The New York Times’ series on tap water pollution reveals dangerous levels of disinfectants in Charlottesville drinking water.
[...]Bob Lewis has a story today about the state’s slide into a fiscal morass of transportation funding that provides a peek at the stories to come in the years ahead. This is the sort of article that we’ll all look back at in five to ten years and wonder [...]
The Charlottesville Board of Architectural Review says that the demolished Victory Shoes façade has to be restored, Liz Palka reports for CBS-19. It was illegally demolished last month, with property manager [...]
A second stab at satire from The Hook, this time about smoking in restaurants.
[...]Apropos of nothing, here’s a money-saving tip: Get rid of your voicemail.
A few years ago I cancelled our call waiting and voicemail, and disabled call waiting on my mobile. Call waiting is really rude. When you answer call waiting, what you’re saying is this: I have no idea who is [...]
The Fifth District Republican Committee has chosen a primary as the method of selecting their nominee against Rep. Tom Perriello, Janelle Rucker writes in the Roanoke Times. It was a 19-13 vote. That’s a significant blow for the backers of basically all of the candidates but Sen. Robert Hurt [...]
The Rutherford Institute thinks that Rep. Tom Perriello should move his office to a more protestable location, Brian McNeill writes in today’s Progress.. As Lisa Provence explains in The Hook’s cover story this week, angry protesters are intimidating patrons of neighboring businesses, insisting that they have every right [...]
Alberto P. Veiga (CC BY)
Last week we highlighted significant factual inconsistencies in a Bloomberg story about Goldman Sachs by Alice Schroeder, in which she claimed that “senior Goldman people have loaded up on firearms to defend themselves if there is a populist uprising [...]
Last week I called out Bloomberg’s Alice Schroeder for a bullshit story about Goldman Sachs executives being “armed to the teeth.” Today the Wall Street Journal joins in. They asked the NYPD who confirmed that it’s just not true. A grand total of four Goldman Sachs employees have [...]
A UVA project has virtually recreated Vinegar Hill in its heyday, the university writes in a press release. (If you’re not from here: Vinegar Hill was a large, mostly black neighborhood around the McIntire/Main intersection that was demolished by the city for “urban renewal.” The [...]
The field of Republican candidates vying to run against Rep. Tom Perrillo is so strong that…a seventh candidate has kicked off his campaign. Jim McKelvey, a Smith Mountain Lake developer, completes our septumvirate of dwarves. McKelvey says both that he’s not satisfied with any of the other candidates and [...]
Biscuit Run may become a state park, Brian Wheeler writes in the Daily Progress / Charlottesville Tomorrow.
Hunter Craig paid $46M for the 1,200 acre property in 2005, which he intended to develop as “Fox Ridge” (somewhere, I know, there’s a software program that just spits out random names [...]
Shopping centers that don’t allow soliciting aren’t allowing the Salvation Army to solicit, Liz Palka reports for CBS-19, and I get the impression that we’re supposed to be angry about that. The Salvation Army is singling out both CVS and Harris Teeter, neither of which allow solicitation on their [...]
The Roanoke Times editorialized today in favor of the Know Campaign’s guilt-based GOTV campaign, and I couldn’t agree more. That was the conservative group who was looking to send out mailers telling people which of their neighbors have voted in recent elections. The SBE was upset, as were many [...]
City Council has signed off on the 250/McIntire interchange in a 3-2 vote. That’s one less obstacle to the Meadowcreek Parkway being built.
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Former Glenmore treasurer Michael Comer has been indicted on charges of embezzling from them. You’ll remember that Comer went missing in July, it quickly emerged that he was dodging an audit of the community association’s finances, and a few weeks later he [...]
I love this story about collectors of frequent flier miles gaming the system. The US Mint was selling dollar coins (at face value, of course) with free shipping. So these mile collectors realized that they could charge these on their cards, get them shipped, and use the money to [...]
Well, that didn’t take long: UVA named Mike London as the new head coach for the football program today. After just two seasons as University of Richmond’s head coach, the former UVA defense coordinator is back again. The 49-year-old one-time college football player is certainly popular among players who [...]
There’s a YouTube trend of filming so-bad-they’re-good self-parodying hip-hop homages to one’s hometown. (See Arlington: The Rap, which I think was the first one, or River City.) They’re all done in the style of Lazy Sunday (Chronicles of Narnia), the crazy-popular SNL short that convinced NBC to [...]
The county has openings on various boards: Ag. and Forest District, ACSA, Economic Devel., Equalization (prop. tax appeals), Housing, Natural Heritage, Pantops Advisory, Planning, Public Rec. Facilities, RSWA, 250W, and Social Services. Be useful. Do stuff.
[...]The BoS has yet again postponed construction of the Crozet library, leaving the growing populace with a library the size of a phonebook. It’s ridiculous how many times this project has been pushed back.
[...]The Coen brothers have an open casting call in town for their next movie. They want a 12–16-year-old girl.
[...]Bloomberg claims that Goldman Sachs executives are buying firearms to prepare for a peasant uprising. Major news outlets across the globe are repeating the story uncritically. I call bullshit.
[...]Bloomberg ran a story by Alice Schroeder yesterday that just seems too good to be true:
“I just wrote my first reference for a gun permit,” said a friend, who told me of swearing to the good character of a Goldman Sachs Group Inc. banker who applied to the local [...]
Two gripes that I can never make during election season, because they’ll look partisan:
1. The fact that a candidate hasn’t disavowed someone or something doesn’t mean that he supports it. Yes, some issues are so big or important, or so clearly intertwined with a candidate, that a refusal to disavow [...]
