If you ask brewmaster Paul Krutzfeldt about bottling his beer, prepare to be dismissed.

"Speak of that no more," he said in the "brewer's lounge" of the new Great River Brewery, near the foot of the Arsenal bridge at 332 East Second Street in Davenport.

It's not that Krutzfeldt doesn't want his brews available in stores or bar coolers. It's just that he's a fan of the can.

"Cans are where it's at," he explained. "You have less oxygen tolerances, so the beer won't go bad. No light gets in. And you have a lot more accessibility to take them places - boating, camping. They're more easily recyclable."

He later cites the slogan of the Minnesota-based Surly brewery: "Beer for a glass, from a can."

This is the summary of what Krutzfeldt said is a trend in the suds industry: good beer being delivered in a container that has historically been the marker of bad beer.

He said he's not concerned about the association of cans with bland, watery, mass-produced beer. "What good beer have you had the opportunity to buy in cans?" he asked.

But the can is the wave of the future because of the protection it offers and its portability, Krutzfeldt said: "Cans are becoming king."

Although he said that he expects cans to eventually represent the bulk of his business, for the time being he's filling kegs.

Each year, Sonoma State University’s Project Censored produces a list of the most “important national news stories that are underreported, ignored, misrepresented, or censored by the U.S. corporate media,” according to its Web site (ProjectCensored.org).

Below is the list of the most-recent choices, with selected excerpts. The full summaries, including sources, are available at (ProjectCensored.org/top-stories/category/y-2009).

In Fairfield, Iowa, those same coins are accepted at more than 15 merchants, from Mexican restaurants to Radio Shack.

They're called Liberty Dollars, and they're part of a movement called "community currencies," or "alternative" or "competing" and "complementary" currencies. And with the economy seemingly getting worse each day, you're likely to hear a lot more about them.

When the River Cities' Reader profiled Figge Art Museum Executive Director Sean O'Harrow in March 2008, he was, by virtue of having just seven months on the job, mostly talk. There wasn't much of a track record to cite, but he spoke with passion about enhancing the Figge's educational and community missions.

Ten months later, O'Harrow seems poised to deliver on many of his promises.

For example, a March exhibit of Michaelangelo sculptures will be the first time those have been seen outside of Florence, Italy, O'Harrow said.

More importantly, those Michaelangelo sculptures - newly cast in bronze from the fragile originals, which were scanned with a laser - can be touched, and O'Harrow is working to bring in sight-impaired people to feel them.

"Art museums normally ignore these communities," O'Harrow said in an interview Monday. "My view is: Bring everyone in sometime, somehow, for some reason. ...

"I'm really keen to have people experience things in different ways," he added. "No one living has ever been able to touch a Michaelangelo work."

The announcement on Friday that the Figge would be housing most of the University of Iowa Museum of Art collection (nearly all of which is being stored in Chicago following the summer flood in Iowa City) was further confirmation that O'Harrow is serious about education.

Rodney Blackwell insists that he did not make the difference.

"It wasn't me, I'm telling you," he said last month.

We are discussing Kone Centre, the planned 18- to 20-story building with approximately 130,000 square feet that will change Moline's skyline, ensures that 375 Kone employees will remain in the Quad Cities for 15 years, and completes - with an exclamation point - the major components of the Bass Street Landing initiative that was supposed to be finished in 2003.