ESPN starts the hype train. Check out the vintage Big Eight logos in the upper right corner at the 30-second mark. Also note the arrow drawn from Herky to Cy, and then from Cy to Brutus, which doesn’t make sense as the two teams have never met in football and Ohio State stole Earle Bruce from us and then in basketball AARON BLEEPING CRAFT and —
I’m sorry, I don’t know what came over me.
It’s the odd-numbered year before a presidential election, which means candidates of all stripes will be descending upon Des Moines’ east side to appear at the Iowa State Fair. As an Iowa State Fair lover and politics junkie, I have a friendly bit of advice: If you are a presidential candidate, do not eat a corn dog.
You will not look dignified while eating a corn dog. Your photo will be added to Gawker galleries of politicians looking unpresidential while eating corn dogs. Sit down at the Beef Quarters or Pork Tent and eat a hot beef sundae or pork dinner. If you don’t want to sit, grab a ribeye sandwich or pork chop on a stick (or both if you’re as diplomatic as Mike Pearson). Drink some lemonade. Have a turkey leg. On second thought, maybe don’t, even if it’s to show solidarity in Iowa’s recovery from bird flu, because being photographed with a turkey leg has its own drawbacks. Have a Rice Krispie bar on a stick Fair Square. Have a grinder. Have some cheese curds (unless you’re Scott Walker and need to avoid offending Wisconsin’s cows).
There are many, many fine Iowa State Fair foods you can partake of while making your case to be our next president. A corn dog just isn’t one of them.
Construction started Tuesday at the intersection of US 18 and US 71 on the north side of Spencer, which has been the site of multiple fatal accidents. “Offset” left-turn lanes will be constructed, spacing them apart from northbound and southbound lanes with a wide median and increasing visibility. A diagram of the new intersection is included with this July 31 Spencer Daily Reporter article.
North Tama has a new superintendent this year. Well, 57 percent of one. For the first time, the district will be sharing administrative functions with someone else.
David Hill, the principal of Dysart-Geneseo Elementary, will be splitting his duties between there and NT. Hill has introduced himself to North Tama via a blog and a pair of columns that ran in the Traer Star-Clipper.
First, he looked at the financial state of the district, and exactly how much Gov. Branstad’s line-item veto of money to augment an already-under-COLA state funding increase hurt. One sentiment could be used by many rural districts: “Your school board’s number one goal is to maintain the financial stability of the district and retain existing programs so that North Tama will remain a viable K-12 school.” Every district in the state has had to deal with the legislative stalemate and subsequent line-item veto. The Iowa Department of Education accounts for about 45% of the state budget and the lion’s share of that is K-12 funding.
(It doesn’t help when two elementary teachers leave in the same year because their husbands got jobs in Minnesota, but that is a whole ‘nother piece.)
Hill’s second column was a more personal one, mentioning his upbringing in Geneseo Township on a farm that’s been in his family for over 150 years.
August 8, 2015: Cy, the Iowa State University mascot, invites himself onto the stage with (from left) Tama County Pork Ambassador Landon Calderwood, Tama County Pork Queen Rachel Kopriva, and Iowa Pork Queen Christy Calderwood (of Tama County) as the Tama County Pork Producers give a $2500 check to Tama County Sheriff Dennis Kucera (third from right) for the K-9 unit at the sheriff’s department.
The mascots of all three Iowa regents universities came to the Winding Stairs Festival in Traer, just as they did for Gladbrook Corn Carnival at the end of June.
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The Walnut school district, which is currently sending its higher grades to AHST, will send everyone to Avoca even if a September merger vote fails, according to the Council Bluffs Daily Nonpareil.
Walnut lost a quarter of its enrollment in this decade. Should the consolidation vote fail, all the students will be sent to AHST (renamed AHSTW) in 2016 anyway, and Walnut would become a zombie district.
AHST is building an addition to its now-sole campus in Avoca, after having closed Avoca Elementary and the building in Shelby. I am not entirely sure when Shelby closed. The AHST board voted to close it in 2005, but a bond issue later that year to build a single campus barely made a supermajority and a lawsuit lasted two years before the Iowa Supreme Court ruled the petitioners did not fulfill requirements in a timely manner.
Traer’s Winding Stairs Festival 2015: ROAD TRIP! Link goes to poster of schedule. The free kolaches are Friday night. (Mmmm…free kolaches.) Parade is Saturday at 5, a little earlier than some weekend festivals.
The Traer Public Library is celebrating the centennial of the building — a Carnegie Library — this year. It underwent a complete renovation and got a major addition in 2004.
No, “traveled every mile of every highway in Iowa” does not qualify me to be grand marshal this year. Besides, I did it too recently.
The Highland school district is proposing to close two elementary buildings that haven’t been around all that long.
Highland, a name that falls firmly in the “tells you nothing about its location” category, is Ainsworth and Riverside in Washington County. The junior high/high school is not in either town but along old US 218 halfway between the two. The district is going to have a bond referendum this fall about building a new elementary near that complex, and both towns would lose their schools.
The oldest part of the building in Ainsworth besides the gym is only 42 years old (in Iowa, that qualifies as only) — and has an addition from 1999. Meanwhile, Riverside Elementary was built in 1995!
The district cites multiple categories of “efficiency” — staff, transportation, energy — as reasons for construction, but it’s up to the district’s voters to decide if that merits emptying out two places that, at least partly, just date back to the Clinton era.
A “for the record” type of post here: Multiple network affiliates serving areas in Iowa were off Mediacom cable systems for two weeks but are now back on the lineups*. This time, the retransmission-fee dispute was with Media General, which owns KIMT, KWQC, and KELO**.
The link from Broadcasting and Cable reports the additional nugget (as I interpret it) that places where the Media General stations were carried as a nearby but not primary affiliate will be dropped. It doesn’t say whether that would affect any Iowa locations — but I had this blog post from February about KIMT cutting its weather map area, and a comparison of WQAD’s most recent weather-cast to a map from last year shows it’s dropped every non-border county in Iowa except Henry, and also dropped Lee County.
*I had written “on the air” but the whole point isn’t about availability on the public airwaves, but on Mediacom cable, where it seems we can’t go a year without a dust-up like this.
**That link goes not to KELO but the reprinting of a form letter from Mediacom with its side of the story. You can tell it is a form letter because the first line needs to say “Sioux Falls” instead of “Fort Wayne”.
The semi-tradition of “the team that beats North Tama, or the team that beats the team that beats North Tama, wins it all” came true again this year in baseball, as Mason City Newman shut out Pleasantville Saturday to win the Class 1A title. Newman mercy-rule’d every postseason opponent except one (Algona Garrigan, in substate), outscoring them 76-6. Gladbrook-Reinbeck, the team that beat North Tama this year, scored four of those six in the first round of the state tournament.
In the 24 Class 1A state baseball championship games since Norway High School closed, private schools have filled 23 of the 48 slots and won 11 of the titles. (Newman in 2009-15 counts for five of the 23 and three of the 11.) This year, private schools were six of the 16 district #1 seeds. However, the best record belonged to undefeated (public) Van Buren, who pulled off an impersonation of Kentucky and lost its first game at the wrong time.
Given this exchange of tweets involving IHSAA information director Bud Legg, don’t expect anything to change any time soon.
