Tomy Temerson

   For contemporary American audiences, the zither begins and ends with the soundtrack to the 1949 film The Third Man - which famously featured the instrument in its opening. (See the credits at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n4JpDUMXBqo.) The tune was a number-one hit in the United States in 1950.

 

But the stringed instrument has a rich history in Europe and Asia and dates back more than two millennia.

 

Edgerton Women's Health Center has opened a new family-planning clinic located at Friendly House, 1221 Myrtle Street in Davenport. With two Edgerton locations in Davenport, women in the Quad Cities area will now have more access to low-cost or no-cost birth control, the newest long-term, reversible contraception methods, pregnancy testing, and emergency contraception. Theses clinics also offer the Women, Infants, & Children (WIC) program as well as obstetrical care. To learn more about Edgerton Women's Health Center, visit (http://www.qcwomenshealth.org).

 

Reader issue #678 Sean O'Harrow, the Figge Art Museum's executive director for the past seven months, sounds diplomatic. He says all the right, polite things about collaboration and about serving the community.

 

"I'm very keen on building bridges," he said last week.

 

Throw Me the Statue Throw Me the Statue's debut album, Moonbeams, was largely built by one man, and you can hear it in the synthesized beats, the emphasis on front-loaded keyboards, the occasionally oddball instrumentation, the aggressive processing, and a complete disregard for the concept of "enough."

 

Cowboy Junkies The Cowboy Junkies first made a name for themselves with The Trinity Session, recorded live with a single microphone in a Toronto church in one night for a couple hundred bucks.

 

To mark its 20th anniversary this year, the Cowboy Junkies did it again.

 

Patrick J. Buchanan, three times contender for U.S. president ('92, '96, and 2000) and syndicated columnist seen in the Quad-City Times, in his December 2007 book Day of Reckoning identifies the great illusion that is fatally eroding the USA's economic strength and world economic leadership: free trade.

 

 

The last Scott County forum of this legislative session will be held at 10:30 a.m. on Saturday, March 29, at the Rogalski Center on the St. Ambrose University campus. Coffee and cookies will be provided starting at 10:10 a.m. The public is invited to discuss issues with representatives and senators from Scott County. These forums are sponsored by the American Association of University Women, Davenport Business & Professional Women, Scott County Farm Bureau, and UniServ.

 

 

 

Reader issue #677 When the City of Rock Island created its "Green Team" last year, one thing it did was initiate an in-house recycling program.

 

Yes, the City of Rock Island - which likes to consider itself progressive - had no recycling program within city buildings.

 

Some recycling was done, said Tim Ridder, assistant to the public works director, the city's environmental-services coordinator, and the staff person who leads Green Team efforts. "It just wasn't uniform throughout the city," he said, and it wasn't being collected as a function of city government.

 

This isn't offered as proof that Rock Island is out-of-step. Rather, it shows how far the Quad Cities have come in the past year. Environmental initiatives range from obvious little things to multi-million-dollar projects, and it's evident that municipal government has gone green.

 

 

 

If necessity is the mother of invention, then Boetje's Stoneground Mustard was born from 19th Century American cuisine.

 

The Quad Cities Convention & Visitors Bureau (QCCVB) has announced its designation as an accredited convention and visitors bureau from the Destination Marketing Accreditation Program, developed by the Washington, D.C.-based Destination Marketing Association International. The only other destination marketing organizations in Iowa and Illinois to receive this accreditation are the Des Moines Convention & Visitors Bureau and the Greater Woodfield Convention & Visitors Bureau in the Chicago area. For more information on the QCCVB, visit (http://www.visitquadcities.com).

 

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