With a 24-0 SHUTOUT of the Longhorns, ISU has beaten Texas in Big 12 play more than Nebraska has. ISU also has a better winning percentage than Nebraska against Texas since 1996, and is the first unranked team to shut out Texas since 1961.
That is all.
…
Wait.
(prolonged fit of schadenfreudelicious giggling)
Better.
Texas plays at Iowa State tomorrow night, and the Cyclones have revenge for 2013 on their minds. It is the latest date in the calendar that the Longhorns have played in Ames, and as with Oct. 30, 1999, it took a late Labor Day for that to happen.
Of the 35 games played in Ames on Nov. 1 or later in the Big 12 era, teams from Texas have been involved in two. They are TCU on Nov. 9, 2013, and Texas Tech on Nov. 22, 2014. Both were narrow ISU losses. For comparison, in that span, Oklahoma has been to Ames in November three times and Kansas five — including the coldest game in ISU football history.
It is rare to the point of almost nonexistent that Iowa State is given the opportunity to use November weather as an intangible factor against any team from Texas. That said, there is a batch of caveats to that statement:
I’m not saying there’s a conspiracy by our conference overlords** to shelter the southernmost teams from the November winds of the Northern Plains, but I guess I’m not not saying it, either.
*Texas and Oklahoma cycled on and off together, and it shows in the records. Of eight bowl seasons, only three (2002, 2011, and 2012) happened when the Longhorns and Sooners were on the schedule.
**Exactly who I’m referring to there is left as an exercise for the reader.
June 26, 2014: The Arkansas-Missouri-Oklahoma triple point is just off MO/AR 43 in Southwest City, Missouri. Photo looking from Oklahoma mostly into Arkansas.
The Washington Post has an interactive map that details every location three states in the United States meet and how accessible they are. The map is with a short story about two brothers who have visited as many of them as they can, including those in the middle of bodies of water. Five of Iowa’s six triple points are in rivers, so I have to pass on that part of the “collection list.” I’ve been as close to the points as one can get on land, though.
I’ve been to all five land-based triple points of the states on the west side of the Mississippi: MN/ND/SD, IA/MN/SD, KS/MO/OK, AR/MO/OK, and AR/LA/TX.
!!!!!!! (Council Bluffs Daily Nonpareil):
The fate of the Farragut Community School District remains unknown, but the situation is now dire after the Iowa Department of Education announced it will recommend dissolving the district. …
The Hamburg Reporter first reported the Department of Education’s recommendation late Tuesday afternoon. District officials were notified in a teleconference Friday, Hinrichs said. The Daily Nonpareil independently verified the announcement Tuesday evening with the state agency as well as Nishnabotna officials.
THAT is the sound of an administrative nuclear bomb about to be detonated for the third time in Iowa history.
The Hamburg Reporter did its work after a very vaguely worded press release came out Monday morning and it got multiple sources confirming things on the record:
Farragut School Board President Jenny Varellas confirmed that they had heard from the Department of Education on Friday, Oct. 23, that it would be recommended that the Farragut School District be dissolved. Varellas said, “with that information in mind the focus of the Wednesday night meeting has changed from discussion about the PPEL to more of a question and answer session, and what-ifs.”
There is nothing so far about the Hamburg school district’s status, but if this comes to pass, there’s a heap of chaos about to descend on Fremont County.
“Then would you mind telling me what you’re doing in the middle of a plain in Iowa — and what I’m doing here, for that matter?”
Occasionally in books or movies a character will drop a reference to some place in Iowa. The most common reasons appear to be a) to show that this person has connections to the Midwest, providing flavor and minor characterization; b) to show that this person is a rube who has no idea how the civilized world works; or c) because there’s a plot device that needs something happening in the middle of nowhere.
Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged is an example of the last. That’s where the quote at the top of this post comes from. A scientist associated with the government is sent to check out Project X, an ultrasonic ray capable of causing great destruction. The radius of the weapon is described as such:
“a circle with a periphery extending from the shore of the Mississippi, roughly from the bridge of the Taggart Transcontinental Railroad, to Des Moines and Fort Dodge, Iowa, to Austin, Minnesota, to Woodman, Wisconsin, to Rock Island, Illinois.”
