Cincinnati

No-Brainer: Legally Blonde is more than fair

The Best Shows in St. Louis This Week: February 25 to March 3

St. Louis is nothing if not prolific in 2013. Last week's show announcements boasted an impressive seven releases-to-be across the board. This week, add three more sets of brand new local tracks to your music collection. DinoFight!, Les Gruff and the Billy Goat, and Mikey Wehling and the Reverbs all ... More >>

St. Louis Fails Transparency Review: MoPIRG Criticizes City for Lack of Accountability

How is the City of St. Louis spending taxpayer dollars? It's can be challenging to to answer that question -- at least according to a new report from an organization that has given St. Louis a failing grade for budget transparency and accountability. Missouri's Public Interest Research Group, or ... More >>

Organic Produce to Your Door: Green B.E.A.N. Delivery Service Expands to St. Louis

Indiana native Matt Ewer has farming in his blood. At the ripe old age of eight, he started selling sweet corn door-to-door for his family's farm. When he was twenty, he began working in organic farming and not long after moved to the West Coast to study organic agriculture. Then he returned to Ind ... More >>

Nick Lowe at the Sheldon Concert Hall, 9/26/12: Review and Setlist

Nick Lowe Sheldon Concert Hall September 26, 2012 "I knew the bride when she used to rock and roll," sang Nick Lowe to wind down an hour of songs at the Sheldon last night. For its part, the not-quite capacity crowd knew the groom when he used to power, pop, pub and punk, when he used to answer to ... More >>

Miller Lite Brings "It's Miller Time on Us" to St. Louis, a.k.a., Free Beer For Some!

Next week, instead of rifling through coat pockets, couch cushions and car cup-holders in search of beer money, Gut Check will be headed to Kiener Plaza (600 Market Street) for a complimentary $25 Miller Lite gift card. Specifically, on Tuesday, September 18, between 4 p.m. to 7 p.m., for "It's Mil ... More >>

Todd Akin's Science, Explained

News of Todd Akin's idiocy has spread worldwide, which is kind of good because it means there's a larger pool of people who can inform us where his scientific opinions about rape and conception came from. The Guardian of London went deep into the law books and dug up this gem of jurisprudence: If, ... More >>

St. Louis Air: Still Polluted, But Showing Improvement

The American Lung Association released its State of the Air report, and St. Louis once again ranked in the top ten for year-round particle pollution, coming in as the tenth most-polluted city out of the 277 metropolitan areas measured -- that's not good. However, the data shows that since 2003-2005 ... More >>

Jeremy Essig is About to Get Raw & Personal (And Record a CD in Brennan's Basement)

​Standup Jeremy Essig put in seven years as a road comic, recorded three CDs and has opened for the likes of Zach Galifianakis and Jeffrey Ross. By  2009, he was sick of it. All of it.  So he enrolled in journalism school at Mizzou. He also landed a political reporting gig in Jefferson C ... More >>

The Six Best Chain Restaurants in St. Louis

Selecting Riverfront Times' Best of St. Louis 2011 was no picnic. Choosing the winner meant several worthy candidates would go unmentioned -- until now. In this Gut Check series, we are chewing our way through notable runners up in a number of categories. To see hundreds more winners and finalists a ... More >>

St. Louis Ranks No. 6 in Number of "Native" Inhabitants

​For most St. Louisans, going home for Thanksgiving this week means staying put. According to Census figures, 69.4 percent of people living in the St. Louis metropolitan area were born in the region. That ranks as sixth highest nationally among major cities and a good 12 percentage points abo ... More >>

Belleville Runners Club Continues Chili Cook-Off Ring of Terror

​Last year we warned Gut Check readers about the Belleville Runners Club's insidious plan to fatten, nay, kill their racing competition with their potentially deadly Belleville Chili Cookoff concoctions. Just when we thought they couldn't top the health-endangering creations of chili-topped nach ... More >>

Spelling Bee Returns From A Tour That Included A Break-In And Several Great Bands

Photo by Mabel Suen​Noise-rock duo Spelling Bee recently embarked on a tour that took members Joseph Hess and Mabel Suen to Washington D.C., Baltimore, Bost and more. We explored the band's approach to D.I.Y. in a feature as the tour was kicking off. Now that they've returned, we asked drumme ... More >>

PW Pizza, Paul and Wendy Hamilton's new place, isn't fancy. It's just good.

Daily Beast: Our Moms Are Happier Than Yours

USA Today​According to the oh-so-scientific pollsters of the Daily Beast, St. Louisans, among other things, have nicotine addictions and a lack of book-smarts. So it's nice to know that the latest ranking chart of the pop-political website, released this week for Mother's Day, suggests that ou ... More >>

Nixon Strikes a Frugal Tone as St. Louisans are Outed as Cheapskates

​Yesterday was a big day in Missouri frugality. Gov. Jay Nixon proposed $300 million in budget cuts during his State of the State address -- even as the website Coupons.com ranked St. Louis as the fourth-cheapest city in the country. Nixon outlined a plan to knock down the state's 2012 budge ... More >>

Wait Till This Year: What 2011 might bring to St. Louis theater

Jeff Ruby Talks! (About Kicking O.J. Simpson out of His Restaurant)

I'm still waiting to hear back from the Jeff Ruby's Steakhouse corporate office in Cincinnati about the status of the River City Casino restaurant. However, I feel bad about depriving you of an opportunity to hear from Jeff Ruby himself, so here's a news report about the time he asked O.J. Simpson t ... More >>

