The sign along Kansas Highway 9 said “Open every day”, and given that it was Sunday, I was going to give a museum in tiny Logan a chance. I was extremely not disappointed, and got a sneak peek at a traveling exhibit that typically is found at museums in much larger cities.
(because someone jumped on the last two weeks of August before I even had a chance to look)
(I wanted to see the Belfast Titanic museum, sigh)
God bless you and your straight-outta-2000 website with football games time-coded to God’s Own Time Zone, lsufootball.net (not affiliated).
Let the record show that I had the last two deep dish/pan slices from pizzas bought at Traer Pizza Palace. (I was told the mediums we were able to get were “the last” non-thin crusts.)
The Latin phrase per se means “by itself” or “in itself.” Many many years ago in the English language, the alphabet ended with “&.” As Merriam-Webster says: “When the 27th quasi-letter & was referred to it was called & per se, and, meaning “& by itself (is the word) and.'”
That phrase became the word ampersand.
I mention that etymology because this happened.
Whatever expression you imagine I made reading that, you’re probably right.
What if you could get the car associated with your childhood memories back? And it was in approximate driving condition? Well, when I went to Conrad’s Black Dirt Days in June, I found someone who did just that.
It’s moderately confusing to have the Iowa DOT release its five-year programs on the fiscal year, but that’s been the case since it formed in 1975. That means that the contracts for 2026 started July 1. I waited until the new state map was released to do my writeup of the 2026-30 plan. Come for the roadgeekery, stay for the fontgeekery.
Community members put on the play “One Stoplight Town” at the Wieting Theatre in Toledo on July 12. It was a good play. Perhaps the most emotional part for me, though, was learning that the lead was played by someone who got back into acting two decades after his last time on stage … when he was a senior at South Tama in 2004.
Two related, but discrete, items from the past week show us the significance of the loss of the Greatest Generation.
First, from Pew Research:
Reflecting on the United States’ actions, 35% of Americans today say using the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945 was justified, while 31% say it was not justified. A third say they are not sure. …
Americans ages 65 and older (48%) are more likely than adults in younger age groups to say the bombings were justified. Adults under 30, meanwhile, are considerably more likely to say the bombings were not justified than to say they were justified (44% vs. 27%).
Second, Roger Corbin, who was originally from Hampton but spent decades in Traer, died last Sept. 20. When I wrote a story about him for my Substack, I included a quote from his interview with the Grout Museum.
“When we left to go to the Pacific I didn’t figure our chances were much better than 50% of ever being back to the States,” he said for the Grout Museum District’s “Voices of Iowa” oral history project. “The invasion of Japan was going to cost a whole bundle of lives, and I’m one of those who can look in the camera and say, God bless Harry Truman for dropping the atomic bomb.”
KWWL found that clip for its story about the 80th anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima, but something got lost in translation.
Please, somebody teach history — and proofreading.
Orient-Macksburg is dead-but-not-dead. We know that. But did you know that a campaign to save Harrison Elementary School in Cedar Rapids more or less succeeded? Also, Toledo’s historic school is being replaced by a site at the Iowa Juvenile Home.
The Great Eastern Iowa Tractorcade switched sponsors from WMT to KXEL this year, partially because one of the main coordinators switched jobs. The 26th edition of this ride was in June, and for 2025 they started in Mount Pleasant and radiated out each day. I went to Washington to write a story about it.
