The Allamakee County Freedom Rock was painted in Waukon City Park this summer and dedicated on Sept. 11. It has something other Freedom Rocks in the state do not have — its own shelter.
A story and pictures at the Waukon Standard show the large, lengthy rock and its red-white-and-blue steel shelter. The shelter was donated and installed by a Waukon High School graduate who now has a business in Wyoming.
This stack is a little thicker than 2019, but my DVD list is massive.
The only fiction title in there is Self-Care. It is a satire made for those of us who are Extremely Online in certain parts of the Internet, with an ending that’s a twist yet so obvious at the same time. Altered States is a alternate-US-history take of sorts, covering states and territories that might have been. Jennifer Fulwiler is a comedian and podcaster; One Beautiful Dream is about her family and the ups and downs of writing her previous book.
I redacted a couple of titles, for now at least, for … reasons.
What you see here is what I came across at the end of my only large vacation of the year. (I did not completely stop traveling. I wore a mask when I was around people.)
Neither the menu nor the newspapers outside the entrance to the King Tower Cafe in Tama had been touched for two months. The King Tower, like so many restaurants across the country, had been brought to its knees by the coronavirus pandemic, which took out the Big T Maid-Rite in Toledo. The derecho that swept through Iowa on August 10 was the killing blow. The cafe’s owners announced August 18 that the King Tower was closed for good.
The papers had already begun to pile up. The three copies of the Des Moines Register show Vice President Mike Pence at a campaign stop in Iowa, wearing a mask; a short notice about the derecho below a story that the Big Ten was preparing to cancel football season (but would later uncancel it); and the word “unconventional” in a headline about a Democratic National Convention being held mostly online.
In full journalistic disclosure, you can see a mark where I had slightly moved the stack before realizing how much the jumble conveyed. I moved the papers afterward to photograph the King Tower’s entire menu.
This photo references the economic toll, political standing, and Iowa’s biggest disaster of the year. (If I posted a paired #2 and #3, they would be the political signs across the road from the now-closed North Winneshiek school and on a lawn in Windsor Heights, each with the assortments you would expect for rural and urban Iowa. The #4 would be of the massive power poles in Cedar Rapids snapped by the derecho that cut my electricity for more than a week.)
It may not be my “photo of the year” in terms of “best” but it’s a photo for the year, or about the year, as I experienced it. Maybe I’ll retroactively select ones for previous years.
Back in June, I uploaded new TV station maps and county-by-county listings. One of the prompts for making the update was finding out that KYOU, the Fox station in Ottumwa and the only standalone Fox station in Iowa, had added NBC as a digital subchannel.
The main effect of this addition, besides creating a gray area in “what counts as coverage”, is filling a space in the Ottumwa area for NBC programming. It’s on the fringes of multiple markets, and the counties in the area had been orphans for a while. I got the map from a video weathercast, and for some of you the graphics might look familiar. KYOU doesn’t have a weather desk, and it’s actually the KCRG team doing the weather for them, as the stations are now both part of Gray TV.
I updated and uploaded the graphics, figuring I’d get a blog post out sometime — and then things went pear-shaped for me computer-wise. The good news is, my iBook still works as long as it’s plugged in, and that’s the refuge for the few things that must be done in an application that stopped being updated nearly two decades ago.
I have taken the “opportunity” to start from scratch by doing a full evaluation — not just the minor tweaks I made in June, but building every network map from the ground up and catching any changes I may have overlooked. One of those other changes was also on the fringe, as Sioux Falls’ ABC and NBC stations merged in a first-of-its-kind operation. KGAN threw me for a loop: Its regional radar and county-outlines-only forecast map are slightly different!
A note also must be made of coverage champion Carroll County, currently 9-for-9 on station maps in Des Moines, Omaha, and Sioux City. The full county-by-county station-by-station listing is here.
I have missed Christmas Eve services for work but the service was always there. This year, due to rules set at the state level, Traer UMC did not have a Christmas Eve service, but it was recorded and placed online.
KKCV-FM, 98.5 “The Hog,” was a new country music station in the Waterloo area in the 1990s. Throughout my school years, that was my most frequently listened-to station. I even spent a job-shadow day there learning about the radio programming. (The radio industry nowadays is subject to lots of job insecurity and increased nationalization, but I ended up in the field of journalism, which is totally different.)
