The Storm Lake school district wants to sell the old South Elementary building because it would cost too much to replace the boiler, KCAU and the AP report. (Of course, the new buyer would have to eat that $100,000 to make the building usable.) The building hasn’t been a school for a while; Storm Lake consolidated its three elementaries into one. The North Elementary site is now a McDonald’s.
I was rewatching the season finale of “Agents of SHIELD” when something near the end jumped out at me. In the second-to-last scene, SHIELD Director Phil Coulson (Clark Gregg) and Agent Skye (Chloe Bennet) visit Cal Zabo (Kyle MacLachlan) after his memory has been erased. He’s now a veterinarian in an urban setting. For a few seconds, as Coulson gets in his classic convertible, three vehicles behind him look very much like they have Iowa license plates. They even have the red 2015 registration sticker in the lower left corner. Here’s a screencap of two of them.
Given the attention to detail of the Marvel TV series, three cars with Iowa (or at least non-California, non-New York, non-Virginia) plates would seem to imply very strongly that they’re there for a reason.
This wouldn’t be the first time the series made a passing reference to Iowa.
Missing a game-winning field goal* as time expires MERE MINUTES after Iowa made a game-winning field goal as time expires, and then losing in double overtime, is one of the most Iowa State football things ever and challenges the UAB game as the most Iowa State thing ever from this calendar year alone, and WHY DID YOU PUNT ON FOURTH AND 18 INCHES AT MIDFIELD AGAINST IOWA FOR THE LOVE OF CRINER
Meanwhile, North Tama is halfway to an oh-fer because the next two weeks are against a Denver team that just upset top-five Gladbrook-Reinbeck and then the Rebels themselves and it’s not going to be pretty.
*Pushed five yards back after an earlier false start because, again, Iowa State.
October 22, 2014: East of Atlantic, present-day US 6 goes north with US 71 to I-80, while old 6 between 71 and Anita is now IA 83. “Historic 6” was signed across the state not too long ago.
Starting this morning, the US Route 6 Tourist Association is going across Iowa on the present and past routes of US 6. (The map more or less follows 6 as it existed in 1932, right after it replaced US 32 in Iowa.) Thursday night was the premiere of a documentary about US 6 in Iowa. That film can be purchased online for $20 right now.
The tour starts in Davenport and ends in Council Bluffs, where US 6 will soon be removed from its alignment on Broadway.
I have written about (and met) Bryan Farr of Massachusetts, who is tirelessly promoting US 20 as a tourism destination and vehicle for economic development. He’s back in Iowa this week to visit the town of Cushing. He was interviewed there by the Sioux City Journal during his cross-country trip last year. After that, the town formed the “Old 20 Community Development Corporation,” geared toward the exact kind of thing Farr is encouraging.
The group now has a website. In addition to being a general-interest city website, it’s also promoting Woodbury County Rural Economic Development initiatives to get people and businesses to call Cushing home. The town may be on “old 20” but by the end of the decade it will be right beside a four-lane connection to both sides of Iowa.
In retrospect, it’s an obvious strategy: Grab the domain names for every school district in Iowa, using the full name; follow that with the school nickname; make it a dot-com, since most official school district websites end in .k12.ia.us; and profit from those who aren’t paying attention. (EDIT: Not just Iowa, this is going on across the country.)
In August, a penny-stock company called DigitalTown did just that. Now typing every [school][mascot].com from “keekeehawks” to “akronwestfieldwesterners” brings up a templated website with a district logo cribbed from somewhere, design accents in the school colors, and “[nickname]bucks”. DigitalTown is engaging in a form of cybersquatting.
The press releases couldn’t be more cookie-cutter or more obvious that they’re press releases, but it looks like local papers have fallen for it, including the Traer Star-Clipper and Reinbeck Courier. The latter’s website has deleted the page, but it can be found in the Google cache. It bears all the hallmarks of a plug-and-chug text macro: Where the website is the first word in the sentence it is not capitalized, all the releases are missing a comma in the same place, and “Jack Londgren” is working in Iowa, Maryland, and Oregon. An extra giveaway: The release/website for North Tama uses “Red Hawks” as two words, which is incorrect. North Tama has put up a notice on its Facebook page, which would be a good idea for everyone else to do too, and the superintendent has a blog post about it.
