Or, Misbegotten Tales of W-H-O-A
Super Bowl Sunday:
That graphic is watermarked with the initials of an organization that does graphics for TV news! It’s in the URL too!
*bangs head on table repeatedly*
UPDATE 2/19: IT’S ALL OF A SUDDEN. A. NOT THE.
UPDATE 2/20: *screams in anguish*
A post solely to push this tweet:
As we creep closer to state wrestling in #IOWA I need to admit the first 39+1 yrs of my life I spent not appreciating wrestling like apparently my entire adopted state does, did a 180 this yr thanks to these athletes. I can’t even explain it but I wanted to admit it. I was wrong pic.twitter.com/oIrscSNVKj
— Ruby McAllister Bodeker (@RubyforIowa) February 10, 2022
(Black singlets for North Tama? Sigh.)
Now that girls’ wrestling is sanctioned by the IGHSAU, will the girls’ state tournament be a week before the boys’ tournament? Or will Coralville find a way to capture another state tournament?
After the current Iowa Legislature session is over, a real scramble will begin as state legislators and challengers have to introduce themselves to new electorates. The 2020s redistricting plan, for the first time since the 1970s,* separates Traer from Tama-Toledo, and for the first time pairs part of Tama County with part of Cedar Falls.
As things currently stand, there will be an incumbent-on-incumbent primary in one of the Tama County districts and an open seat in the other.
Rep. Dave Maxwell, who’s in far southern Poweshiek County, is paired up with Rep. Dean Fisher of western Tama County. By the end of January, both Republicans had announced plans to run for re-election, reported the Tama-Toledo News-Chronicle. New District 53 is the southernmost state House district in the new 2nd Congressional District.
The district including the south half of Cedar Falls along with eight other cities will not have any present legislative member. The North Tama Telegraph reports that Rep. Dave Williams, D-Cedar Falls, is not running in new District 76. The article link includes a map of the new district, which the Princeton Gerrymandering Project estimates as about a 59-41 Republican lean. The district does not include the UNI campus or the College Square commercial area, but its northernmost bound is Seerley Boulevard between them.
*The Management is aware of the decade-ago promise to re-create older redistricting maps. The hamsters are taking their sweet time to get back on the wheel. — Ed.
Usually, when the Iowa Automobile Dealers Association has been involved in lobbying the Legislature recently, it’s about getting rid of front license plates. See this Radio Iowa story from last year.
But this time, the group is out to eliminate something else — county names on license plates. Naturally, I’m aggressively against this.
According to KIWA, the IADA only wants the “option” to create generic, county-less plates. But do you think it would really stop there? Why do some vehicles’ standard plates need to obscure their home (or past home) location in the first place? “Supply chain” is not a good enough answer.
The county name, or more accurately county number, used to be a promiment characteristic of Iowa license plates. That changed with the 6-character alphanumeric series plates in 1979. Since then, the county name has been stamped/printed at the bottom of every standard plate. And WE LIKE IT, as this 2016 Des Moines Register piece shows, with accompanying photograph of a collection that spans many counties. Leafing through old plates at sales or Pioneer Hall, or seeing them repurposed in 4H projects or elsewhere, would be less interesting with generics.
Only a handful of states still have county names on their plates, according to Radio Iowa. (Nebraska, except for the three largest counties, still uses numbers based on a system from 1922, and I’m sure Hooker County intends to keep it that way. Kansas has two-letter abbreviations in the corner.) Having the county name on the plate offers a little bit of regional pride in this ever-homogenizing society, and of course it’s always fun to see random ones on vacations.
Nooooooo!!! My geographical mind needs to know what county folks are from!!! https://t.co/HnX9dqJ5Sz
— J.D. Scholten (@JDScholten) January 31, 2022
The response to “Dozens of specialty Iowa license plates don’t have county names” is not “Get rid of it on the rest of them.” It’s “Well, what percentage of cars on the road have those county-less plates?” or “Maybe we shouldn’t have so many specialty plates, then.”
The bill passed out of committee this week and is eligible for a Senate hearing. The House has a companion bill more limited in scope, restricting generic plates to vehicles purchased by someone living in one county from a dealer who does titling/registration in another. That’s preferable, though the best course is no action at all.
UPDATE 2/12: The House bill has been replaced with one that says a license plate “need not display the name of the county,” which removes any requirement. So the House version now is also very bad.
Clayton County Press-Journal, February 9, 1958:
“Strawbareans” is a great word and I am fully in favor of bringing this term for the Clayton County town of Strawberry Point back into common use. (“Denonym” is the name of the word used for people who are residents of a certain place.)
