The article this sidebar accompanies is less about ethanol than it is about government encouraging agricultural practices that aren't sustainable and do more harm than good to communities. Author Kamyar Enshayan argues that the federal government, in particular, should divert some agricultural subsidies into re-building sustainable local economies. Championing ethanol as the savior of the Midwestern farm, he claims, is a losing proposition.

To be clear, Enshayan said that ethanol is superior to gasoline in terms of its desirability as a source of energy. "Gasoline is terrible," he said. But he added that conservation and other options aren't being considered as alternatives to ethanol and gasoline. "We're in an addictive situation," he said of the United States' energy consumption. "What do we do to get out of it?"

The River Music Experience last week announced the lineup for its 2006 River Roots Live festival along with a new partnership with Living Lands & Waters. The festival, which will be held September 22 and 23 in Davenport's LeClaire Park, will feature two stages of music this year. The Black Crowes will headline, and other acts will include Umphrey's McGee, Martin Sexton, Bo Ramsey, Susan Tedeschi, Junior Brown, The Make Believe, The Gourds, The Hackensaw Boys, L'il Brian & the Zydeco Travelers, Calexico, Alejandro Escovedo, Girlyman, and Scott H. Birum. River Music Experience President and CEO Lon Bozarth said following the press conference that Living Lands & Waters would receive a portion of the event's profits; he said he hoped profits for this year's festival would be $100,000. In its inaugural year, River Roots Live drew roughly 8,000 people and finished about $4,000 in the black, Bozarth said. This year, he said, he's targeting attendance of 7,500 each day. For more information on River Roots Live, visit (http://www.riverrootslive.com). To view an edited version of the press conference, visit the River Cities' Reader's online multimedia repository: (http://www.qcspan.com).

WVIK 90.3 FM will present the program Quad City Oral Histories throughout July, giving audiences an opportunity to hear Quad Citians relate their experiences (both at home and abroad) during World War II. The program will air at 7 p.m. on Mondays. The project was a collaboration between WVIK and the Davenport Public Library's Richardson-Sloane Special Collections Center. According to a press release: "Now in their 70s and 80s, these local citizens were chemists on the Manhattan Project, brides from England, farm boys on ‘scrap drives,' MedEvac nurses, and ‘Rosie-the-Riveters.' They were at Pearl Harbor and survived ‘D-Day.' One man shot the padlock on the gates of Dachau, and several liberated labor camps across Europe."

A couple of years ago, the people who are continually stretching the edge of the Internet envelope began talking about Web 2.0. Wikipedia, the user-created encyclopedia, defines Web 2.0 as "a term often applied to a perceived ongoing transition of the World Wide Web from a collection of Web sites to a full-fledged computing platform serving Web applications to end users. Ultimately Web 2.0 services are expected to replace desktop computing applications for many purposes."

That's happening.