We want to thank the Riverfront Times for selecting us as the “Best Local Celebrity Site” in their Web Awards! Hell, we even made the cover (That’s us above with or logo look-a-like cat.)

We mentioned before we had made the list of finalists, but here’s what the judges had to say on our selection:

This is the only nominee that has daily updates and includes “celebrities” with some kind of tie to St. Louis.

We’re honored to be selected by default, a win’s a win. Thankfully it gets more flattering as they continued:

Its post about KMOV-TV (Channel 4) morning news anchor Virginia Kerr tweeting her birth was one of the funniest reads of the year. Author Mike Flynn has a deliciously cynical sense of humor. He’s a truly prolific and creative blogger who does it all, amazingly, in his spare time.

We just want to thank the Riverfront Times, all of our awesome and sexy as hell readers, anyone we’ve ever made fun of, and jesus I guess. Seems like that’s the thing to do when you win stuff.

We had a tip slip by us when we had already written our original story on The Beautiful Kind’s announcement, but it’s worth of an update.

Our friends at the Riverfront Times have released an in-depth story with lots of interesting childhood details that’s worth reading – NSFW: The St. Louis mom behind sex blog the Beautiful Kind is outing herself

Go for the story, stay for the classy photos of her dildo collection.

For even more of the recent TBK media-gasm, you can check out Kendra’s interview on KFNS’ The ITD Morning After at InsideSTL.com

via the Tip Line and our morning comute

Oh look the RFT’s Music blog has an interview with some local rapper named “Corle 2 Da”…why does that name sound familiar?…

​You may have seen this excellent vid floating around the Interwebz in the past two weeks. “So St. Louis” is the work of one Corle 2 Da, a Belleville rapper looking to make his mark on this side of the river.

Belleville rapper…god this all sound so familiar. Wait! “So St. Louis”!? As in making it rain with singles “So St. Louis”?

No. This is the “excellent vid floating around the Interwebz”?! Jokes! Gotta be a joke.

“A lot of people call it the new St. Louis anthem,” says Corle’s manager Ron Boles, with Red River Entertainment. “We really are happy with it. We’re gonna put the video in Vintage Vinyl where people can buy it.”

The 30-year-old started rapping with friends at age 12. Though he was born in Alton and currently resides in Belleville, Corle considers himself a dyed-in-the-wool, Provel-eating, Cards cheering, Rams-lamenting St. Louisian.

What?! Seriously?! You’re interviewing him now? For reals?

“The whole area around here thrives off of St. Louis,” Corle says.

What the hell does that even mean?! It is St. Louis. We live in St. Louis. You can’t thrive off yourself. That would create a thrive loop and would probably lead to…crappy rap videos! Ah, it’s all so clear now.

“I’ve got a couple major labels looking at him,” [Corle's agent] says. “We didn’t even expect this, 7,000 hits in less than 2 weeks.”

Yikes. No mention that “German Soccer Coach Picks Nose and Eats It” has over 12,400 views or that “Sportscaster Jim Knox Shows Off His Ball Sweat” has over 36 thousand views in a week. No, no yours is good though. Still good.

Corle’s working on an album — he says it will be out in December or January — and plans to shoot another video in October for a new single called “Digital.”

Yea! New post material!

Getting back to the main point though: Why on earth is the RFT on this guy’s jock? Look the song isn’t Tina E bad, but come on, let’s me real here. There must be some reason why the Riverfront Times would be so infatuated with bad rap…

…I guess we’ll just never know.

See our full review of “So St. Louis” here!

The site BestofStLouis.com is gone. There isn’t even a traditional “It’s over” page…it’s just gone. The domain now goes to an all-ad page.

What happened? Lawyers and copyright law happened, and the heat came from the Riverfront Times.

As we’re sure you’re aware, each year the Riverfront Times puts out its “Best of St. Louis” issue and because of that believes it holds the rights to the term “Best of St. Louis”. That seems week to us that someone can own something as generic as that, but we aren’t lawyers and the Riverfront Times’ parent company Village Voice Media didn’t bother to call and ask our opinion, so they went ahead and sent one of those oh-so-fun legal notices to the two guys that ran BestofStLouis.com. They were “graciously” given until September 1st to take their site down.

Just as they should have, BestofStLouis.com posted the letter on their site, but instead of trying to fight this, or at least work with Village Voice Media, they just hung it up claiming they were “hacked”. Pseudo-claiming the hack came from some mysterious Village Voice Media executive order.

[F]aced with the prospect of trying to resurrect our site from its hacked and smoldering ashes only to tear it down by September 1st to comply with a legal order we have no resources to fight, we said “fuck it.”

*Sigh*

You lost us guys.

BestofStLouis.com, run by Max Bemberg, Ben DeMeyer and Alex Luft, were standing on that methaphorical street corner saying the RFT was bullying them and people were feeling it, getting behind the little guy…and then they pushed it…”Oh and we think they had hackers attack our website.” they might as well have said “…once the RFT rolls out their alien news print brainwashing technology their plan will be complete!”

