DesMoinesIst

The National Weather Service says that there's a 96% chance that the Raccoon River will go through at least some minor flooding in Des Moines this spring, and an 86% chance that the Des Moines River will do the same. Time to batten down the hatches -- especially if there's any meaningful rain this spring.

There's an inbound snowstorm that's supposed to drop another 2" of snow on our heads today, so the normal rounds of parking bans are falling into place. West Des Moines has imposed one from now until 5:00 pm on Tuesday, which means it's likely Des Moines will be doing the same soon enough. Des Moines has an interactive map showing the progress of snow removal all over the city.

The winter weather this year has felt extraordinarily bad, but it's hard to tell whether we're just imagining our oppression -- especially since it's been almost a year since the last round of winter weather, and that intervening year included tornado season. But the kind folks at the National Weather Service have confirmed our victimhood this year: Only once has there been more snow in Des Moines in December and January than we've had this winter, and only twice have we gone longer with snow on the ground.

Seriously, Nature: Knock it off.

In case you're looking for abundant political fun to be had this weekend, your options are aplenty. Those hoping to find out all the gory details of municipal budgeting can sit in on the West Des Moines city budget workshop starting at 8:00 on Saturday morning. And then, if that hasn't fulfilled all of your hopes and dreams, you can migrate to your precinct caucuses to help set the Republican or Democratic party agendas for the state in 2010.

Mercy has opened its new West Lakes hospital, and so far, they've been behaving and keeping the lights off that form a gigantic white cross on the side of the building. Their cooperation in keeping things toned down will be much appreciated. The presence of two new west-side hospitals (Methodist West opens next month) ought to be mostly beneficial to the area, since it moves high-quality health-care service closer to the ever-growing west-side population, but it remains to be seen how the air and ground ambulance services will add to the noise in the area. It's a new thing to have helipads in West Des Moines.

The City of Des Moines is considering adding red-light cameras to intersections and Interstate 235 off-ramps. Clive already has them in six locations, so the horse is already out of the barn around here, in a sense. But that doesn't mean Des Moines should roll over and follow suit. Red-light cameras are not only creepy symptoms of a surveillance state, they're not even especially good at reducing collisions (in fact, they tend to increase rear-end collisions). If you want safer roads, you have engineers design them to be safer -- and you don't complain when those designs seem strange or unusual. Roundabouts, for instance, are remarkably safe: They've been measured to reduce injury crashes by 50% to 75%. But Americans aren't used to them, and that's gotten in the way of their widespread acceptance. Red-light cameras, though, are intrusive and more than a little Big Brother-ish. A civilized society relies on accommodation and judgment, not always-on surveillance. As it's been put elsewhere, if a police officer follows you for 500 miles, you're going to get a ticket. Red-light cameras are like that ultra-persistent cop: They don't blink. That's because red-light cameras aren't really about traffic safety: They're about revenue generation.

Dear Mediacom:

I'm still not happy about that channel lineup change you made last month. I had the most basic cable television package to go along with my high-speed Internet connection, and you took away CNN and Discovery. I understand that you're trying to force me to upgrade my service, but I really don't have that much need for more than a handful of channels. Sure, I'd like Comedy Central and the History Channel, but I just don't watch enough television to justify the added expense. I'd rather spend that money on concert tickets and Cubs games.

But to add insult to injury, you've made your channel lineup so ridiculously elusive that I cannot fathom what you're trying to achieve. Why make it challenging for your subscribers to find the channels you offer? Maybe I'm picky because I used to work in the cable and Internet division of the Cedar Falls Utilities, which makes me more conscious than the average customer about what it really costs to deliver that TV and Internet service to my house (in Cedar Falls, cable Internet is $25 a month with about a hundred channels of TV for $42 a month on top of that). I'm writing a check for $72.19 a month to you folks and getting about 15 TV channels, and that assumes I have the courtesy to count the insipid shop-at-home networks that account for channels 2, 4, and 15.

So now I'm shopping around for other options. Believe me, I'm not out to cut you off for no good reason, but I'm getting tired of paying premium prices for less than I know I could be getting back in my old college town. And when you hide your channel lineups like you do, you only make my aggravation worse.

Please, Mediacom, show a little love. Stop cutting back your service and cranking up my charges. There's a point at which I won't take it any longer. It could be quite soon. And don't think I'm going to fall for silly pricing tricks. I want a flat rate that isn't going to blow up after a 12-month trial period. And, so help me God, if you ever again have someone make a telemarketing call trying to talk me into a higher-priced service package the day after you cut back my channel options, I may not be responsible for my actions.

XOXO,

Brian

A visitor from Lexington, Kentucky, says that he defies his friends who mock our fair city to find better barbecue anywhere in the country. He thinks the best BBQ is to be found here, particularly when the World Pork Expo is in town every June. Of course, Kansas City will dispute any competitive claims to the title of "Best Barbecue" (and they do take their barbecue seriously), but let's get real: No state produces more pork than Iowa. It's not even close. If you have four strips of bacon on your plate, one of them came from Iowa (at least, relatively speaking). And anyone who doubts that Iowans' capacity to consume that delicious food matches our prodigious capacity to produce it ought to stop by the Iowa State Fair, where overconsumption is a way of life.

That's not to say that our food habits are entirely innocuous. The Fair just got itself into trouble by sending out press kits filled with things like cookie dough, which all seems innocent enough until one of those kits breaks in transit and arrives at a radio station, leaking a white mystery powder. How red-faced anyone was to have called Hazmat over the leak (yes, they really did) seems not to have been reported.

The Clive Festival is underway this weekend. The planning committee includes representatives from about half a dozen Clive organizations, and the resulting party includes carnival rides, food, live music, and a dunk tank (see photo). Summer festival season seems to catch almost every town in the metro area in one way or another, ranging from Sauerkraut Days in Bouton (if they're still holding it; nothing seems to show up on the Internet for this magnificent event) all the way up to the State Fair in August.