Top Ten Worst Things About Columbia, Missouri
All roads must end, and life changes call for the ending of this Tumblr. I’m moving out of this town! I’d like to leave with my list of the ten worst things about Columbia, since Buzzfeed has some weird hard-on for it.
Note that any individuals mentioned are public figures who are valid targets of satirical critique. It's all in good fun.
10. Restaurant Servers
This could be a subsection of College Students, I guess, but fuck it. I need ten items. There is ten-year-old girl in one of the Thai restaurants who is at the top of her game, but besides that, there are no reliable servers in any restaurant in town. Instead, you get a revolving cast of servers who have no idea what they’re doing, both in general and at the moment in particular. The word ‘water’ does not register in their ears for some reason so good lucking getting a free drink. Pretty much every restaurant is a crapshoot in terms of whether you’ll get a competent person or not.
9. Festivals
Local festivals seem to have a lifecycle where they start out small and nice, get awesome, and then get national attention and suck. Right now two of Columbia’s festivals have gotten big and matured into the suck zone: True/False and Roots N Blues. The common factor: cost. A once-common factor: downtown gets hammered and any business that doesn’t serve beer or ice cream lose business. At least Roots N Blues when to Stephens Lake Park, where they’ll just inconvenience the environment and sporty types. Maybe some of these will die off like Summerfest, a.k.a., I-can’t-work-in-downtown-Thursdays. Update: Summerfest was back. FUCK.
8. The Spinny Glowstick Guy
This guy is everywhere and he’s always spinning glowsticks. You can see him at concerts where he is taking up too much space in the crowd being a giant distraction. Hey, it’s the band’s turn to be center stage, not you. Knock it off.
7. The Guy Who Protests for Peace on the Crosswalks of Broadway and Providence on Wednesdays
He’s the guy with the green flag with the peace symbol who crosses the crosswalk when it’s his turn. I have no problem with him using the crosswalk repetitively. I even admire his passion. I can’t think of another person who has done so little for his cause, though.
6. Bicyclists
Are there even laws for bicyclists? I don’t see enough consistent behavior among bicyclists to figure out their underlying rules. They can act like cars by using the car lane, but they can also blow through the stop sign like a super fast pedestrian. What’s going on?! I hear they had a hand in getting the backwards parking set up (see #3), in which case: *shakes fist*. The bike cartel in town has had a lot less influence in recent years, but the unused lanes from their heyday are still around.
5. Commuters
I know there are laws for commuters, but they get thrown out when it’s time to get to and from work. Coming from the south part of Columbia towards MU, there are a lot of luxury cars driven by people who just don’t give a shit about lanes or signals. Invariably the most expensive cars are headed toward the hospital complex. I’d rather get to work ten minutes late everyday than deal with almost dying because an Audi wanted to skip the wait at the intersection by making a right turn followed by a u-turn mid-street and another right turn to get back to the original direction.
4. College Students
Saturday night in downtown is a nightmare because it is filled with college students drunk out of their minds but mobile enough to get in the way of moving traffic. I also hope you like shouting. If there is any silver lining, it is that the verbal harassment of strangers crosses all gender and racial boundaries. When not poisoning themselves with alcohol, they are still terrible people. Have you been to areas where the frats are? They treat their own home and close-knit community like garbage I saw a guy today in a car in the middle of the road talking to a fellow student as I drove up behind them. He did wrap it up and drove off, but not before tossing a water bottle out the window. Such class.
3. The Roads
Of course the roads made this list; this was the subject of the whole Tumblr! Whoever is in charge of designing where cars go in this town is fucking terrible at the job. Due to the ineptitude of those in charge, we were graced with the backasswards parking behind City Hall. If you don’t remember that debacle, they experimented with a method of parking which involves blocking both lanes and backing into a parking spot. So convenient! The lanes got shifted to accommodate the larger spots, which is confusing in its own right.
