It goes without saying that Dave Heller is a baseball guy. He is, after all, the Quad Cities River Bandits' managing partner, and he has an ownership stake in three other minor-league teams.
He talks about his first ownership experience - as a business partner with legendary players Don Mattingly (Heller calls him "Donnie") and Cal Ripken Jr. And about road trips to see his baseball idol Tom Seaver when he pitched for the Mets and Red Sox.
When I inquired about his favorite River Bandits player, he quickly answered, "Carlos Correa, without question. ... Great work ethic, great natural ability, great with kids. He'll be a special star. ... The idea of having an overall number-one pick like Carlos here is really exciting to us. Two years later, and he's in the major leagues and tearing it up."
Heller grew up in Baltimore, but he wasn't an ardent Orioles fan. "I wasn't passionate about the Birds the way other people were," he said. "I really kind of just loved baseball writ large. I could watch a Cardinals-Cubs game and enjoy myself every bit as much as watching an Orioles-White Sox game."
Yet the 53-year-old doesn't run the River Bandits - or any other team he owns - like a sports enterprise. In an hour-long conversation last week, the game itself felt incidental. Heller said his model for the myriad improvements, additions, and promotions at Modern Woodmen Park during his tenure was "county fairs. ... I think the idea of bringing some of that county-fair atmosphere into a ballpark is really healthy and fun and productive."
Treating the ballpark like an amusement park might rankle baseball purists, but it's good business - particularly when one considers that minor-league owners manage the venue and not the team. The goal is to get people through the gates - and all the better if some of them only know ERA as an acronym for the Equal Rights Amendment.
Davenport started Iowa's debate over using cameras to ticket vehicle owners for speeding and running red lights, so it's appropriate to look at one of its intersections as an illustration of the current situation - 11 years after the city began automated enforcement.
The 2009 book Half the Sky is filled with stories that are heartbreaking and inspiring - and often both. The Pulitzer Prize-winning husband-and-wife team of Nicholas D. Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn gives you precisely what you'd expect from a book subtitled Turning Oppression Into Opportunity for Women Worldwide. There are lots of anecdotes supporting the idea that women across the globe face horrific violence, discrimination, and marginalization. That's countered by personal stories that provide hope for change. And both are supported by statistics and academic studies.
It's long been an article of faith with me that the seemingly perpetual growth in the number of state-sponsored gambling outlets is poor public policy. Common sense says that the amount of money people will spend on these games has a ceiling - one that we've almost certainly reached by now.
Steve Zuidema, the co-owner and brewmaster at Davenport's Front Street Brewery, called the byzantine state laws regulating alcohol distribution "laughable now. But getting them changed is going to take some lobbying and some money, because I think the distributors have a great lobby."
If you're the parent of a child who's a voracious consumer of comic books, don't make the mistake of worrying that he or she won't grow up to be anything. That child could, after all, grow up to be an artist. Or an educator. Or a detective. Or ... a superhero.
"Look into my eyes and keep still," Socibot says to me in its pleasant but mechanical voice. Before I can do anything to comply with the command, the Putnam Museum's machine continues: "I would say you are a 44-year-old man." I laugh. "Your face is happy," it says.
By most standards, Jason Kakert's 
