From last week, heard on KXEL, in Jeff Stein’s “Iowa Almanac”. Go to near the top of the April archives to hear more about these two events:
I guess ramming your head into a brick wall/plain old obstreperousness sometimes DOES work.
The Iowa DOT is prepared to allow an intersection with future four-lane US 61 and a side road south of Wapello, the Muscatine Journal reported nearly two weeks ago. This is what (or reasonably close to what) Louisa County supervisors and local residents have been demanding.
The plan, according to the story, involves a “J-turn” intersection. A J-turn is similar to a Michigan Left, except that no traffic on the cross road is allowed to go straight through. They have to cross two lanes of traffic to get to the U-turn, then cross two lanes again.
The J-turn concept was floated and shot down at both the US 65/IA 330 intersection, now an interchange, and the US 30/US 218 intersection, soon to be an interchange. This would be the first J-turn location in the state.
The Iowa DOT says it started repairing a fire-damaged bridge on I-29 this week. The project will last about two months.
This unexpected repair issue prevented I-29 from being open to six lanes throughout the city and “completing” the decade-long reconstruction project.
Fill out your census forms! (Because it’s the right thing to do, darn it.)
Or rather, take the code that the Census Bureau put in the envelope that was mailed to you and go online and do it. (Doing the whole thing online was a bad idea in 2018, but now…) The document says a paper version will be sent “in a few weeks” to those who do not respond online.
Please. I like having new data sets to play with, and I want them to be as accurate as possible.
(This was scheduled for last week, but WordPress gave me a “Missed Schedule” notice, which I’ve never seen before.)
Paul Lukas’ Uni-Watch, which deals in the history and minute details of sports uniforms, recently did a feature on Iowa girls’ basketball. His starting point was a recent New York Times story about Denise (Long) Rife. Most of the post looks into her Union-Whitten uniforms in 1968 and 1969, but then starts looking at what the other girls were wearing, which was very varied.
This may have been Lukas’ first encounter with six-on-six, as he dubbed the video of the 1968 championship game “interesting!”. We Iowans are always glad when someone discovers “our” game.
(h/t Dan Drackley)
I apologize for nothing.
Joe Diffie, who died Sunday from coronavirus, was one of THE definitive singers for 1990s country — for me at least.
Third Rock From The Sun was the first CD I bought. I have 85% to 100% of it memorized. Below is one of the “deep cuts” from that CD, a song that never made it to the radio, but exemplifies the blue-collar attitude of both Diffie’s own life and the era.
To reduce the time US 30 will be closed northeast of Woodbine for a bridge replacement, a different tactic is going to be tried. The new bridge will be built beside the existing one, then slid into place. This will cut down on the time necessary for a very long and winding detour through Earling.
There’s a video explaining how it works. No sound.
The NCAA Tournament. Church services. Dine-in restaurants. Tulip Time.
And two sessions of Private Pesticide Applicator Continuing Instruction Course in Tama and Traer, the latter of which was supposed to happen tomorrow.
It seems like such a silly, inconsequential thing, but that’s the point. The coronavirus is not leaving anything, anywhere, or anyone unscathed. It doesn’t matter how big or how small, routines and rhythms and parts of daily life we took for granted two weeks ago have been disrupted and we don’t know when or even if they will come back.
This is the third macro-case of “interesting times” my country has had to endure in my adult life. At the risk of sounding like a whiny millennial, I’ve had my fill, thanks.
Related: How do you finish a yearbook if not only there are no events, but school itself is cancelled?
Potential changes to the US 63 corridor from US 6 to Hudson are the subject of a recently released “online meeting” from the Iowa DOT. The video requires a signup and nothing interesting happens in the first two-thirds.
It’s a “Planning and Environmental Linkage” study, which means it is approximately Step Negative 2 in actually doing anything with the highway. The only things in the works are what we already know: Shoulder paving between Traer and Hudson, and a bridge deck overlay on the north side of Traer. Anything that comes out of this would not be tacked on to a five-year plan for years.
The worst pavement ratings on the route are between the Garwin and Gladbrook corners (E29 to IA 96) and Traer to the Black Hawk County line, the latter of which was resurfaced in 1997-98.
Perhaps the most interesting bit was the five-year crash statistics. Of 290 total crashes, nearly 40% of them were “single-vehicle animal”, which I suspect is almost all if not exclusively “hit a deer”.
