Drawn! site is a multi-author blog devoted to illustration, art, cartooning and drawing. Its purpose is to inspire creativity by sharing links and resources.
The site was conceived by John, like all good ideas, while goofing off at work.
The Des Moines Register Illustrated.
A young music teacher named William Pitts was traveling by stagecoach from Wisconsin to Iowa to visit his future wife. While waiting for the stagecoach horses to be changed, he walked down Cedar Street and saw the empty lot where the church now stands. Being a romantic young man, the thought came to him of what a charming setting the spot would make for a church. Returning home, he wrote the poem �Church in the Wildwood,� and later set it to music. He put it away in a drawer and forgot it.
Meanwhile, church members grew tired of meeting in places such as the lawyer�s office, abandoned stores and parishioners� homes. They began making plans to build a church. A family in the parish gave them the property. When Rev. Nutting arrived, talk of building became serious. Limestone was quarried and by 1860 the foundation was laid. The Civil War slowed the work, but when one family gave trees and another donated the sawing of the lumber, the work never really ceased. By 1862 the building was enclosed and not a penny had been spent. When it came time to paint the building, the cheapest paint to be found was Ohio Mineral Paint, which would protect the wood but which was unhappily brown. With help from friends in the east, the building was finished, complete with bell, in 1864.
Mr. Pitts had married and was living in Wisconsin. In 1862 the couple moved to Fredericksburg to be near her elderly parents and Mr. Pitts was hired to teach singing class at the Bradford Academy. Imagine his surprise when he saw a little brown church nestled in the very trees where he had stood some years before. He went home and found the song and taught it to his class who sang it at the dedication service of the church. Pitts had written a song for a church that wasn�t there. The congregation had painted their little church brown without ever hearing of the song.
The Piccard Memorial Trophy is awarded to the top finisher of the Balloon Federation of America U.S. National Hot Air Balloon Championship.
Last night we went to Indianola, home of the National Balloon Museum, and took some pics.
Register’s Annual Great Bike Ride Across Iowa XXXIII
This year, ~ a northern route from LeMars to Guttenberg with overnights in Sheldon, Estherville, Algona, Northwood, Cresco, and West Union.
Five of the seven days of the 2005 Register Annual Great Bicycle Ride Across Iowa feature relatively easy terrain. The final two days include some big ups and downs as the ride heads into the Mississippi bluff lands, but this route isn’t as hilly as some in northeast Iowa.
This year’s ride ~ passes through 47 towns [like Woden]. The route is 485 miles long.
Some people go every year.
Matts RAGBRAI XXXIII Weblog explains it all (lots of pictures).
RAGBlog text and audio commentary by Mike of Los Angeles.
MoRB (Museum of RAGBRAI Buses)
Is he the world’s best breakdancer?
You might think so after watching this amazing video.
You at least have to agree he’s pretty darn good at push-ups.
Actually, Junior came in third in the Swiss Red Bull Championship.
Something in this syrupy hooch seems to have a synapse-blasting effect not unlike low-grade cocaine. Often, people on a Cisco binge end up curled into a fetal ball ~. Nudity and violence may well be involved too.
Our research indicates that MD 20/20 is the best of the bum wines at making you feel warm inside. Avaliable in various nauseating tropical flavors that coat your whole system like bathtub scum ~.
The night train runs only one route: sober to stupid with no roundtrip tickets available ~. Some suspect that Night Train is really just Thunderbird with some Kool-Aid-like substance added to try to mask the Clorox flavor.
As soon as you taste this swill, it will be obvious that its makers cut every corner possible in its production to make it cheap. Anyways, if your taste buds are shot, and you need to get trashed with a quickness, then “T-bird” is the drink for you. Or, if you like to smell your hand after pumping gas, look no further than Thunderbird. The undisputed leader of the five in foulness of flavor, we highly discourage driking this ghastly mixture of unknown chemicals unless you really are a bum.
Like its brother Cisco, “Wild I” definitely has some secret additives that go straight to the cranium. It’s called “wild” for a good reason, and bystanders should beware. Wild Irish Rose is sure to light a fire of drunken rage in your soul. Only those willing to sacrifice their liver need apply.
I like reading about these bum wines, but I don’t think I want to try ANY of them.
Sure, it’s cool to see the graphic of where the Space Shuttle and Space Station are, but that’s not the best part.
Depending on your location on the Earth’s surface, the spacecraft’s position in orbit and the time of day, you may be able to see either the space shuttle or the International Space Station, or both, as they orbit about 386 kilometers (240 miles) above the planet. A spacecraft will be seen as a steady white pinpoint of light moving slowly across the sky.
When they’re overhead in the sunshine, and you’re in the dark (dusk or dawn), the Space Shuttle and Space Station can be seen screaming accross the dark sky at 17,500 MPH. It’s exciting. It’s fun. It’s real people flying up there.
Just click on your city to see when they’re flying over, then go outside and watch. It WILL be fun. Honest.
Atari Flashback 2, the first riff on the 1977 console that’s actually worth buying. The $30 Flashback is preloaded with 40 games – classics like Pitfall, Centipede, and Missile Command, and fresh, fan-created ones. The best part? Unlike other reissues, nothing here is emulated. “I re-created the original schematics on a single chip,” says developer Curt Vendel, who founded the Atari History Museum.
During the summer of 1673, Father Jacques Marquette became the first Frenchman to explore the Mississippi River.
Marquette’s opportunity to explore this river came after he opened a mission on Mackinac Island. On May 17, 1673, Marquette and Louis Jolliet, a Canadian-born fur trapper and explorer, along with five other men described as “simple, hardy, and unwashed,” set out in two canoes from St. Ignace.
They traveled along the northern shore of Lake Michigan and paddled about thirty miles a day.
In two weeks, they reached present-day Menominee, Michigan. The local Indians warned the Frenchmen if they went farther they would meet Indians “who never show mercy to strangers but break heads without any cause.” The Indians also told Marquette and Jolliet that the great river “was full of horrible monsters, which devoured men and canoes one bite.”
Despite these forewarnings, the Frenchmen pressed on. After crossing present-day Wisconsin, they paddled into the Mississippi River on June 17.
Marquette and Jolliet followed the river, but near present-day Arkansas, they turned around after realizing the river flowed south, not west.
After the Marquette-Jolliet Mississippi expedition, the French, relying on Marquette’s research and following their usual practice of naming rivers after the tribes that lived along them, began calling the Des Moines River “Riviere de Moingoana.”
Father Jacques Marquette, French-born missionary of the Jesuit order, and Louis Jolliet, Canadian explorer and mapmaker, were the first Europeans to view the land on which the City of Chicago was to stand.
Iowa has a lot of towns, rivers and even some companies with Native American names. For example, Winnebago Industries, Inc., is headquartered in Forest City, Iowa.