To the Riverfront Time’s credit they did post about this item on their DailyRFT blog last Friday and allowed comments which, overall, carried a mixed sentiment.

Meanwhile at Punching Kitty headquarters (…which is a mountain with a giant kitty-head carved in to it. It’s over by Grand and Natural Bridge Road, you wouldn’t have seen it.)

One more St. Louis website bites the dust and we take a step closer to being that web-version of Boardwalk with 2 big red hotels on it. A few more fake cease-and-desist letters and us, along with our army of hackers, will rule the St. Louis website world!!

Oh, and CityTV with your “Best of STL”?! Nice try. We all know “STL” is just short of “St. Louis”! You’re next.

Mr. Dana Loesch, aka Chris Loesch, a frequent, but pseudonymed, commenter on all posts concerning Dana on this very site, has quite a reputation around town of appearing like Beetlejuice when someone mentions his wife’s name three times. No, it doesn’t matter if they are “attacking” her or just reporting, he still appears.

The most recent sighting was the Riverfront Times where…well, I’ll let RFT reporter Chad Garrison tell you:

Chris is upset with a post I published yesterday drawing attention to a $2,500 check that Republican candidate Ed Martin’s campaign paid to his St. Louis production company, Shock City Studios.

According to Chris, I failed as a journalist for not contacting him before I published the story. (I’ll grant him that one. Unfortunately in my job as a blogger — writing 6-10 posts a day — I do not have the time to make phone calls for every single topic I cover.)

But that’s not the only problem Chris has with my post. Curiously, he’s also angry that I got the story right.

The post they are referring to and linked above is the recent story about a curious amount of money that Republican Ed Martin paid to Shock City Studios, which is owned by the Loesch’s (or more specifically, Beetlejuice…er…um Chris). The story goes that fellow Republican and candidate John Wayne Tucker has been recently at odds with Dana over not being invited on her right facing radio show while opponent Ed Martin has gotten her blessing to be on with no problem. The controversy comes in when it was found that, as we said, Martin’s campaign recently had a video produced by Shock City putting a dubious charge on Martin’s public campaign finance books.

Our thoughts? We believe Chris in that it was honest pay for work he did for the Martin campaign if only because everyone knows those books are open to the public, and though we at Punching Kitty have spared with the Loesch’s before, we don’t think they would do something like forcing political campaigns in to Shock City contracts in exchange for airtime. Plus, Shock City is a really nice place [Editor's Note: Yes we've been there, not not lately as you can imagine. Oh the costs of gossip blogging.] so its not like the Martin campaign is hiring out someone’s 14 year old nephew with a laptop to do his videos for 3 grand.

However, given the recent angst triangle between Martin, Tucker and Dana Loesch does that transaction look bad and warrent investigation and fair reporting? Yes, of course it does.

This is the very reason campaign finance books are open! Asking these questions are absolutely fair game and the response should be to answer them clearly and honestly without trying to duck things at all which, in the right or not, makes the accused look bad.

“It’s a complete non-story,” counters Chris Loesch. “Dana did not make one red cent off the work we did for Ed. Adam completely got it wrong, and I’d think you’d want to get it right as a journalist.”

Okay. But why was it that Ed Martin chose to use Chris Loesch’s studio over all the other production companies in St. Louis?

Still, one wonders: Don’t Chris and Dana — like most married couples — share bank accounts? So when one profits, so does the other, right?

“I’m not going to get into my personal life,” replies Chris.”It’s obvious from what you write that you don’t like Dana. And that’s fine. You keep writing what you do, because whenever you mention her name it’s good for us.”

“Us?” I ask. “I thought you were two separate entities. Why would it be good for you?”

“Because,” says Chris. “She’s my wife.”

Er, okay.

Oh Chris.  Not exactly the game plan we would have went with.

Oh and Chad? You may think Chris is gone, but if you and the RFT staff start spontaneously lip syncing to “Banana Boat”, he’s still there.

We heard rumors, but today the word was out that it was indeed real: Sometimes people leave newspaper jobs on their own accord.

Also, Kristen Hinman is leaving the Riverfront Times.

Hinman, who has been at the RFT for over five years, has been the fingers at the keyboard for some of their more memorable posts in recent years including the recent piece on fan-of-the-site Dana Loesch and, one of our favorites, a article entitled: Kevin Slaten’s Head Is About to Explode: The exiled sports-talk radio ranter needs to get some things off his chest.

Undoubtedly, Himnan’s thrill of her RFT writing career was interviewing, Mike Flynn, editor of this very site, not once, but twice, for our feature in the Blogger’s Dozen and a little while ago for the Tour de Frankfurter.

We hear Hinman is off to Washington D.C. where the cost of living is way higher, but we hear there is less poop on the side walks. Sounds nice. Of course we will miss her voice in our weekly jaunt to read words printed on a dead tree.

Kristen, if you would feel like starting the Washington D.C. franchise of Punching Kitty, lets talk!