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Posted November 01, 2017in Just Released

Special Olympics Iowa VP of Development to Become President/CEO

Grimes, IA — John Kliegl, a longtime Des Moines-area special needs advocate, who has been on the Special Olympics Iowa (SOIA) staff since February 2016, will become President and Chief Executive Officer of the organization.   “We are excited about John Kliegl being named President and CEO of Special Olympics Iowa,”

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Posted November 01, 2017in Feature 1

New Wolves on the block

“One pack, all in” and big changes for the 2017-2018 season with Des Moines’ rebranded NBA affiliate Des Moines was recently named the No. 1 Minor League Sports Market by the SportsBusiness Journal. In the history of the rankings, Des Moines is the first to have a team in four sports. One of those sports is basketball,

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Posted November 01, 2017in Feature 2

Morbid attachments

The afterlife of our body parts In Iowa, November is the month of death and decay. It begins with the four-day “Day of the Dead” celebration and ends, without baseball or tomatoes, in a post-Apocalyptic landscape of leafless trees, brown grass, dead fruit, plowed under crops and frozen grounds. In

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Posted November 01, 2017in Feature 3

It’s hip to reuse

Shoppers are digging the surge in local thrift stores Like sharks sensing blood in the water, bargain hunters circle the void as the empty blue basin is wheeled away by the blue-shirted employees. The Goodwill Outlet Store on Des Moines’ southeast side has changed the decision-making paradigm for shoppers. The store doesn’t specifically

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Posted November 01, 2017in Civic Skinny

Kirk Blunck’s family sues, says architect was murdered. Is Teachout sale near? Register circulation plummets.

The sad tale of Kirk Blunck drags on. The police have gathered all they could gather about that Sunday afternoon in January of 2016 when the often-praised and often-sued architect and landlord fell or was shoved to his death in a stairwell of the Teachout Building he owned in the

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Posted November 01, 2017in Political Mercury

Boots and blue-jeaned into oblivion

Or can Fred Hubbell, the embodiment of the Des Moines establishment, resurrect rural Iowa? Mr. and Mrs. Rural Iowa. Or to put it more directly, my friends and neighbors: I invite you to take a Sunday drive through the Des Moines suburb of Grimes, which is snaking east with housing

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Posted November 01, 2017in Film Review

“The Foreigner”

Forget what the 1990’s taught us about Jackie Chan. If everything you loved was taken from you, what would you do to get a hold of the people responsible? It’s a familiar story with a resurgence in popularity thanks to the ever-quotable Liam Neeson in “Taken.” However, “The Foreigner” takes the premise a step

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Posted November 01, 2017in Food Dude

Heavenly Asian is well named

Getting straight to the point — greater Des Moines is now served by a San Gabriel class Chinese restaurant. San Gabriel, California, is the first U.S. city with a majority Asian population, and it’s mostly Chinese and wealthy. It is the best place to go if one wants to spend a week, or weekend,

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Posted November 01, 2017in Your Neighbors

400 Nativity scenes and 100 dozen cookies

Baby Jesus, plus cookies, and after three days… This holiday season, when the women at Valley United Methodist Church host a festival of nativity scenes, they won’t be feeding 5,000 people with only five loaves, but they do plan to bake 100 dozen cookies to feed the multitudes in attendance.

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Posted November 01, 2017in Joe's Neighborhood

The drag queen and us

“Everyone does drag. Each one of us in our everyday life puts on a costume and does a performance piece as whoever it is we are.” – Joe Fraioli. The Garden Nightclub was just beginning to fill as folks got off work on this weekday night. T-shirts, a sprinkling of

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