Friday clip show

THIS didn't take long post-election:

The City Council on Monday will discuss changes to the 21-only bar ordinance that would place more rules on establishments like restaurants that want to be exempt from the law.

The proposal comes from the Partnership for Alcohol Safety (sic), which is a group of city leaders, University of Iowa officials and students, business owners and community leaders.

The group wants to stop what it sees as establishments taking advantage of exemptions to the law, which bans people younger than 21 from being in places with liquor licenses after 10 p.m.

Doc Dobyns is jumping up and down in anticipation.

From the Deeth Blog's Department of Shameless Self-Promotion, here's the Talking With Yale Cohn city election post-mortem I did with Garry Klein and Adam Sullivan.



Branstad is fined for spreading BS, only it's the wrong Branstad. And it's not metaphorical rhetorical BS, it's actual BS.

A handy checklist here for caucus-watchers that lists staffing and endorsements in Iowa.

Iowa legislative stuff; Bleeding Heartland has a good overview of the Senate 26 pairup of Dem Mary Jo Wilhelm and Republican Merlin Bartz, who has a tin ear about his fence line. And a routine re-elect announcement from Sharon Steckman (D-Mason City) that emphasizes the small changes in a District Draws Itself seat (Mason City proper is something like 90% of ideal district size).

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Sad news in the Iowa journalism world. An open letter from Iowa Independent editor Lynda Waddington indicates that the site is likely in its final days.

It was a blogging supergroup, the original Iowa Independent of 2007 and 2008. A few names came and went, but the core stayed together. Doug Burns. Tom Lindsay. Chase Martyn. Lynda Waddington. Dien Judge. And me.

One of the best things I've read recently on writing came from, of all places, Cracked:

if you're making money online, it's because you kept at it for zero reward until that happened. Some people want to quit their jobs because they hate them and go write instead, which is the exact wrong attitude for a writer. You write because you love it. You write on top of your regular work, because words might be the true expression of your soul, but your unique spirit doesn't pay the rent.

Some people get hired straight into writing because they were smart enough to do the "find out what you really want to do and work at it utterly" thing in college, which is what college is for. The rest of us simply work two jobs, where the second is unpaid for a long time.

This means that you're pouring all your free time into writing, work that matters to you, instead of spending it in an endless parade of distractions to forget the next day's early start. You keep doing this until you're earning as much from the writing as you were from your old job, then you reward yourself by taking a 50 percent pay cut by going full time and betting "I can work twice as hard as I have been doing just to earn as much as I was."

Good luck to Lynda and everyone else associated with the site.