The Des Moines Register looks around a really big Hy-Vee:
The combined food store, restaurant, coffee shop, sushi bar, health store, take-out food department, cooking education station and cheese shop is housed in more than 95,000 square feet. It’s the grocery store chain’s newest concept store, and it’s likely to wow and overwhelm shoppers all at once.
Andy Staples has an excellent long piece at SI.com. A key passage about the most recent events:
Later, when it came time to add a 14th school, SEC leaders took Missouri. Clemson or Florida State might have made more geographic sense, but they wouldn’t have opened any new television markets for the league. Missouri did. The SEC couldn’t tear up its contracts with ESPN and CBS, but adding so much earning power did give the league leverage to renegotiate.
The middle of the afternoon on Sept. 8, 2012, will have the following available on basic cable in Iowa. Most of these are nonconference and so fall under the home team’s contract:
CBS won’t be showing football (probably golf) since it’s early in the season. I picked an early date because those TV times have been set. Later, when Notre Dame has afternoon home games, all three networks and all those flavors of ESPN and Fox will have games going on.
That is a lot of football. To get that, though, we’re all paying a price: cable/satellite subscriptions, football ticket price increases, athletics facilities arms races, and most visibly, ends to hundred-year-old series. Let’s hope that we don’t lose the things that make college football special — or at least not lose any more.
July 25, 2012: The westernmost part of Business 20 through Fort Dodge now goes west a short bit on what was D26 before turning due south to immediately meet new 20. D36 is the designation for old 20 through Moorland to Rockwell City.
While crews did a great job of signing all the county roads involved in this intersection, no Business 20 signs got in on any direction here or at the interchange.
Planned work to build shoulders on the road south of Albion has been scrapped. (Marshalltown Times-Republican)
Something was going to have to give, since the houses in the former village of Marietta are so close to the road. The road wasn’t a state highway until the end of 1989.
After my latest excursion to the northwest (more on that eventually), I have been to or through all by 15 of Iowa’s 500 largest cities.
The top of the “unvisited” list is Blue Grass (#211), by virtue of not really being on US 61 anymore, followed by Fruitland (#288), also by virtue of not being on US 61 by the letter of the law.
I haven’t updated my Clinched Highway Mapping page yet, but there are only four segments of state-maintained road I have not traveled since Jan. 1, 2003: Part of IA 9 in Howard County, four-lane US 63 south of IA 346, the Fort Madison bypass, and IA 1 north of Mount Vernon. New US 20 will be added shortly, in two bursts or possibly one. I think I’ll have to extend my time frame to 11 years instead of a decade for every mile of every road.
I’m not completely sure the statement in the headline is true, but the vast majority of this article about what Penn State faces with scholarship reduction deals with just HOW BAD Cyclone football was in the Jim Walden era thanks to Jim Criner and the NCAA doing what the NCAA does. In a word: Eep.
That year [1987], top-ranked Oklahoma and second-ranked Nebraska combined to beat Walden’s Cyclones by 98-6. Though the losing consumed him, Walden had no choice but to rely on walk-ons at times, and his game plans became desperate answers to the question: “How can we keep from getting beat 75-0?”
Fewer than 120,000 plates to go. Expect a big jump soon since U and V are skipped.
The segment of US 65 between IA 2 and Lineville on the 2012 Iowa Map for Bicyclists (PDF) doesn’t appear on the map at all. The map is color-coded with traffic counts — purple is the lowest, fewer than 700 vehicles a day — and shows trails across the state.
County roads crisscross the state just waiting for bicycle riders at the end of every July, but in some places, there just isn’t easy access in without heavy vehicle traffic.
Based on 2010 population and 40 years’ worth of maps (previous disclaimers apply):
“Please save our church. Buy beer and wine.”
— St. Anthony Christian Church, Marshall County, which set up an all-Iowa-microbrew garden for RAGBRAI.
