Jeff Speck doesn't expect to be a popular person among government officials.

"It will be a little bit controversial," Speck said of his July 9 lecture at the Figge Art Museum. "I will attack your public-works department and your fire chief - never having met them."

The week of May 12 through 18 is "Bike to Work Week," but if you're a casual cyclist, good luck.

The Quad Cities have a great trail system along both sides of the Mississippi River - which one day is expected to form a loop on each side of the river. Yet that system is geared more toward recreation than transportation - getting you from home to work. And very few drivers are good at sharing the road with bicyclists in a way that makes both feel safe.

Enter "complete streets."

If you wonder about the durability of stereotypes, ask Solo Greene. A member of the Nez Perce Native American tribe and an education specialist with an environmental group on the tribe's reservation in Idaho, he began going into elementary schools five or six years ago to speak to students.

"I thought it was just because they were young," he said in a phone interview, in advance of his fifth-annual appearance in the Quad Cities as part of a cultural exchange with Black Hawk College. "Some of the questions that they asked me ... were: Where did I come from? ... How is it living in a tipi? Did I have to get a pass to get off the reservation?"

Film incentives in Iowa are likely to become law this legislative session after being approved by a house committee last week.

But it remains an open question how much of a boost House File 411 - which would create three types of incentives for film production in Iowa - would provide to the state's motion-picture industry, and whether the state would benefit financially from the incentives.