Levon Helm (far right) and The Band, photo from Rolling Stone

News broke last week that Levon Helm, lead singer and drummer of The Band, was in his “final stages” of fighting cancer and then it was announced early after on Friday that he had passed away.

Back story

Wrapping up the final PrairieCast

Two big milestones to report last week in podcasting related to my life.

PrairieCast

First of all, we ended PrairieCast, the SPN-themed podcast that I co-hosted with my friend Andy Brudtkuhl for more than two years. We put together 80 episodes in that time on four different platforms. I've been a podcast consumer for many years and I was really excited to create one when we started back in February of 2010.

Dear Family and Friends,

Welcome back to our annual holiday letter, The Year of Our Wood 2011!

Sure most people do their holiday letters for Christmas but we’ve never been conventional, typically opting for New Years. However, this year time got away from us and next thing you know it’s February. So, in that spirit - Happy Valentines Day!

Last year our holiday letter was filled with catching you up on two of the busiest years in our lives. A new baby, new jobs, law school, and a new house and more made that letter cover a lot of ground. 2011, by comparison, was a pretty slow year (and we like it that way).

It's Thinc Iowa week! We (at Silicon Prairie News) have been working on producing what is known Thinc Iowa for over a year and it's finally here. Check out the website (put together awesomely by Performance Marketing) at thinciowa.com.

The professional sports world lost a good one today in IZOD IndyCar Driver Dan Wheldon. Dan died from unrecoverable injuries sustained in the worst crash I’ve seen since we started following IndyCar about seven years ago. In a race that was supposed to feature a dual for the championship between rivals Dario Franchitti and Will Power along with a second storyline of Wheldon with a unique chance to compete for a prize of $5M.

We recently reached out to the photographer who shot our wedding six plus years ago to see if he still had our images on file. Luckily for us he did and he offered to send them to us for a pretty decent price. We took him up on it and we're glad we did because now we get to check out all the proofs that we'd forgotten he'd shot.

Well, since I haven't blogged since July, I figured it was time

ScottyHendo gets it. He was once a Hoosier, too.

Yes, the holiday is Independence Day not "the 4th of July"; that's simply the date. Just a guess but it may be an unexpected consequence of the popularization of Cinco de Mayo in this country.

An odd mention showed up in my Twitter stream this afternoon (above). What's even more odd is that the aforementioned boyfriend lives two hours from me in Iowa City.