them – unclean – into the world.
May the flesh drip from their bones like rancid feces, and form a pool of rotten stink within which their putrefying religion drowns and asphyxiates.
May all terrorist purulence be washed from our memory; voided like the bowel movement of an entire planet.”
As for Butler, I hope he got a shit sandwich.
That sure casts a strange tone on my Saturday musings…
The only reference to the post-hunger strike meal I came across was from a regular on another former Star employee’s blog. Claimed he saw a video of him eating. Since no link to said video was provided by the poster, I refuse to pass it on.
The timing of Pinkel’s announcement, saying he was resigning rather than retiring, seemed odd. His statement after standing with the players that he had no idea what they were protesting when he joined them was pretty strange.
It reminds me of the CEO who leaves his position to explore other opportunities shortly after an embarrassing event.
Good decision on not passing it on. Orphan…hearsay.
Interestingly the MU protesters were upset by the events in Paris because it pushed them out of the news.
I personally think that the MU protest along with the obstinate little brat, I’m sorry, thug, who got yanked out of class are going to be watershed events.
If you go to the Facebook page of the Sheriff who immediately fired the deputy you will look very, very hard to find anyone who supported his decision. I predict that he’ll be out of office next election.
And the MU situation has gotten dumber by the day as more facts come out about Mr. Butler and his faculty allies.
“wouldn’t a journalist worth his or her salt think it was relevant”
I think similar thoughts when I read or view the news these days.