“The Goldbergs” wallows in a decade’s worth of shame and guilt The 1980s take a beating in “The Goldbergs” (Tuesday, 8 p.m., ABC). An adult narrator looks back on his childhood in the days when REO Speedwagon seemed profound and even middle-aged moms wore the Madonna hairdo. The Goldbergs are
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September 18, 2013 by justin
in Sound Stage
The inaugural Bushwak Music Festival took place this past Saturday and Sunday in the barely charted wilds of St. Charles, just south of Des Moines. A hundred or so music enthusiasts made the trek southward with tents and sleeping bags and set up shop on the grounds of the town’s
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September 18, 2013 by justin
in Belly Up To...
Bikers can get a bad rap — mostly because movies and TV shows paint a rough and rebellious portrait of them as gangsters who spend their lives terrorizing small towns and outrunning the fuzz on steel horses. In fairness, it’s also partly because some of them do have rapsheets to
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September 18, 2013 by justin
in Cover Story
You ever have one of those days when you just need a drink? A good, stiff, “I want to taste my money” kind of drink? When in search of a place to belly up, it doesn’t take a GPS navigation system, just a watchful eye to the left and to
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September 18, 2013 by justin
in Joe's Neighborhood
The counter must be the problem. The lilting music in the background and the four-foot-tall goddess perched next to the napkins certainly add to the problem. But I’m thinking it’s the counter that prevents you from seeing the waiter clearly. Paramjeet Singh is on the other side of the counter
Read More →Happiness is a clean toilet Beginning in 2011, about three dozen people in Tokyo have been meeting every Sunday at 6 a.m. on a mission to scrub down, one by one, the city’s grungiest public rest rooms. “By 7:30,” according to an Associated Press reporter who witnessed an outing in
Read More →Amount: $75 To: Polk County Medical Examiner For: Fee for having a blood sample drawn from a 20-year-old Urbandale resident who Des Moines police officer Brian Cuppy suspected may have been operating a motor vehicle while under the influence of drugs or alcohol at 1:55 a.m. on Aug. 10 at
Read More →FIRST DOWN So they’re circling the wagons in Lincoln again. Circling, the Cornhuskers can do. It’s tackling that’s the problem. We kid, of course. Sort of. Nebraska football stories are starting to pull out the old “for the first time since 1961” line again, and which means two things: The
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September 18, 2013 by justin
in Political Mercury
A western Iowa Republican Party fall fundraiser weaved the local and international in a power-punch case for a conservative reshaping of U.S. government at all levels. In a two-hour session last week at Santa Maria Winery in Carroll, headlined by WHO Radio talk-show host Simon Conway, a London-born American, an
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65 years ago, Iowa made a president
Jimmy Carter came out of Georgia in the political campaign season of 1975 to run for president. This unknown (to Iowans) Georgia governor could relate to Iowa farmers, being one himself. He swept the Democratic caucuses, the first ever held, and was propelled into the White House. Iowa has ever
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