From last week's City Strobe:

Locals attempt, fail to become cool
Last week was marred by several embarrassing botched attempts at coolness by local citizens. Despite the fact that electronic gadgets are nature’s way of making it easy to quickly identify nerds, area dorks descended on the new Apple Store, in Oxmoor Mall, in a failed attempt to become cool.

The store, which sells iPhones, iPods and iMacs, offers the latest overpriced technological advancements in helping customers insulate themselves from any possible human contact (which is apparently why Apple products begin with the first person singular, in lowercase). Bystanders took solace in the fact that there were few actual sales.

In other overpriced-retailer news, the Big Granola formed by the merger of Whole Foods and Wild Oats announced it would close the Wild Oats store in Shelbyville Road Plaza and begin gouging customers in earnest at its Whole Foods store a block away. Bypassing the excellent opportunity to rechristen the chain “Wild Whole,” the company will instead be known as “Just Like Kroger but More Expensive and with Twice the Seitan.”

Worried that insufferable pretentiousness was stampeding east, downtown’s 21c cemented its reputation as the world’s most self-conscious hotel by hosting an $821-per-person pajama birthday party for itself. The party included a boob-art porn star, a contortionist, “historical hip-hop’s” “Black Mozart,” a sidewalk sex clinic and an “orgy,” in what critics deemed “only $821 more expensive than public-access cable.”

With so many failing so badly to become cool, ya really gotta feel for Dixie Highway. Those cats aren’t even cool enough for Kohl’s. Despite Mayor Abramson’s personal plea for the Dockers-mongers to take over the former Dillard’s space in the Shively Shopping Center, Kohl’s politely declined, though its thought balloon cited the company’s inability to compete with Wal-Mart in the discounted-crap-you-probably-don’t-need market.