Jul 07

North Union, North Kossuth look at consolidation

Posted on Friday, July 7, 2017, at 10:00 AM by Jeff

At least, that’s what I get from the headline-only item from the area weeklies. The North Union School Board page hasn’t been updated with minutes/agendas for THREE YEARS. A radio station link whose headline says the same is already 404’d but the Google cached version from June 13 says the North Union and North Kossuth boards were going to approve a reorganization petition.

The two districts — formerly three, as Armstrong-Ringsted and Sentral — have been whole-grade-sharing for a while. I extensively covered the population and consolidation issues of the area four years ago. Save for the NON-merger of LuVerne with Algona as Corwith-Wesley dissolved (LuVerne is sending 7-12 to Algona, though), it holds up.

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Jul 06

Iowa’s going to have mismatched plates for a DECADE?

Posted on Thursday, July 6, 2017, at 10:00 AM by Jeff

The DOT is finally going to look at a new license plate design. That’s…fine, I guess. Iowa ended up being on the front end of the light-blue-at-top-gradient-to-white style that spread across the country. IIRC, the design — the first not to be a solid color — didn’t particularly please anyone. But it’s the planned implementation, which could start next year, that I have a problem with.

In the 1979, 1986, and 1997 rollouts, when Iowa went to registration stickers for extended periods, the entire state had its plates replaced over a year. But this time the DOT won’t automatically replace everyone’s plates, but roll them out on the 10-year replacement cycle. That’s really stupid. That means that for a decade, we will have two presumably very different styles out on the road, both valid. In fact, in 2020, you would see four variants:

  • The W’s, X’s, and two-thirds of the Y’s from the 1997-2012 cycle, numbers-then-letters in blue on current background, that won’t be replaced yet
  • The rest of the Y’s and Z’s in black on current background
  • The alphanumeric sequence we’re currently in, letters-then-numbers, from AAA to somewhere probably in the G’s, on the 1997 background that would be good for another half-decade-plus
  • And plates with the new design but continuing the alphanumeric sequence from 2012.
  • The above doesn’t count the dozens of specialty plates and any older ones that slip through the cracks; I’ve seen at least two vintage 1997-2000 plates still around with current stickers.

County names will still be on the plates. That’s good. And presumably we’ll keep both front and back, which is the way it should be. But the mismatches are going to be epic; it’ll be like seeing vehicles from two states every day.

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Jul 05

Google [expletive deleted] up Google News

Posted on Wednesday, July 5, 2017, at 10:00 AM by Jeff

Rant week? Fine, rant week.

Keeping up on the “beats” of Iowa highways, school districts, and other things means a regular look for stories. For that, I use Google News a lot. It did a pretty good job of tracking down stuff I was looking for…until a week ago Tuesday, when disaster struck.

Google News has become the latest victim of the “subtraction by subtraction”/”optimized for mobile” user interface madness of the 2010s, and the hipsters love it. It “looks like something from this decade,” proclaims Ars Technica, and then a commenter pointed out that that’s not a compliment. It’s “cleaner,” says Engadget, in the way that a room that’s never used is clean. It’s “a much-needed redesign to cut down on clutter and confusion,” says the Verge.

Clutter and confusion? Take a look at old and new side by side, tell me who would be confused by the old look and embrace the new, and then explain why those people should be allowed to vote. The new design embraces everything that sucks about the “mobile web”, from larger images when we’re looking for stuff to read, to the non-use of underlined blue text as links, to the headline-only approach that reopens the door for clickbait, to the vast, gaping wastes of space on any horizontal monitor. (The website Daring Fireball, looking back at the 10th anniversary of the iPhone, perhaps unintentionally shows off the catastrophe of vertical-first design.)

All of that could be tolerable if not for the other part of the modern design equation, flipping off power users. (See also: 2016 MacBookPro.) “SORT BY DATE” IS GONE. It’s absolutely nonexistent in New Google News. Sure, it can “localize,” but there is only ONE PAGE of results and they aren’t in chronological order. And when you’re looking for current events, or past-week events, that’s kind of a big deal.

(And all that’s before touching the new “fact-checking tool”, to which, Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? or said another way, what could possibly go wrong?) Those of us who work with words on a large screen are apparently a dying breed anyway, given Fox Sports’ and MTV’s recent unceremonious amputations of their writing staffs and the New York Times (!) eliminating (!) its copy desk.

So if in the future I seem to be scrambling for news nuggets, it’s because Google took something that wasn’t broke and broke it.

Signed, a member of the Make It 2010, 2005, Or God Help Me 1999 on the Internet Again.

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Jul 04

Happy Calendar Date of Significance

Posted on Tuesday, July 4, 2017, at 10:00 AM by Jeff

Remember the joke, “Does Britain have a Fourth of July?” It was funnier when Americans actually remembered the reason the day was special. But now, we get stuff like this. This was the image in an e-mail from MidAmerican Energy:

midamericanholiday

It has a name. It’s Independence Day. Dozens of men dedicated their “lives, fortunes and sacred honor” to do something unprecedented, something that changed the course of history. Want to use the calendar date as an occasional synonym or second reference? Fine. BUT DON’T MAKE IT THE PRIMARY REFERENCE.

Maybe it’s because people can’t spell “independence” anymore…or because “have a happy holiday” has too much of a connection to that random calendar date at the end of December.

(On a related note, I am floored that the legalization of fireworks in Iowa hasn’t been more of a story, but the nation’s crazy meter went right past 11 and got stuck on 12, so I guess that’s the way of things. If my neighborhood is any indicator, I feel sorry for anyone with PTSD after 8:30.)

