Aug 11

A presentation with a special guest

Posted on Tuesday, August 11, 2015, at 10:00 AM by Jeff

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.

(View image in new tab to see larger.)

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Aug 07

Walnut school closing regardless of merger vote

Posted on Friday, August 7, 2015, at 10:06 AM by Jeff

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.

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Aug 06

Best festival theme ever, but I might be slightly biased

Posted on Thursday, August 6, 2015, at 10:00 AM by Jeff

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.

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Aug 05

Highland wants to consolidate building location

Posted on Wednesday, August 5, 2015, at 10:00 AM by Jeff

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.

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Aug 04

Iowa TV stations back on Mediacom

Posted on Tuesday, August 4, 2015, at 10:00 AM by Jeff

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”.

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Aug 02

Mason City Newman. Again.

Posted on Sunday, August 2, 2015, at 12:01 PM by Jeff

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.

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Jul 31

‘Largest ice cream cone in the world’?

Posted on Friday, July 31, 2015, at 10:05 AM by Jeff

IF
July 22, 2015: Downtown Ackley during RAGBRAI. Anyone for ice cream?

One highlight from last week’s RAGBRAI on Wednesday was a giant ice cream cone in Ackley. Inside, the owners serve, what else, ice cream!

I don’t know what it would take to get an official “state’s/nation’s/world’s largest” title, but the creator said on KCCI he’s going with a self-proclaimed title. At least, until someone says otherwise.

IF
Ackley’s theme was “I Like Pig Butts and I Cannot Lie” and these costumed characters helped spread the word.

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Jul 30

Wilton uniting campuses, will close former high school building

Posted on Thursday, July 30, 2015, at 10:00 AM by Jeff

From the Muscatine Journal: Wilton is building an elementary addition onto its junior/senior high school. Completion will be in 2016. The current elementary, which was the town’s only school building decades ago, will be demolished.

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Jul 29

Titanic newsreel among historic footage in AP archive

Posted on Wednesday, July 29, 2015, at 10:12 AM by Jeff

The Associated Press announced July 23 that it and British Movietone have recently posted over a million minutes of historic film and video news footage to YouTube. All have an AP watermark, but the bulk of the clips are newsreels.

The Washington Post asked an AP archivist to pick out some of the most memorable films. The #1 selection was about the sinking of the Titanic — but the ship in the newsreel footage is not the Titanic.

Because the Titanic sank on its maiden voyage, there is very little photographic record, save for invaluable amateur photographs taken before final departure from the British Isles. However, there was footage of the Olympic, its sister ship. On the Titanic, the forward section of the A deck promenade (below the Boat Deck) is enclosed. It was not so on the Olympic. Since this is the only immediately identifiable difference save for the printed names themselves, footage of the Olympic was rushed into service as substitute Titanic footage, fooling audiences of 1912 and still vexing all except hardcore Titanic buffs* a century later. The port side of the ship without the enclosed A deck is clearly visible from 1:15-1:25.

The nine-minute newsreel about the disaster shows how the world saw what happened, and the rest of the footage including the Carpathia’s arrival in New York is accurate.

Reminder: A Titanic artifact exhibition is in Dubuque this summer at the National Mississippi River Museum and Aquarium.

*Including yours truly, if that wasn’t obvious.

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Jul 27

Can we PLEASE do something about Iowa’s postseason trophies?

Posted on Monday, July 27, 2015, at 10:00 AM by Jeff


November 19, 2010: What do you want on your tombstone trophy? (Center: Sara Stoakes, one-woman championship.)

The state high school softball tournament was last week — AGWSR won its first title in that sport — and the baseball tournament is this week. (Actually, it started at the end of last week, with Mason City Newman routing Gladbrook-Reinbeck.) While state tournament memories last a lifetime and the participation is about more than the hardware, Iowa’s postseason trophies are now universally generic and lack the luster they used to have.

On the girls’ side, the trophies at best look like wooden J.D. Power awards but also bear a striking similarity to tombstones. This has been the case since 2007-08, when styles in use for decades were supplanted by rectangular slabs dominated by the IGHSAU logo*. It wasn’t always like this; Everly’s girls’ basketball trophy from 1968** is half the height of the participants themselves and the following style wasn’t bad at all.

Starting this past year, the boys followed suit. They have gone from this and this and this and this, large and regal pieces that leave no question about what sport they’re from, to trapezoidal slabs that say “State Participant” for everyone except the top two teams and a champion’s trophy just like a quarterfinalist’s. No matter the sport, they ALL look the same.

I can only guess that this move was done for financial purposes, that bulk-ordering trophies that are entirely identical except maybe for one line and placing a thin sheet of metal on them with the specifics is cheaper than trophies of different shapes with different figures on them. I want to believe that because otherwise the change — even or especially for the sake of change — doesn’t make sense.

This needs to be fixed, and I think I have an idea on how to make it happen. Read on. Continue reading →

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