The first public meeting of the new year is the third meeting in 26 months regarding I-380 in the Hiawatha area. The late 2017 meeting revealed plans for double diverging diamonds at Boyson Road and Tower Terrace Road; the second had more detailed information.
The meeting starts at 5 on Thursday at Hiawatha City Hall, according to the press release.
Let’s say you are a presidential candidate. (Odds are you might be.) And let’s say you want to run the same ad at least twice every half-hour*. Since you’re mostly likely in that group with a percentage smaller than the margin of error, you need a cheap consultant and/or a blogger to crib research off of to maximize your reach.
What I’m trying to say is: I’ve updated the county table and maps for Iowa’s broadcast affiliates. This process has come a long way from when I started, when I had to physically visit the broadcast area to take notes during the news or rely on notes from people there.
Most of this was done in September. Since the last time I did a complete run-through, the following has happened:
When all of the above is taken into consideration, we have a new champion for best station coverage/worst change of venue site: Carroll County, receiving love from all nine stations in the Des Moines, Omaha, and Sioux City areas. On the other extreme, poor Van Buren County is down to two stations, period.
(And then, when it’s time for the general election, I’d prepare for pouring a bunch of money into the Duluth-Superior market that blankets northern Wisconsin and the Iron Range. But that’s just me, and —
In this case the dark psychic forces are the ones autoplaying video.)
* Three days of Jeopardy, ten weeks before the caucuses, in order: Yang, Bernie, Steyer, Biden, Pete, Warren; Yang, Pete, Steyer, Bullock, Yang, Biden; Yang, Pete, Yang, Bernie, Biden, Bernie, Yang, Bullock, Bullock. And, on two of the three days, also an ad against Sen. Joni Ernst.
PRE-PUBLISH UPDATE: A week before Thanksgiving, WHO changed its entire graphics package. I happened to have seen the same style/system a few weeks earlier, on WISH-TV of Indianapolis. It’s very light-backgrounded and uses super-super-basic weather icons (the Jony Ive-ization of weather graphics and chyrons, if you will). That allowed me to make tweaks along the edges of its map, all eliminations, including Tama County.
Iowa entered the J series of license plates before 2019 ended. Of course, it was a blackout plate, because as this early December story from the Marshalltown Times-Republican shows, a lot of Iowans really, really, really hate the standard license plate design.
I haven’t seen Episode IX yet — I’ve been waiting to get around to it until Rian Johnson was impeached for his high crimes and misdemeanors, or after today, whichever came first — but when I heard this happened, I may also have squeed a bit.
THEY
USED
DUEL
OF
THE
FATES
*brain explode* https://t.co/AuMCd6MH3a— Kristen Soltis Anderson (@KSoltisAnderson) November 29, 2019
And then I found this “epic orchestration” that took the overlay of “Duel” with “Imperial March” and extended it out. (The YouTube user appears to do a lot of these.) WOW. And not because the clarinet has a solo. Well, not just.
It was 1995, and I was a dork. Now it is not 1995, and I am still a dork. (There was no college football championship at the time, and Iowa State certainly wasn’t doing anything bowl-worthy, so I took my best shot.)
I have a couple different fears now, but that’s not to say the old ones are gone.
Sometimes I think about how to reconcile who I think I am now with the person I thought I was. It can be very difficult.
November 4, 2019: From the Lincoln Highway in 2011 to the Jefferson Highway in 2019, Iowa’s scenic and historic byways received a more uniform, more visible signing scheme in the 2010s.
Since the Second Great Decommissioning and completion of four-lane corridors that had been planned out in some form since the late 1960s, the Iowa highway system on paper was between mostly dormant and low-level active for the 2010s. These changes do not cover the massive interstate projects in Council Bluffs and Sioux City, which totally reshaped how traffic gets through but did little map-wise.
And then we got the out-of-nowhere shock to the system: The eastern half of I-680, between I-29 and I-80, was renumbered I-880. Some people may point to this as a case of state governments adapting to global warming, because this was precipitated by an unusual “bomb cyclone” that left vast areas of the Missouri River floodplain under water at a time of year it should not have been.
I, however, just want to hate it because I believe it is both unnecessary and the wrong type of number to assign. I-880 by itself doesn’t form a loop or partial loop, and/so it should have been numbered I-329, I-180, or I-580 (to avoid confusion with the nearby-ish I-180 in Lincoln). An odd-first-digit route can still have both ends at another interstate; see I-155 in Illinois and I-196 in Michigan.
October 11, 2015: Notre Dame’s stadium expansion includes academic facilities and its first video boards.
I wrote before on this blog that Iowa State would never play Notre Dame in football unless the stars aligned for a bowl game. Well, much like with “ESPN College Gameday” in Ames, an improbable course of events has resulted in exactly that.
AND I CAN’T GO. (It is possible I will never be able to attend a bowl game again.) But at least I can watch it on TV, given the kickoff time and lucking out into being on ABC for the second time in three years.
Tonight’s and tomorrow’s games, with Iowa playing USC and Iowa State playing Notre Dame, would be the perfect matchups to josh “Irish Trojan” Brendan Loy (who graduated from both). But after he ended his blog, we lost contact, and then the 2016 election changed him.
After Saturday, there will be eight teams the Irish have never played, three of which are in the Big 12. But now is the Cyclones’ chance, in ISU’s first Florida bowl game ever, in front of maybe the biggest TV audience since at least the 2011 Oklahoma State game if not ever…
WITH BLACK HELMETS?!?!?
Sigh.
This is an expanded yet condensed version of my 29 states in 12 months of ’16-17. The only additions to the red group on this map were Wyoming (two months before the 12 began), South Dakota (very barely), Washington, Oregon, and North Dakota — all but SD 12 to 17½ years since the previous stop.
At the close of this decade, my least-recently-visited of the 48 are Georgia, Montana (less than 15 hours in the one visit), Idaho, Utah, New Jersey (at 2 hours, now the record-holder for least time spent), and California.
But small-ballers only count states. Counting counties is where it’s at, and I racked up 128 new counties in 11 states the past two years, for a current total of 1680 (53.47%). But again, my nearest unvisited counties with an interstate in them are in Indiana and Arkansas.
Here’s a reason Iowa needs to keep the presidential caucuses. A major media outlet left to its own devices went looking for a “small town” and found
Try again, please.
October 22, 2013: There’s a Casey’s in Casey, Illinois (seen here). There is not a Casey’s in Casey, Iowa.
Casey’s hangs its convenience store hat on two major things: Serving rural Americans and making great pizza. In many places, maybe even a majority, it’s the only place in town you can order a pizza. For a long time, it has run a deal where you can save 10 box tops (tabs/coupons, really) from large pizzas and get a free one.
But the low-tech days of saving tabs are coming to a rapid end, as Casey’s announced it will be ending that tradition.
This is sad/troublesome in many ways. You HAVE to have an account on the app, which means you HAVE to have a smart phone AND an account. You won’t be able to pool coupons and you won’t be able to get that stroke of luck from someone who threw their box out without taking it off. When you hit 10, you HAVE to claim your reward in 60 days.
Of course, all these “analog loopholes” may be why it’s ending the program in the first place. But Iowans who don’t have smart phones, or who would like to get their coupons without extra work, are going to be left out.
