Through 1988, the year before Bill Snyder became the head coach at Kansas State, Iowa State had a 20-win margin in the all-time series, 44-24-4. Today, after the 98th meeting between the teams, that margin is down to four.
Kansas State is the only Big 8/12 team that Iowa State leads in the all-time football series.
The post I made a month ago about Gov. Branstad buying ads for the Keokuk-Hannibal-Quincy market served as an impetus/inspiration to update my Iowa TV station county-by-county list and station-by-station maps, which hadn’t had a good hard look for a few years. I got the maps for the vast majority of stations, so it’s a pretty good update.
There were a couple of surprises, most notably in southeastern Iowa. With KHQA and KTVO mirroring each other on ABC/CBS broadcasts, KCCI has retreated some and now that is the only way some counties get those networks. In point of fact, Jefferson County is only in two stations’ coverage area: KCRG and KTVO, both ABC stations. (I’ve left the county as “3 stations” on the frequency map because I wasn’t totally prepared for this contingency, and it can get CBS on KTVO 3.2.)
Tama County continues to be off and on for the central Iowa stations, but KCCI kept going for Traer when the tornado struck June 30, and for that I am grateful.
Speaking of that severe weather coverage, KCCI and WOI have made a small design change that reverberates: Their warning maps in the upper left corner are only visible if you have a widescreen TV. (WHO has moved some news graphics far enough to the sides they can be cut off, too.)
December 18, 2006: “The oldest courthouse in continuous use in the state of Iowa” will continue to be so if Lee County Supervisor Ron Fedler has his way.
According to both the Burlington Hawk Eye and Fort Madison Daily Democrat, one Lee County supervisor has decided to start the ball rolling on removing all county seat services from Keokuk and making Fort Madison the sole county seat. Naturally, the two supervisors from Keokuk have a problem with this. Three readings of the ordinance are needed, starting tonight, and the process would be completed by Nov. 14, according to the Hawk Eye.
Earlier this summer, there was a split-the-baby option floated of making Montrose the county seat with a new building, but that might have fallen by the wayside.
Fort Madison and Keokuk were 34th and 35th in Iowa population in the 2010 census, the former switching places with the latter as top dog in Lee County.
There has not been a change in county seats in Iowa since 1919, when Cedar Rapids wrested the Linn County seat away from Marion. (Marion had it just long enough for the original route of the Lincoln Highway to touch, but then the Mount Vernon Road cutoff was built.)
Here’s one shovelful in a deep backlog of photos and updates. The “new” photos, taken just north of Spirit Lake, show that the intersection of former IA 276 and IA 327 has been converted into an all-way stop.
Also, I’ve updated text and added links for the IA 100 project on that page.
Despite the subject matter, it is not possible for me to hate this ad. (Flying over the map! Little icons!) Well done, Big Ten, well done.
If you want to see the animation slowed down, and know something about HBO, here it is set to the “Game of Thrones” theme.
Detouring again…
I have toyed with creating a “Things That Make Me Feel Old” category for the blog, and this fits right in along with that: Cumulus has changed multiple stations including KJJY into “Nash Icon,” which “favors country music released from a 25-year ‘classic’ period.”
I remember well — don’t even have to remember, it still happens — when people would say their favorite music was “anything but country.” That happened even when country music of the 1990s was viewed as too pop-ish (Hi, Faith Hill!). Today’s radio-country is close enough to pop to be swapping spit. Taylor Swift says her next album is “pure pop”. Its title? “1989” — the year of her birth but also the year Garth Brooks released his first album. And that is why that country cutoff is where it is.
It’s a seismic shift that at least one website says “needs to happen to country radio”. The “country” buttons nowadays are full of songs about nothing but drinking and trucks and partying*, and if I never hear BABY YOU A SONG again it will be too soon. What I haven’t been hearing are the songs from (cough) my adolescence, and that’s because playing a song from 1996 today is like being in 1996 playing a song from…1978.**
Thus, I become someone who says the kids these days listen to noise that should not be called “music.”*** If this change means a home for those songs that are only available on my iPod, more power to it.
*Of course the ’90s had “Pickup Man,” but there was also “Two Sparrows in a Hurricane”. The decade was at least more diverse in what songs were about.
**Not my youth, because I wasn’t in control of the radio then, and it was oldies ahoy. But now KIOA plays Van Halen’s “Jump”, which for someone who associates that station more with the Righteous Brothers and Chuck Berry is quite discombobulating.
Yay? (Expectations are…not high.)
It would feel incomplete without Pat Forde taking a cheap shot at Iowa State (item 29):
But the Sooners will not run the table. In fact, both they and Baylor could run into trap-game scenarios at Iowa State and West Virginia – both tough places to play. (And visit. And live.)
He did say those were predictions “sure to go wrong,” though. And with one ISU win over OU in half a century, it’s safe to guess it will be.
And now, mood music.
So, for reasons as yet unexplained, I haven’t had Internet service for two days. (Yesterday’s blog post was a timed one. My connection cut out in mid-draft of tomorrow’s post.) Kids, this is why us oldthinkers DO NOT TRUST THE CLOUD.
It takes a special kind of stupid (or expectation that everyone has a “mobile device” with fast connection that is not dependent on the provider involved) to tell people to visit a website during a service interruption.
I was actually somewhat productive during that time, but only because I worked with images and videos stored on my hard drive. Tim Cook, please keep that in mind as Apple plans to jettison iPhoto. The Cloud may be five-nines-of-uptime hunky-dory in Silicon Valley, but here in the Great Flyover, not so much.
I’ve never heard of “GetTV” (or, as it is in the press release, “getTV” even at the beginning of a sentence) but it’s showing up in two Iowa TV markets. It’s a deal between Sony Pictures Television and Sinclair Broadcasting to show classic movies. The channel, 2.2 or 17.2, bumps the music channels on KGAN and KDSM to the .3.
And while I’m on the subject of TV changes, Mediacom is adding CBS Sports Network to expanded basic cable — but there appears to be a catch. The listings here are said to be effective next Tuesday. CBSSN, along with the National Geographic Channel and FXX (which is currently showing a “Simpsons” marathon in the wrong aspect ratio), is marked as “Requires a Mediacom digital converter, a Mediacom digital adapter or cable card” while everything else in expanded basic says “Requires a digital-ready TV, a Mediacom digital converter or a Mediacom digital adapter.” It’s a subtle difference, but it may mean that non-HD TVs are incapable of getting the channel.
One of the last school districts in Iowa that includes a township in its name may be the next domino in the continued consolidation trend.
Tim Gallagher of the Sioux City Journal reported last week that Remsen-Union and Marcus-Meriden-Cleghorn were to have meetings with a consultant about who would get what grades if they decided to engage in sharing. Gallagher said the two already share summer sports and a few others.
Remsen-Union is in a slightly different spot than other rural districts, because it also has to contend with a private school in the same town, Remsen St. Mary’s. MMC is going to suffer some effects of the Tyson plant closure in Cherokee.
The two districts had a combined certified enrollment over 1100 in 2000-01 but last year couldn’t even muster up 850. Together, they’d be about the size of West Branch or Aplington-Parkersburg.
Union Township is south-southwest of Remsen.
