Ten years after the riot that rocked my senior year of college, and eight years after being given ONE MORE LAST CHANCE, the nation’s largest student-run celebration has been cancelled for this year. It is likely to be cancelled forever.
I won’t write more right now, because emotions are just too high.
Nobody seemed to be able to spell it right anyway.
The Dallas-Fort Worth Cyclone Club is looking for 200 applicants to get a Texas license plate in cardinal and gold.
(Meanwhile, in Iowa, we have specialty plates up the wazoo but the university/college plates are limited to in-state institutions. I wonder how a Nebraska Cornhuskers plate for the state of Iowa would fare…and then wonder if I want to know…)
A report last week in the Muscatine Journal says that an option to expand US 61 to five lanes through the town of Wapello has been removed from consideration. Two alternatives use a western bypass.
Building a four-lane US 61 in the area is years if not a decade out. Wapello and Mediapolis are the only towns on the part of 61 that is not four lanes.
Still in spindle-clearing mode…
After consolidation of Exira and Elk Horn-Kimballton, there wasn’t a need for two school sites in Exira. The district has decided to burn down the multi-story brick downtown site April 27. Exira still has a school, on the south side, built in the late 1950s/early 1960s.
The building, last used as an elementary, will live on in Google Street View— at least until Google goes through again. It was photographed in 2009 when it was still in use. (What does Google do with previous pass-throughs? Good question. It could be very useful for comparisons.)
This is a “clearing the spindle” week, where I bring up items glossed over during posting of my trip log and my illness.
The project page for proposed improvements to US 20 on the west side of Dubuque only includes Alternative B, which limits the area from Menards to the railroad bridge to three stoplights and creates some frontage roads. The stoplight at Menards, which today is literally the first/last one on US 20 in the state of Iowa, would be removed and Old Highway Road would be the first signalized intersection.
In July, a meeting about this area included a plan of convoluted roads that would have made the highway controlled-access. That appears to be off the table now. This construction plan is not directly related to the Southwest Arterial; the Seippel Road interchange is to the southwest of Menards.
It’s still winter judging by the temperatures, but construction season is inching its way forward. That’s reflected in two DOT press releases.
This previous Tournament of Champions winner and my Iowa State quiz bowl contemporary will be on the “Jeopardy! Battle of the Decades” today
Here are the Jeopardy airing times for Iowa TV stations. KWWL will be showing the episode 30 minutes after this post goes live. UPDATE: Air time on KWWL has been changed to 4 PM.
Here’s an interview Falk did with the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel.
July 23, 2009: This intersection, and the road ahead, will look very different at the end of this decade.
For assorted reasons, I never got around to making a blog post about the planned relocation of IA 31, but now that the Sioux City Journal has an article about it, I should go ahead and post.
The plans have been available since last July. A new road will be created for IA 31 just west of present Aspen Street, on the west side of Correctionville, and meet US 20 at the present west L36 intersection (in the background behind the car in the picture). There will be a short 20/31 multiplex on a five-lane road, and then 31 will continue north on its present route.
Correctionville will take over old 31, including a slight jog at the survey correction line that gives the town its name, and Woodbury County will take a quarter-mile east-west section that has been part of the state highway system since it began.
There has literally never been a time in my life when Ron Steele wasn’t behind the anchor desk at Channel 7. The Waterloo Courier has a long profile and look back.
Steele has covered the occasional North Tama sporting event and spoke at the 2003 Father-Son Banquet in Traer.
This is a “clearing the spindle” week, where I bring up items glossed over during posting of my trip log and my illness.
In the current DOT five-year plan, US 20 is supposed to be four-laned between Moville and Correctionville by the end of 2018. Plan drafts indicated that the existing two-lane road would not be used, in favor of building an entirely new alignment.
The Sioux City Journal reported on March 19, however, that it was not going to be possible to keep existing 20 open while those new lanes were built. In preparation for the first new lanes being built in 2016, old US 20 will be rebuilt to hold detour traffic.
This part of 20, now D22, was bypassed in 1958. The segment to be rebuilt is between Ida and Minnesota avenues.