Iowa’s school districts have nothing to do with the DigitalTown websites. Schools will not receive any revenue through them. In fine, fine print at the bottom of each one is a disclaimer like this: “DigitalTown.com and its network are not affiliated with Bcluw Comets. All trademarks are held by their respective holders.” Yes, lowercased just like that. Even the disclaimer is an autofill blank.
The Fairfield Sun-Times — not Fairfield, Iowa, but Fairfield, Montana — did some investigation, and it gets more suspicious by the minute.
Sports schedules and rosters are available in many places. But DigitalTown takes it further, attempting to sell ad space, offering e-mail addresses that use the school name and nickname, and selling merchandise with the school’s name on it. The “Team Stores” have all sorts of clothing designs but — and here’s another sign this whole thing is automated — the full name includes the nickname even where the nickname is listed separately. That leads to…this.
There is significant potential for confusion here, and that’s just what DigitalTown is banking on. I would argue that it amounts to false representation, something that can’t be avoided with a miniature disclaimer. The average Iowa school district isn’t concerning itself with the concept of snatching up every website related to it (see, for example, presidential candidate Carly Fiorina not buying the .org version of her name), nor is it thinking about its name as a form of intellectual property or a reason to trademark it. One that HAS thought about it, though, is West Des Moines, which created new logos not that long ago and trademarked them. And guess what — DigitalTown owns valleytigers.com.
I intend to tell the IHSAA, IGHSAU, and the Iowa attorney general’s office about this. Even if state-level groups are not able to do anything — the individual districts may have to take action, and they aren’t going to be able to afford the lawyers — they can alert districts and Iowans that this is happening. Ideally, DigitalTown would get buried in an avalanche of cease-and-desist letters, but at the very least, true supporters of Iowa schools and their sports teams should stay as far away from DigitalTown websites as possible.
The 90-year-old truss bridge on a still-gravel Lincoln Highway loop in Linn County will be replaced, the Cedar Rapids Gazette reports.
The bridge was not old enough to be an official part of Lincoln Highway (the Marion routing was changed shortly before construction) but is certainly in the character of Iowa bridge construction of the era.
The current bridge will be demolished by the end of October and a replacement built next year, the article says.
Two stories about the power of one:
A Riceville school board candidate failed to win election because he didn’t take time to vote for himself — and no one else did either.
In Columbia, Missouri, businesses along Business Loop I-70 created a “community improvement district” specifically designed to exclude residents so they could impose a sales-tax increase — except a student moved into a rental house and became the sole voter in the bounded area. Under Missouri law, that meant she alone would decide on the increase, and after doing research she opposed it. There won’t be any vote at all.
Wapsie Valley 42, North Tama 0; Iowa 31, Iowa State 17.
If ISU plays the rest of the season as listlessly as they did in the second half, Paul Rhoads will be out of a job.
Throughout the summer and until Saturday, I was predicting that the losing coach of this week’s Iowa-ISU game would be fired at the end of the season. This past week, I haven’t been so sure. Iowa State looked good (i.e. didn’t lose) against UNI, and Iowa scored the same amount of points but also had its fans applauding a fake field goal that failed to get a first down. I’m 1-for-1 on sports predictions so far this year, and I’ll keep that record intact by not officially making a prediction on coaching.
This is a make-or-break game for Paul Rhoads’ record, as he is 3-3 against Iowa. Gene Chizik and Dan McCarney finished with even records against Iowa (1-1 and 6-6, respectively), so in the 20 years since McCarney was hired the series is dead even. Two of Iowa’s three most recent coaches are .500 or worse against Iowa State.*
I will say that this year, as is often the case, if the team’s schedules were flipped, ISU would be talking bowl potential and Kirk Ferentz would be coaching for his job. Not all of us are so lucky as to get Illinois AND Purdue AND Indiana AND avoid our conference’s top two teams.
From an ISU fan’s perspective, perhaps the best thing that could happen to Iowa this year (aside from losing out) is for the Hawkeyes to go 8-4 with the four losses coming in the four trophy games. It would infuriate those who want Ferentz gone, but the “old guard” would remember the 20 years B.F. (Before Fry) when Iowa only won a third of its games and say that firing a coach after an eight-win season borders on lunacy (or Nebraska fandom, but really, who can tell the difference?).