Local Blogger Rediscovers Earliest Known Photo of a Human Being

Last week, a local blogger known as the Hokumburg Goombah, and also as Gig Thurmond, awoke to, like Lord Byron, find himself famous. In blogger terms, this means "when we got home after running errands, visiting a sick friend, and getting dinner, and we checked the counter [yes, it has come to that, ... More >>

Ten Things To Do This Weekend: October 22-24

​Ten things to do, that is, besides what we previewed on the music page, the Earthworms DVD screening and Ryan Bingham Sunday night at the Old Rock House. Friday: 7 Shot Screamers @ Way Out Club Punk-a-billy faves 7SS haven't done a show in a long, long time; this gig features the golden-age ... More >>

Jeff Ruby's and the Case of the Disappearing Website

www.jeffruby.com/st-louis.php​File this under "Things That Make You Go Hmmm": The screenshot above is what you see if you visit www.jeffruby.com/st-louis.php. This should be the home page of the St. Louis branch of Jeff Ruby's Steakhouse, which opened earlier this year at the new River City Casino ... More >>

Muse Cancels Its St. Louis Show

Timothy Norris / LA WeeklyMuse at Coachella music festival in April.​Here's a bummer email to wake up to: Muse has re-routed its fall 2010 tour due to the fact that "bassist Chris Wolstenholme is expecting a child with wife Kelly in November of 2010," according to a press release. It goes on t ... More >>

10 Things to do for $10 This Weekend in St. Louis, May 14-16, 2010

It's that time of week again -- you're hopefully left with at least a few hours of free time where you can decide to do whatever you feel like: No time-sucking birthday lunches, Saturday morning soccer games or shift-covering for your slacker of a coworker. ("How has he not been fired yet?" you may ... More >>

Zachary Schomburg and His Magic Poetry Mobile Take St. Louis Tonight!

Tonight is Exploding Swan Night at Stirrup Pants Chapbooks (2122 Cherokee Street), which will deviate from its usual Saturdays-only schedule to host The Rats & People Motion Picture Orchestra and a host of readers, including poet Zachary Schomburg, who has driven out here from Portland, Oregon, in h ... More >>

Columbia Named 17th Most Romantic City in America

flickr.com/photos/ryangladstonephoto Stuff like this happens in Columbia every day! That's what makes it one of the most romantic cities in America.​Some shocking news from Amazon.com: The most romantic city in Missouri is...Columbia. Yep. The home of the University of Missouri ranks 17th i ... More >>

Take a Beercation to Louisville with the Beertender

Fleur-Design, Wikimedia Commons​Beercation (n.): A short, inexpensive trip whose primary justification is the pursuit of rare, local or otherwise unattainable beer.Among potential beercation destinations, my current front-runner is Louisville, Kentucky, only four hours east on I-64. Maybe not the ... More >>

Holy Crap! Branson Theater Wins Award for Best Bathroom in U.S.

The ladies' room at Shoji Tabuchi Theatre. ​ The results are in and the Shoji Tabuchi Theatre has won the coveted "America's Best Bathroom Award." The Branson music hall features a ladies' powder room (right) boasting wainscoting, live cut orchids at every granite and onyx pedestal sink, stained g ... More >>

Survey Sayz ... St. Louisans Think "Grass is Greener Somewhere Else"

There's slush the color of wet concrete on the sidewalks, in gutters and on roads. Jobs are hard to come by and our winter sports teams are atrocious! But do St. Louisans really think of their town as St. Louis Shitty?Pew Research CenterPercentage of residents who say they want to live in this city ... More >>

Show Review: Scribble Jam Preliminaries at Atomic Cowboy, Saturday, August 16

Over the Rhine

9 p.m. Wednesday, October 3. Blueberry Hill's Duck Room, 6504 Delmar Boulevard, University City

Love Machine

B-Sides compares the biographies of Courtney Love and Sharon Osbourne, and reports on Brandt's reorganization.

Safe and Sorry

Dennis Brown has a question about the Rep's Off-Ramp series: Why?

Capsule Reviews

Dennis Brown and Deanna Jent suss out local theater

Letters Column

Week of June 1, 2006

Black Tie Affair

Monday, January 2; Creepy Crawl (412 North Tucker Boulevard)

Let There Be Rock

Ten albums that make it easy to avoid fretting about your old-fashioned, Rockist ways

Popcorgasm

Unreal witnesses debate history (well, from a tent outside), learns guerrilla postering tactics and asks the tough questions about adult diapers; plus, this is the month to celebrate two of our most favorite things!

Brilliant!

The Beer Hall of Fame is a cool idea -- perhaps too cool for St. Louis

Love, Rhine O'er Me

High-fidelity romance

The Isley Brothers

Body Kiss (T-Neck/Dreamworks)

Valley Rally

The Missouri Valley Conference tournament bounces into Savvis Center

The Scarlet Letter

In St. Louis, the "A" is for "ambition"

One-Wheel Roller

King of the rink Leo White is ready for prime time, but is prime time ready for him?

Chili

O.T. Hodge Chile Parlor

Flaming Wreck

Owen Wilson goes down Behind Enemy Lines and lands in familiar terrain

Tedious People

The People Project only gets worse

Duets

Directed by Bruce Paltrow

Hit Parade

Short Cuts

Get Down River