Author Archive for Tom Jordan



Food on my mind

by Tom Jordan on December 5th, 2015

I tend to read articles and books about particular subjects in phases.  I’ll read a couple of books on parenting, a few biographies of athletes, maybe some philosophy or some histories.  Maybe most of us do this.  Exercise and food are two subject areas I often circle back to.  The idea is that some of it might sink in and actually affect the way I eat and move.  Experience tells me that my natural position is sitting down with my feet propped up while eating a bowl of ice cream. Eating on the wild side

One book that made a big impression on me was Eating on the wild side by Jo Robinson.  It’s all about vegetables and fruits – their origins, nutritional value, and how to get the most out of eating them.  Robinson, an investigative journalist, writes about how the plants we eat have been cultivated over time to be the way they are now.  In general, we’ve selected them to be less fibrous and more sugary.  They’re also less nutritious.

Even if you aren’t interested in changing the way you eat, there’s plenty to make it a worthy read.  From Chapter 2: “The Menominee Nation of the Great Lakes region laid claim to an extensive field of wild garlic, or ramps, that was located on the southern tip of Lake Michigan.  The area was so rife with ramps that their odor perfumed the air for miles.  The Menominee called their prized field Shikako, or ‘skunk place.’  The name lives on today in its anglicized form, Chicago.” food

Jim Gaffigan approaches food and eating from a different angle.  In Food: a love story, he writes less about things like vegetables and nutrition and more about things like cheese and gravy.  He covers restaurants and culinary specialties in various regions of the country.  Gaffigan, a comedian, describes himself as an “eatie” rather than a foodie.  If you want to read about food and feel okay about yourself and your diet regardless of what you’re eating, then give this one a try.

Library Streaming Video

by Tom Jordan on September 25th, 2015

The Library often has events I’d love to attend, but other life things (having children) make it a stretch. Steven Pinker was here last Tuesday, for example, and there was lots of excitement. A young couple asked me earlier that day if they would get seats by getting here an hour before he started speaking. I said I thought they would.

If you have cable through Mediacom, then you can watch events like this on Channel 20, The Library Channel.

V1

What’s neat is that a lot of ICPL’s videorecordings are available to watch any time at http://video.icpl.org/. As with the catalog, you are able to browse by subject or search by keyword. If there is a recording that you know the Library has but you’re not seeing on the site, then you can request it be added by writing us here: webmaster@icpl.org.

The view from above

by Tom Jordan on June 17th, 2015

You might be familiar with the Park@201 building downtown. It’s the new building on the ped mall with the glass exterior. Take a look at the top of building, the southwest and northwest corners in particular, and you will notice two protrusions. No, they are not gargoyles. They are video cameras that provide a giant’s-eye view of Iowa City courtesy of MetaCommunications. Here’s the website: http://www.metacommunications.com/webcam.

One camera is pointing north and the other is pointing south. The neat thing is that you can control the cameras. On the lower right part of the camera view, you will see this:  CameraControl

 

 

Clicking on the icon to which the green arrow is pointing will give you a fullscreen view. The icon to the right of that will let you control the camera. From there you can choose the camera’s orientation and you can zoom in or out.

Here are views from both cameras:

SouthViewNorthView

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

My favorite view is Ped Mall South. What’s yours?

Hampton Sides

by Tom Jordan on May 18th, 2015

A friend recommended Blood and Thunder: an epic of the American West to me awhile back, but I was reluctant to read it.  It had been some time since I had read a history and had unreservedly enjoyed it.  Take Charles Mann’s 1491 and 1493, for example.  They’re both great.  You will be enlightened, and you will learn all sorts of fascinating things if you read them.  I’ll go ahead and say that you will be a better person.  But I’d guess that you’ll also find the level of detail tedious at times.blood_and_thunder

My experience with Hampton Sides has been different.  He is a master storyteller.

In Blood and Thunder, Sides focuses on the American Southwest from the 1840s to the 1860s and on the life of Kit Carson in particular. Carson participated in the conquest of the West and gave his loyalty to the American military and government. He also married two Indian women and spoke many Indian languages. Popular westerns of the time – blood and thunders they were called – portrayed Carson as a swashbuckling hero protecting settlers from marauding Indians. More contemporary histories have tended to the reverse these roles. Sides is more interested in telling stories about human beings whose actions and motivations are complex and develop over time. The story of the Navajo people and their land is particularly interesting.hellhound

Hellhound on his Trail is both history and true crime, and it’s riveting. Martin Luther King, Jr’s last days are chronicled and details of his assassin’s life and flight from justice are doled out at a measured pace. The manhunt for King’s killer, who had been living under an alias or two, was massive, and it eventually reached overseas. Please note that Sides gives no credence to the government conspiracy theory of the assassination, so you’ll have to look elsewhere (one-star Amazon reviews) if you’re inclined that way.

kingdom_of_iceI’ll give his latest, In the Kingdom of Ice, another thumbs up. I’m about a third of the way into it, and I’ve never looked forward more to hearing about shivering, miserable sailors in the Arctic. The mission was operating on the notion that there might very well be an open polar sea. There was a current in the Pacific Ocean, it was thought, similar to the Gulf Stream in the Atlantic, and that current was flowing through the Bering Strait and warming the Arctic Ocean at the Pole. They imagined the wonders.