In 2003, the KKCV call sign and “Hog” branding was discontinued. The much-longer-lived KOEL-FM took over 98.5 while its old home, 92.3, changed formats.
Earlier this month, the quarter-century of country music on 98.5 came to an end with a direct swap of KOEL and “Q92.3”. The latter is now “Q98.5”. (Source: Radio Insight) The new place has a greater reach, which is good. However, instead of 1990s country, it’s playing 2010s country, which aside from a few exceptions I have little taste for.
March 12, 2007: Eastbound I-80 at I-380. I probably have a better picture of this, but archive searching isn’t what it used to be for me.
The most important inner loop ramp of the I-80/380 cloverleaf interchange is being replaced with a flyover ramp this week, according to a press release from the Iowa DOT (story/reprint: Gazette, KCRG). The shift should be done by Christmas.
The flyover ramp is the Des Moines-to-Cedar-Rapids connection, and has been a bottleneck for a while. The ramp from eastbound 80 to southbound US 218, which needed to move outward a bit for this ramp to open, has been in use for a little while.
In conjunction with the flyover’s opening, two inner loops will be closed permanently: The EB-NB loop it’s replacing and also northbound 218 to westbound 80 underneath. To go from, say, the Melrose Avenue exit toward Des Moines, a traveler will need to go up to the Forevergreen Road exit and turn around.
December 31, 2009: Insight Bowl, Tempe AZ. Iowa State beat Minnesota 14-13. I thought it could be the start of good years for ISU football; instead, it kind of was a high-water mark of the Rhoads era. It’s hard to believe this was a decade ago — and the 2000 Insight Bowl two decades.
I am on record as believing that if Paul Rhoads could not figure out Iowa State football, no one could. (We can’t know what effects Conferencepocalypse had on his tenure.)
I am on record as being unsatisfied with Matt Campbell’s off-field demeanor, including if not especially the “Team Out East” stuff, and for that matter with his early on-field demeanor.
I am on record as believing in the immutability of Iowa State football as the universe’s plaything — its last conference championship nearly as close to the Louisiana Purchase than the present day — and its saga against a football blue-blood as Sisyphean.
I am on record that I hate hate hate hate hate hate LOATHE wearing outfits that do not represent the cardinal and gold of Iowa State University.
However.
Campbell has led Iowa State to three eight-win seasons, two wins against Oklahoma including the first at home since 1960, a bowl game against Notre Dame, its second and third AP Top 10 rankings ever, its first regular-season finish atop conference standings in modern college football history…
…and now, its best bowl game ever (the 1977 Peach or possibly 2018 Alamo the previous title holders). Iowa State will be playing in the Fiesta Bowl, in a January bowl game. That’s a sentence I never thought I would type.
I can’t argue with that.
From the (at least) second-greatest and most underrated football movie ever.
(FYI: This will be ISU’s fourth game between Dec. 7 and Dec. 26, inclusive. The other three were bowls in the 1970s: two on the 18th and one on the 20th.)
From this blog post in 2018, emphasis added:
The Cyclones upend the world order with a 38-31 win en route to their second-best season in my lifetime, becoming the only team in the nation to beat Oklahoma in the 2017 regular season, and earning the first of two road wins over ranked opponents that year. … Frankly, it’s the most concrete evidence yet that God set SimUniverse on “haywire” mode. [Burn the witch! — Ed.]
Now, with their first win in Ames against Oklahoma since 1960 and first win against Oklahoma in Jack Trice Stadium, the Cyclones are one game away from their first ever outright conference championship in the history of American football. (In case you were unclear on the stakes.)
All they have to do is… beat Oklahoma. Again. For the fourth time since John Glenn originally went into space and also the third time in the current presidential term. Oklahoma has foiled good Iowa State teams from having nice things in the past, both directly and indirectly, covered elsewhere.
Remember, the Big 12 Championship Game exists because the Powers That Be said 12 games wasn’t enough to make the playoff, and how dare a have-not team take the seat reserved for a TV magnet like Ohio State. (OK, that last part was only implied.)
In 2020, when the number of games each team has played is a variable, ad hoc rules were changed midseason to get a 5-regular-season-win team into the playoff. That team? Ohio State, of course, which won both fewer conference games and fewer games overall than Iowa State this year.
In a way, faceplanting against ULaLa in Game 1 lessens the blow. Otherwise, one might look at the landscape and decide “Iowa State is not allowed to have nice things” is the only ironclad law there is.
October 9, 2020