By the time St. Ambrose University's May 13 commencement rolled around, students had put in more than 20,000 hours of service to the community during the 2006-7 academic year. SAU student service included a wide range of activities and projects. Ambrosians for Peace & Justice sent 15 students and staff to New Orleans to help in cleanup efforts at facilities for the elderly, logging nearly 600 service hours. Twenty others went to the David School in Kentucky over spring break and worked 800 hours teaching the school's students and cleaning and renovating its grounds. Thirty student mentors in the Big Brothers Big Sisters program spent more than 900 hours with their "littles" in a variety of activities that included pumpkin-carving, visiting the Davenport Fire Department, and attending sports events together. And St. Ambrose's Habitat for Humanity group logged more than 2,800 hours helping to build a house in Davenport and volunteering during spring break in Colorado and Arkansas.

If you provide incentives, they will come. On June 8, Quad City Development Group President Thom Hart and Davenport Mayor Ed Winborn announced that the Quad Cities will provide locations for a new feature by filmmakers Ryan Fleck and Anna Boden, who previously collaborated on the Oscar-nominated drama Half Nelson. John O'Donnell Stadium, in particular, will play a key role in the currently untitled project, which concerns a young man from the Dominican Republic who - inspired by Field of Dreams - journeys to Iowa to play in the minor leagues. Project co-producers Jamie Patricof and Jeremy Kipp Walker stated that recent legislation providing incentives to film in Iowa, and the stadium's "beautiful field" along the Mississippi River, were key motivators in their decision to shoot locally, with filming scheduled to run from late July through mid-September. Numerous Quad Cities locations are currently being scouted, and the filmmakers hope to employ local talent in the feature's production. For information on the Iowa Film Promotion Act, which was signed into law on May 17, visit (http://www.traveliowa.com/film). - Mike Schulz

For the River Cities' Reader's fourth-annual short-fiction contest, we got mean. Diabolical. Bound-for-hell cruel.

Oh, sure, in the past we gave the challenge of starting or ending with a particular line, or including seven specific words in a story. We've limited you to 200 words.

This year, in addition to the relatively mundane prompts of a photograph and a fortune cookie, we devised what we called the "Wheel of Fortune challenge," in which authors could not use the letters R, S, T, L, N, and E. As you'll see from the winners and other selected entries, that nasty constraint gave us our most creative and playful entries.

Churches United has announced two awards received in support of its Hunger Ministry: $500 from United Church of Christ, Neighbors in Need, and $5,000 from the Illinois Conference of the United Church of Christ. Churches United operates 23 food pantries and three meal sites in the Quad Cities area. In 2006, the volunteers that work in the food pantries responded to more than 26,800 visits, and meal-site volunteers provided more than 30,800 meals to those who were hungry.