Twenty-three area museums and historical sites have announced the establishment of Quad City Museum Week to be held the last week of September. The event is meant to coincide with the 2006 Association of Midwest Museums conference being held in the Quad Cities September 26 through 29. The Quad Cities Museum Coalition, working together to encourage visitation at the partner venues located throughout the greater Quad Cities region, chose the last week in September to celebrate the hosting of this major conference and to highlight the wealth of educational and entertaining programs offered to the community by the coalition partners. Coalition partners have been working with elected officials to proclaim the last week of September an annual celebration of museums in the Quad Cities. Proclamations have been or will be made in Rock Island and Scott counties, and the cities of Rock Island, Moline, Bettendorf, and Davenport. Current activities of the Quad City Museum Coalition include hosting the 2006 AMM conference, Fun for Free Weekend in partnership with Modern Woodmen of America, Triple Ticket Membership, and Quad Cities Pass program in partnership with Riverboat Development Authority.

The covers album is time-honored stopgap, and Susan Tedeschi's Hope & Desire CD from last year fits the mold perfectly. The blues belter/guitarist signed with the Verve Forecast label in 2004 when she was pregnant with her second child, Sophia, and her own material wasn't yet ready to record. It had been several years since she'd put out new songs - Wait for Me came out in 2002 - and the label wanted some product.

"They were sort of in a hurry to get one together," Tedeschi said in an interview last week with the River Cities' Reader. So the label gathered Tedeschi and producer Joe Henry to pick some songs.

The images of Robert and Shana ParkeHarrison - at the Figge Art Museum through October 29 - transport us through narrative image to a world that is parallel to our own, but oddly vacant and visually strange, owing largely to things being out of scale, a lack of color, and metaphorical structures such as gears turning beneath the surface of the earth.

Where exactly these worlds exist is unclear, but the place suggests a 19th Century country where an impoverished inventor is trying to build new machines out of scrap parts. Or it may be a future place after an environmental disaster that is populated by a sole survivor who is trying to save what he can while being over-equipped with archaic tools and under-equipped with appropriate technology. The message seems to be that the task before him is enormous, and the odds of success are in question, at best.

Okay, by a show of hands, how many of you out there have ever given $1,500 to the college fund of a friend's seven-year-old and then didn't tell your spouse about it?

Yeah, I didn't think so.

In case you haven't heard yet, I'll give you a brief wrap-up of the latest scandal that has befallen Governor Rod Blagojevich.

You may remember that the governor amended his statement of economic interests after he was interviewed by the FBI. One of those amendments included a previously undisclosed gift from Michael Ascaridis, his campaign treasurer during his congressional bids and his first run for statewide office.