on a side not, what's it like living in St. Louis?
Good and bad. Good, I can get away with saying shit to people by just mumbling a bit and people assume I'm a normal polite Englishman. Bad, large swathes of the city are so knackered, slums would be upset to be compared to them.
http://www.bbc.com/news/av/magazine-17361995/crossing-a-st-louis-street-that-divides-communities &
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delmar_DivideI live on that street. Look south down Union, and you can see private gated streets (the Mayor lives in one of them). Look north, and you can see derelict houses (Chuck Berry used to live about 500 yards north of where I'm sat now, but it's a really rough street these days). There's a lot of tough history here, too - the guy who made the documentary "Jandek On Corwood" is from St Louis, and he also made a documentary about the failed housing project Pruitt-Igoe -
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xKgZM8y3hso . Being politically active, too, I've met a lot of the people who were involved in the Ferguson protests, and I was a little involved in the protests around the Jason Stockley acquittal last year -
http://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-41306935House prices are similarly divided - I could get a 6 bedroom mansion for under $50,000, but it would be on the same street as three crack-houses; south of the city, crappy one-bedroom places are going for $150,000 and above.
Or were you on about baseball? Almost everyone loves it, so it's super-easy to start conversations wherever you go. Even the local alternative free weekly paper gets in on the act, but they talk about why the percentage of black players now is the same as it was in 1956.
https://www.riverfronttimes.com/stlouis/the-disappearing-black-baseball-player/Content?oid=16660276 (It's an interesting discussion, but doesn't mention the extreme levels of conservatism at the top of the game, or stuff like how expensive it is to get to the upper echelons of the game now; like you need parents willing to bankroll travel leagues and expensive camps and all that stuff)