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Jul 03

OABCIG consolidation passes

Posted on Monday, July 3, 2017, at 10:00 AM by Jeff

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June 24, 2017: The school in Odebolt was a sticking point in previously failed reorganization votes. Residents were afraid the town would lose its school.

The Odebolt-Arthur and Battle Creek-Ida Grove school districts will consolidate in 2018, the Sioux City Journal reports. This was the third attempt at the vote. The second one, which failed last year, drove enough hard feelings the Des Moines Register wrote about it. The high school will be in Ida Grove, which tore down its 1923 school that was right by the courthouse four years ago. (Until 10 days ago my last stop in Ida Grove was a decade ago, when I wasn’t thinking about taking pictures of all the old schools, so it’s lost on my list.)

The combined district will be over 350 square miles — a number that a decade ago would have been semi-notable but now doesn’t even make the top 20 for one-high-school areas — and run along IA 175 from the Woodbury/Ida county line to the new IA 471.

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Jul 01

Canada’s sesquicentennial

Posted on Saturday, July 1, 2017, at 10:00 AM by Jeff

June 26, 2007: Inside Ottawa Parliament Hall, Ottawa, Canada.

For anyone in the Great White North (or Great White Slightly Northeast, depending) who reads this blog, here’s a commemoration of the unified Dominion of Canada. Iowa exports $3.3 billion of products to Canada, and in exchange, we got their greatest export delivered to our homes.

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Jun 30

Front of Sparks Garage has collapsed

Posted on Friday, June 30, 2017, at 10:00 AM by Jeff


April 17, 2016: Sparks Garage in Beaver.

A Lincoln Highway landmark in central Iowa has entered its death throes. The Sparks Garage in Beaver, established in 1912 but abandoned for decades, deteriorated significantly in the past year. The cinder blocks above and to the right of the main garage door have collapsed inward. (The cinder-block construction means this building likely only dates to mid-century, but the garage itself was considered part of the historic scenery.)

beaverbusinesses

Beaver was a busy town in the Lincoln Highway days, as seen in this clip from the 1918 Iowa State Gazetteer and Business Directory (later known as a Polk City Directory). Sparks Garage is listed second from bottom. Today, the only businesses are the post office and elevator.

The collapse of the front (the roof was gone long ago) was encountered during the Lincoln Highway Association bus tour last week. Also damaged recently was a unique “L” bridge on gravel 210th Street just west of the Boone/Greene County line; a chunk of concrete was chipped out on the northwest corner (barely missing the engraved “L”).

I and many others have pictures of the Sparks Garage as it existed at the beginning of the 21st century and the Lincoln Highway’s centennial, but time marches on.

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Jun 29

A southward expansion of West Des Moines

Posted on Thursday, June 29, 2017, at 10:00 AM by Jeff

West Des Moines has had its eyes on northeastern Madison and northwestern Warren counties for a while now, and the concept is taking a step into reality.

The city intends to build a bridge over I-35 between the IA 5 and Cumming exits to open up land for development, the Des Moines Register reports. A new Veterans Parkway, coming diagonally down from the city (the former Southwest Connector), would run between what is now 105th and 110th streets in a rural area. Then it would intersect an extension of Alice’s Road Grand Prairie Parkway in Section 3 of Madison County’s Lee Township, which right now is a spot on a dirt road between two farm fields. West Des Moines wants to build the parkway extension to open development and make way for a new Microsoft data center on the very western edge of Warren County, the Register says.

But in order to get clearance for construction, West Des Moines is engaging in a little expansion gamesmanship. An annexation request filed with the City Development Board and sent to Madison County shows WDM gets the area by taking the right-of-way for I-35 from the county line south 2½ miles, then stopping 50 feet before the city limits of Cumming. Cumming a while back annexed land covering the I-35 exit (except for the OLD exit right-of-way, which doesn’t match the ramps there now) and is probably very happy Iowa doesn’t have laws like Nebraska where one city can swallow another up if it’s big enough.

WDM’s annexation at the very edge of Warren County would leave a boxed-in gap of unincorporated area east of I-35. That’s where the 50-foot corridor comes in. That corridor, in the NW¼ of Section 7, doesn’t have a road now, but technically this doesn’t box in the land. However, the edge is either on the wrong side of I-35 or I-35 itself so it looks a bit silly.

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Jun 28

History of the Lincoln Highway in Wyoming

Posted on Wednesday, June 28, 2017, at 10:00 AM by Jeff

Wyoming Public Television made an hourlong documentary for the centennial of the Lincoln Highway in that state. It won an Emmy.

It’s entertaining and informative, and I’m going to link to the station’s page with the video although I first saw it on YouTube. (It was what inspired me to make a blog post last Thursday, and how I discovered things were bad.) Among the topics the documentary covers is why and how the route got signed through Medicine Bow, while I-80 passes far to the south today.

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Jun 27

Worst. Temp. Job. Ever.

Posted on Tuesday, June 27, 2017, at 10:00 AM by Jeff

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June 20, 2016: Hello, I must be going.

The Carroll Kmart was not in the large list of nationwide Kmart closures announced at the beginning of the year, but was included in a less-publicized round in spring. Two months after that, the Kmarts in Iowa City and Marshalltown were added to the list.

Unless more closures are announced, Iowa will have nine Kmarts at the end of 2017, half of what there were in 2015. Charles City and Oelwein will be the last ones left in the 319 area code. The store in Carroll has about three weeks left; Marshalltown’s will be open until September.

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When they say “Everything Must Go,” they aren’t kidding.

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