Posted February 20, 2014in Iowa Watchdog
DES MOINES, Iowa — Exactly what Sioux City’s automated traffic cameras have done to improve public safety is debatable, but the more than $1 million they’ve raised to fatten police and firefighter pensions isn’t. Now new regulations from the Iowa Department of Transportation curbing use of the cameras on state
Read More →Play the “Name that Crime” Quiz! WAKE UP CALL Police responded to a residence at the 1600 block of East Virginia Avenue just before 5 a.m. on Feb. 11. The victim there said she pressed the button to open the garage door and walked to the driver’s side of her
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Posted February 19, 2014in Belly Up To...
At the Highland Park Country Club, the best seat in the house is one that probably won’t hold your weight. “We’re on our 34th year, and that’s probably been there for 25 of ’em,” said owner Gary Stone as he reluctantly lowered the tailgate from a 1970-ish Ford pick-up that
Read More →Guided By Voices “Motivational Jumpsuit” Guided By Voices Inc. When Guided By Voices is on its game, the band can be very, very good. But let’s be honest, how often is GBV really on its game? Therefore, “Motivational Jumpsuit” is in many ways the perfect GBV album. “Littlest League Possible”
Read More →I have a problem — a great problem for any theater critic: I have enjoyed a season of theater, which required no digging to find compliments. If the Des Moines metro has ever delivered a one-two punch as powerful as “True West,” at Tallgrass, and “Our Town,” at Repertory Theater
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Posted February 19, 2014in Political Mercury
It’s eye-rolling, this posturing and re-posturing of Iowa Republican U.S. Senate candidate Mark Jacobs. Faced with news that he gave money to a Democrat — former U.S. Sen. Jon Corzine of New Jersey ($1,000) — Jacobs said he just did that because Corzine was CEO of Goldman Sachs, where Jacobs
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Posted February 19, 2014in Duffy
Posted February 19, 2014in Food Dude
Ralph Waldo Emerson supposedly said, “Build a better mousetrap, and the world will beat a path to your door.” That hasn’t been good advice. In “the Discipline of Innovation,” Tim Kastelle writes that the U.S. Patent Office has granted 4,400 mousetrap patents, still about 40 new ones every year, yet
Read More →Courtesy of Beaverdale Books Review by Shirley Shiffler Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill 5/21/13 $14.95 355 pp. Though an over-used description, “The Art Forger,” by B.A. Shapiro, is a genuine page-turner of a book. I read it in a four-hour sitting — and much too late into the night. In
Read More →Many of my childhood Saturdays involved the errand of tagging along with my father to his office to pick up something he forgot. He worked in a cubicle maze for a large financial institution in Des Moines. To a small child, spending anytime there was pretty much the equivalent of
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