3. Yellow Pages

One December evening in Des Moines, about ten years ago, sitting around my hotel room waiting for the fun to start, I sort of accidentally started leafing through the local Yellow Pages just to kill some time. Not surprisingly, given my proclivities, I soon found myself deep in the restaurant ads. I wasn’t looking for a place to eat. I guess I must just have thought that a quick glance at this catalogue of local eateries might tell me something I didn’t already know about the town. And indeed it did.