The Iowa City Assessor

by Tom Jordan on April 9th, 2015

The Iowa City Assessor’s website is useful if you’d like to know more about real property in Iowa City.  In Iowa City, real property (land and buildings), is reassessed every two years.  On the Assessor’s Duties page, there is information on the qualifications of the assessor, definitions of terms like “market value,” and explanations on how and why properties are valued as they are.  Prominent on this page is the General Misconceptions About the Assessor’s Work section, and its gist is that the Assessor is a disinterested party when it comes to taxes.  Grief from property owners over taxes must be ever-present.

IC aerial photoIowa City is divided into parcels, or defined lots of land that are owned by a person or persons. Parcels are searchable by number, name of business, street address, and legal description. It would be nice if non-commercial properties were searchable by name as well. The Johnson County Assessor, which assesses all Johnson County property not in Iowa City, allows a search by name. Do you know someone who owns property in Johnson County outside of Iowa City? Go ahead and search for the property by the owner’s name here.

After doing a search and selecting a parcel on the Iowa City site, you’ll find all sorts of information: values of the buildings and land, lot dimensions, details of building permits, etc. What I find most interesting is the sales information. Who bought from whom? And when and for how much?

You may also search property sales in Iowa City and limit the search by a number of criteria. The first listed is a date range. So, for example, you can see that there were 247 recorded sales in Iowa City in January 2015.

Another search offered is a search of buildings. Would you like to compare your house built in 1924 to others built that year? Do your search here.

To find out more about property in Iowa City, visit the Iowa City Assessor’s website. Or maybe even stop in at the office for a chat. Just be careful if you’d like to talk taxes.

Who is in jail?

by Tom Jordan on January 14th, 2015

This is not something I ask myself often.  But when I do, the Johnson County Sheriff’s Department has a ready answer.  The County’s website is here: http://www.johnson-county.com/.  On that page, there is a Jail Inmate Roster link on the left side of the page.  If you’d like to see Sheriff Lonny Pulkrabek’s smiling face before looking at the roster (or if you just want more information on the Sheriff’s Department), then select Sheriff from the Department dropdown menu.  There’s a Jail Inmate Roster link there too.

Jail Roster

 

After a disclaimer page (presumed innocent until proven guilty), then you have the roster.  There’s quite a bit of information there: name, date booked, age, location of the inmate, the charge, bond amount, and a photo.  Right now, Johnson County has 116 inmates.  58 are housed here in Johnson County, 57 are in Muscatine County, and one is in Linn County.

 

 

Read and pedal

by Tom Jordan on October 17th, 2014

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My oldest daughter is nine and she’s a super reader. She’ll be still for long periods of time and the book is all she needs. My other daughter is on her way to being a super reader too, but the being still part is tough. Part of it is her age, she’s six, but part of it is just who she is. Jumping, kicking, punching the air, or striking a pose is what she’s doing.

So I read this article about children riding exercise bikes in school while reading. There’s more on the program here. Apparently, kids like it and it helps them learn. There’s not enough research presented to satisfy a skeptic, but it fits with my experience of listening to books or podcasts while exercising. It’s a good combination.

Imagine if we had these in your school or here in ICPL. My six-year-old would love it. Maybe yours would too.

Help Yourself

by Tom Jordan on July 24th, 2014

The thought of reading self-help books makes me uncomfortable.  I imagine sitting down in an office with Joel Osteen and Joyce Meyer (both of whom I’m sure are wonderful people) and having this feeling that something really bad is about to happen and that it’s going to involve their teeth. However, when I speak to people I trust who’ve read self-help books, it sounds like I’m missing out.

ScottAdamsSo I read one. How to fail at almost everything and still win big by Scott Adams. He’s best known for being the Dilbert creator. Adams is funny and values simplicity a great deal. Throughout the book, he reminds the reader to be skeptical of the wisdom he’s imparting; he’s a cartoonist, not a guru.

Here are some of the topics he covers: why systems are better than goals; your programmable mind; the importance of tracking your personal energy; and doing sleep, fitness, and diet right (avoid relying on willpower).

Adams also writes quite a bit about his own life. He’s self-deprecating and owns up to his mistakes. “Some of My Many Failures in Summary Form” is the title of Chapter Four.

A revelation for me was in a section entitled Simplifiers Versus Optimizers. He makes the “Don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good” argument in a way that validates the worthiness of simplifiers in a world that tends to appreciate optimizers. This section alone makes the book worth reading.

You’ll find most self-help books in the 158.1 area. This one, both memoir and self-help, is in with the biographical works about cartoonists and graphic artists at 741.5092.

Searching for the right language

by Tom Jordan on May 1st, 2014

A patron wanted help finding books and articles to use for writing her paper.  The topic, she told me, was to be about young adults living with their parents and how this was a good thing.  What terms were we to use for the search?  “Parents of adult children,” I thought, and I used it as a subject search.  No, that wasn’t the right language.  As a keyword search, it brought up quite a bit.  We scanned through the titles and subtitles of the results list, and I realized we’d have to dig a little to find support for her point of view.  Phrases like “When will my grown-up kid grow up?” and “a revealing look at why so many of our children are failing on their own” were notable.

Some of the titles in the list, like Boomerang kids and The accordion family, looked promising.  So we took a closer look at the records for these two.  Both had “Parent and adult child” as a subject heading.  A subject search with this term brought up a decent looking list and two related subjects.  One of the two subjects was “Sandwich generation.”  The other one, “Adult children living with parents” looked like a winner.  However, ICPL had only one book with this subject heading.

We turned to Ebscohost, one of the Library’s online resources which provides access to magazine and journal articles.  There, “Adult children living with parents” as a subject search yielded a nice looking list of full text articles for her to use.
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