Marcel Pacatte

Pop quiz: What do a pig puppet named Hamlet (Get it?) and about a dozen Boise elementary school students have in common?

You wouldn’t be incorrect if you ventured that all are adorable, but the answer we’re looking for is a little more specific: All performed on Saturday in proximity to a 400-year-old book that you can see in Boise for just one more day, Wednesday.  

The first collection of Shakespeare's plays, printed nearly 400 years ago, is in Boise for three more weeks, and on Thursday night the world's foremost Shakespeare scholar delivered the keynote speech of the celebration surrounding the famed First Folio's stop here.

Today, we revere them. So much so, in fact, that they're worth millions. One was purchased for just under $6 million, another for just over. Some are secured in vaults. One had to be sold because its owner couldn't afford the insurance.

"I came to be inspired. I need inspiration."

Those words were one bookend, spoken by a two-year Boise State University employee as she walked to the Morrison Center auditorium on Wednesday morning. 

A year after announcing major changes in the structure and thinking at the university and nearly seven months to the day of President Barack Obama’s visit to campus to highlight the innovation occurring in classrooms and research labs, what’s left to say?

If you’re Boise State President Bob Kustra, and you’re giving your 13th State of the University address to faculty and staff, plenty.

Boise City Council members had three hours of questions this afternoon about how ride-sharing platform Uber would work – and be regulated by the city.  In the end, the council voted unanimously to have an ordinance drafted for a public hearing by the end of next month.

Nowhere else but on a college campus do you, two days after a presidential visit, sit down and unpack the event with a raft of scholars, some of the school’s best-brained students and a group of highly motivated learners from the community.

This was simply a university being a university on Friday afternoon in Driscoll Hall at Boise State University – and the place was packed for the unpacking.

The bill you received in mid-October if you live in the Nampa and Meridian Irrigation District is coming due later this month.

Officials are reminding the district’s 38,000 property owners that they have until Dec. 20 to pay the first installment of their irrigation tax bill.

But a more dire reminder has gone out to the owners of 99 properties in the district who are as much as three years behind in their payments.

Irrigation district Secretary-Treasurer Daren Coon says final notices, a follow-up to certified letters that were mailed in August, are now in the mail.

If you’re one of the thousands of Idaho residents who go online to buy things, you’re probably one of the thousands of Idahoans cheating the state out of money.

The state has a little-known – and frequently ignored – companion to the sales tax called the use tax. It’s also hard to enforce, as residents are entrusted with self-reporting their purchases.

“Many people don’t know about the use tax,” said Randy Tilley, who is the administrator of the Idaho Tax Commission’s Audit Division.