If Google is to be believed, this is the first appearance of that word typed out online.
Also, notice how the newspaper could drop in the handy abbreviation “Pt.” in one-column spaces when necessary. SP’s teams were, of course, the Pointers. They became the Starmont Stars after consolidation, but not immediately. For two school years, 1962-63 and 1963-64, the consolidated Starmont district retained individual sports teams — and high schools! — at Arlington, Lamont, and Strawberry Point, until the present-day high school opened at the intersection of IA 3 and 187 about equidistant from the three towns. (Source: Cedar Rapids Gazette, 7/18/62, 11/21/63, 8/23/64)
And because I know you want to ask: That’s Goudy Heavy, not Cooper Black. School history and fontgeeking!
When I worked on my school timeline mega-update last year, the online Harlan newspaper archives ended in 1969. That was enough to find out the consolidation of the Harlan Community School District, including many small towns in the western half of Shelby County, but not when those towns lost their schools. Now, though, papers are available through 2017, and I can finish the Harlan district plus add to some others in the area.
The Old Creamery Theatre, which would have celebrated its 50th anniversary last year, is now another casualty of COVID-19 in the arts. Its website is now an obituary.
Old Creamery started in Garrison and then moved to the Amanas, and had a well-known presence in east-central Iowa. It cancelled its 2020 season in May of that year, and though it tried road shows in fall 2021, it wasn’t enough.
UPDATE: Stories at the Gazette, KWWL, Radio Iowa.
The Essex school district wants to buy a bank.
KMA reports that Essex and Bank Iowa are discussing a land swap that would put the bank building under the school’s control. Essex wants to develop its culinary arts program, the superintendent told KMA, and a student-run restaurant would be part of that.
The present bank downtown doesn’t have a drive-through, and Bank Iowa is interested in getting one. It’s also right next door to Johnson Locker, which seems like a ripe opportunity for a really local food movement. The story doesn’t specify where the school land to be swapped is.
Essex has one restaurant — Garrison’s Tavern and Grill downtown — unless you want to count the Casey’s across the street from the school. (According to my notes from 2009, it was the nicest I’d seen, so it must have been among the first in Iowa to get the design with the expanded footprint.)
On the night of January 11, there was a top-15 men’s basketball matchup involving one of TV’s darlings. Iowa State-Kansas was banished to ESPN+. Half an hour before that tipoff, a top-25 women’s basketball game involving the same school started. Iowa State-Kansas State was banished to ESPN+.
At 1 PM on January 15, the Iowa State men and women played at the same time and AGAIN the games were only available on ESPN+.
On January 26, the ISU women AGAIN tipped off half an hour before the men and AGAIN the games were only available on ESPN+.
On January 29, the ISU women tipped half an hour before the men, and only on ESPN+. This time, though, the men’s game was on ESPNU as part of the Big 12/SEC challenge — but the announcers weren’t even in Hilton Coliseum, doing the game remotely instead.
When ISU men’s and women’s games overlap, the men’s game takes precedence on the Cyclone Radio Network. This means that when those games are streaming-only — which a significant portion of the Iowa State fanbase is unable to access at any reasonable price — there’s no radio option, either.
The syndicated Big 12 Network TV package actually offered more coverage of men’s games, at least in the Big 12 footprint. But since then, it’s increasingly hard to define what the Big 12 footprint is. Oh, for the days when the biggest out-of-market issue was the Whataburger trolling. (BTW, Whataburger is now getting into the Kansas City metro area in a big way.)
The sooner you let elementary school teachers schedule games, the sooner this overlapping nonsense will be fixed. We can rearrange an entire day in a heartbeat and still get it all done. Both my school's teams are top 25 and I have to try and watch them simultaneously?NONSENSE.
— Megatron (@Megs_ISU) January 29, 2022
This happened four months ago, but worth a note: The Hamburg Reporter, in the southwest corner of Iowa, changed ownership. It had been a GateHouse paper, then a Gannett paper following the former’s purchase of the latter (but taking the latter’s name).
Nearly two dozen small papers in the Midwest, including the Reporter and the Nebraska City News-Press across the river, were sold to CherryRoad Media. CherryRoad filled in with a new newspaper for International Falls, Minnesota, a month after that city’s 111-year-old paper shut down. (It owns a paper in Grand Marais, WAY up there in the Boundary Waters area and 2/3 of the way from Duluth to the Canada border.)
The Reporter was an outlier in the “new Gannett”. Many of its Iowa weeklies nearly form a ring around Des Moines.