Speaking of shifting lanes, there are many parts of town where the lanes just scoot over in the middle of the block, or don’t match the street at the opposite end of the intersection. This catches unaware drivers and is dangerous.
One last systemic problem with the roads: the painting of the lines are sloppy and poorly designed. They are working on Providence next to campus right now and the lane markers do not fit the generous width of consumer vehicles. The actual painted lines will make the lanes even smaller! See Forum south of Chapel Hill for another area where the lanes are tiny for no reason, since there is plenty of shoulder space. Oh, and that roundabout exit that dumps you onto South Providence, just north of Hyvee. It’s a yield sign but people just YOLO and merge onto Providence, where cars may be going 55, because yielding there involves craning your neck to see the traffic behind you and there is no clear line to show that you don’t just dive into the street (other cities have a series of triangles to show a yield line). Or they could have just made the side road meet Providence at a 90 degree angle like a normal intersection.
2. The Weird and/or Shady-Sounding Things that the City Council Does
This fair town has had its share of ridiculous shit. A lot of the shenanigans have been covered in the previous points, but a few are indisputably the town's boners.
Point 2a: Columbia PD
I hear the term Keystone Cops tossed around, but that would be insulting an iconic piece of comedy. Remember that time they shot an aggressive corgi? The dog breed known for having no limbs, like a whale or a python? Or that time SWAT busted a house for a stupid small amount of pot? I'm glad that incident doesn't look stupider and stupider in hindsight. There is also the time the creeper/rapist evaded police while riding a bicycle. At least they found him dead after a chase that led towards campus. Speaking of finding someone dead, there was that unsolved murder that was only solved when the killer killed himself and his friend spoke up. When the Associated Press notes that your press conference was "hastily arranged," you are bad at your job. This is basically the only way to solve the case while using zero detective skills, which is what police had. Think about it.
Point 2b: City Council
For a smallish city, the council looks corrupt as fuckall. The cockamamy plan to put art installations around downtown is a good example. Rather than approach their own city, which is 80% unemployed artists, they went to a firm in St. Louis. This is a defensible act, except the firm came up with fucking bullshit that the unbribed citizenry immediately called out. The firm was so up the council's ass that the council had not considered the proposal to be full of feces and made a survey that did not have the option to state that all of the proposed installations reeked. I have an equivalent survey for you:
What would like for lunch?
A. Hard turds
B. Diarrhea
Result: I didn't know you were a shit eater, fuckface!
Now, there is no evidence that someone got paid off to hire a shit design company to turn Columbia into a roadside attraction. But-- BUT, if no one got paid or blown under the table for this, then the council is even more inept than I had thought.
1. MU
Of course, MU. The evil corporation in this town's 80's movie. There has been a lot of weird stuff that the university has done or been entangled in.
• Ask/demand that departments give back a portion of their funding due to the misestimate of their finances.
• What appears to be a covered up rape case among athletes.
• Oh and MU leads the SEC in student-athlete arrests. M-I-Z
• When mishandling of archived books needed $900,000 to fix and the school did not know where the money would come from. Donations are very low, possibly because this is the university's own fiasco and they should pay for it. It's hard to say.
• How Pickard Hall has been known to be radioactive since the 70s but only started to clean it when outside regulations on radioactive buildings got stricter.The university asked for an indefinite amount of time to come up with a plan for cleanup. I-N-D-E-F-I-N-I-T-E. As it in, until the end of the universe. To come up with a plan. P-L-A-N. Not even to get it done.
• A weird intraprofessor divorce that impacted the philosophy department so much that it was the subject of an article in the Chronicle of Higher Education.
• When the school announced shutting down the University of Missouri Press but changed their mind in the face of the criticism by other universities.
• When MU named a sports arena after a "Walmart heiress" but she didn't go to MU and she cheated through the school she did go to.
There you have it, my top ten gripes about Columbia. If you have something to add, or a rebuttal, I don’t give a shit. I’m outtie!