Here’s what it looks like on the Iowa map if you circumscribe all of those locations. (Woodman is a pretty small town.) Note that part of the circle follows close to the Mississippi. There are two nearby railroad bridges in real life, the Government Bridge for the old Rock Island Railroad in the Quad Cities and the Union Pacific bridge at Clinton.
The square in the middle represents the center of the circumscribed area. It is not the center of the shape represented by the polygon inside it, since the circle includes a much greater area to the south. This square is directly over La Porte City.
Since no original name was given, the true site is up for grabs. The website Conservapedia, for example, pinpoints Harmony City as being Dunkerton, 18 miles due north of La Porte City. Black Hawk County, in general, makes for a reasonable geographic location of the project.
Note: This post is not intended to be political. It is merely a discussion of Iowa in literature. It just so happens that this is a very political book.
Friday was like this.
Since 1921, when football was reinstated at Traer High School after the national period of safety concerns, only one team had gone winless in a season. The 1939 team went 0-8.
This year, the Redhawks finished 0-9, being outscored 407-56 including three shutouts.
The 3-24 record of the last three years is the worst since Traer went 3-24 in 1958-60, and that was bracketed on either end with a 1-4-1 abbreviated 1957 season and Traer-Clutier going 3-15 in 1961-62.
Here’s to hoping things look up next year.
A public hearing with a presentation about changing IA 58’s intersection with Viking Road into an interchange will be held Tuesday, the Waterloo-Cedar Falls Courier reports.
The roadbed for current 58 will be lowered and a very tight SPUI constructed. I have no idea how that’s going to work, but it’s certainly going to mean lots of disruption when it happens.
A rendering included with the article shows the proposal to build a new flyover-ramp interchange with US 20 as well. You can see the right-of-way lines left behind as an entirely new four-lane would be built just to the west of the current center point of the interchange (where 20 goes over the road) and then go in an elevated S-curve over Ridgeway Avenue and the current road (part of which would be eliminated) before hooking up with the current road south of Viking. However, that interchange and another tight SPUI at Greenhill Road have no money and aren’t in the five-year plan.
Retail east of the 58/Viking intersection has grown tremendously over the past decade and a half, from the Farm & Fleet and Wal-Mart to largely supplanting College Square Mall with a Target, strip-mall storefronts, and a McDonald’s (which is a recent enough development I only know about it via a picture with the article).
The Des Moines Register‘s documentary about the changes and decline of rural Iowa’s school districts airs on Iowa Public Television at 7 tonight. Former North Tama principal Nick Pace is among those interviewed.
In conjunction with that, Iowa Public Radio interviewed reporter Jason Clayworth, photographer Charlie Litchfield, and a small-school shared superintendent in southwestern Iowa. (Sidney is misspelled in the chatter.) The interview is about 50 minutes long.
Sunday’s Register had a “what does it all mean” type of piece, and as far as ISU economist David Swenson is concerned, we’re past the point of no return. Former opinion writer Richard Doak also wrote about it, and for the most part avoided a broadside against rural Iowa.
(For the record, I was not consulted, aside from the very beginning of the project when I floated/agreed with Corwith-Wesley and Southeast Webster-Grand/Prairie Valley as potential candidates to be covered.)
Plug and reminder: My timeline of changes to Iowa school districts over the past 30 years gets updated after I dig up new information or when things happen.
…now what?
UPDATE: Instead of sweeping, the Cubs got swept, and we haven’t abolished lawyers. This is the timeline that sprung from when Marty didn’t hit the Rolls-Royce on Oct. 27, 1985. Future imperfect, indeed.
UPDATE II: USA Today has been capitalizing on 26-year-old product placement a very good sport about BTTF Day coverage, and has a landing page with links to all the articles it’s done about the trilogy.
Story from KWQC. If you watch carefully, you’ll see a few seconds of the street sign with “Co Rd 252” on it at the former west end of IA 252. That intersection will be on sort of a frontage road because the four-lane is being built to the west with an interchange at IA 92.