Under an act of the General Assembly, smoking in Virginia restaurants is illegal, beginning today. Huzzah! (The exception is restaurants that maintain a closed, separate smoking room with an independent ventilation system.) Many restaurants banned smoking after the bill passed last winter, getting a head start on the law, but [...]
One of the Murray brothers, Dr. Latham Murray, died yesterday evening, of causes as yet undetermined. The eight sons of Panorama Farm owners Jim and Bunny Murray—James, Matthew, Christopher, Stephen, Andrew, Thomas, Timothy, and Latham—are pervasive in the community, quietly doing the various good deeds that [...]
The Hook provides a detailed description of the overhauled Jefferson Theater.
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By Karen Blaha, reproduced under CC BY-SA license.
Al Groh is being paid $4.3M to please stop coaching UVA football, CBS-19 (among many others) reports. Just last night the university wrapped up a 3-9 season with a 42-13 loss to Virginia Tech, [...]
I’ve been enjoying the music of Charlie Poole for the past six months or so, and I was surprised to discover Loudon Wainwright III’s new album, High, Wide and Handsome: The Charlie Poole Project, just before I saw him perform some of the songs at The Paramount last month. If [...]
Al Groh, asked if his career at UVA is done after getting beat down by VT, read a terrible poem, “The Guy in the Glass.” That would be a “yes.”
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The SPCA wants you to foster a dog for Christmas, to give just one dog a home, if only for the holidays. Orientations are next month. Fostering is great!
[...]A UVA student died in a spelunking accident in Utah this morning. He was trapped 150 feet underground for 28 hours. (Via)
[...]Roanoke NPR station WVTF is opening a downtown Charlottesville studio. They’ll have a grand opening of the 1,780 square foot facility weekend after next, and use the facility for conducting interviews. It’s at 216 W. Water St. (here, I think), across from the Ice Park. This is constitutes [...]
A Cessna on its way to CHO crashed near Durham, NC today. Looking at the pictures, it’s tough to believe it, but the couple in the plane walked away unharmed.
[...]There was a 2.7 earthquake in Nelson County, just north of Appomattox at 5:24 this evening. The epicenter was here:
Nobody should have felt it in the Charlottesville area. (And hardly anybody in Nelson.) Earthquakes in the 2.0-2.9 range are so weak that they’re generally not even felt. We [...]
The Observer has spilled the beans: we’ll be publishing new work by Joe Sacco. The journalist/artist is producing an original, 48-page comic for us, entitled “The Unwanted,” about the thousands of African refugees who have wound up in Malta in their effort to escape to Europe. Conflicts throughout Sub-Saharan [...]
Mayor Norris got engaged and shaved off his beard. When you wonder “who is that chipper-looking handsome stranger?”, look again.
[...]It’s not just Glenmore: Mill Creek’s treasurer has been arrested for embezzlement, too. You only find out who is swimming naked when the tide goes out.
[...]Charlottesville’s Dr. Gregg Korbon told the story of how Brian C. Korbon Little League Field got its name on NPR this morning. John Borgmeyer named this as the best story recorded by StoryCorps here in 2005.
[...]Hollymead Town Center isn’t the paragon of pedestrian friendliness that it’s touted as, Erika Howsare writes in the current C-Ville Weekly. Years after the development went in, Howsare tried to take a stroll to the shopping center from the townhouses that make the place ostensibly mixed-use. It did not [...]
Local filmmaker Eric Hurt has won Organizing for America’s competition to create short films about the paucity of affordable family health care, Brian McNeill writes in today’s Daily Progress. A thousand films were submitted, with a blue-ribbon panel naming this one the best. It was shot at Riverview Park.
Del. Phil Hamilton lost his reelection bid earlier this month, I was relieved to see–voters saw fit to hand him his hat for lining his own pockets with taxpayer dollars (or so it appears). Democrat Robin Abbott won the Peninsula district with 54% of the vote. Like every other [...]
Angry protesters are driving away customers to businesses next door to Rep. Perriello’s office, and they’re demanding that Perriello relocate his office to a place where they can more easily picket him.
[...]The Victory Shoes façade has been illegally demolished, Dave McNair wrote in The Hook a few days ago. (Here’s how it looked when the shoe store was still in business.) One of the few remaining examples of art deco architecture in town, the building—just to the left of [...]
Teabagger Nigel Coleman on why he’s cancelled his plans to burn Rep. Tom Perriello in effigy:
I feel like I obviously handled this poorly, as far as the press goes. We really should have thought this through more … and seen how this was going to affect not only us, [...]
Adopt a needy family for Christmas. I’ve done this—it’s guaranteed elevation.
[...]West Main business owns are pushing for a charrette on the history of the corridor, Rachana Dixit writes in today’s Daily Progress. (For those who aren’t familiar with the process, Wikipedia provides a good definition. It’s basically when a bunch of stakeholders get together and try to collaboratively [...]
President George W. Bush has assented to participate in the Miller Center’s ongoing presidential history project, The Daily Progress reports. Every president since Carter has been interviewed—along with hundreds of administration officials—for their Presidential Oral History Program, which has used that extraordinary level of access to create an [...]
The Cavalier Daily is scaling back the number of issues they’ll publish each year, they announced in today’s lead editorial, going from 136 down to 131, or thereabouts. It’s a financial decision, a result of decreased advertising revenue, so they’re eliminating five Friday papers, the day that generates the [...]
My brother’s second “deer hunting for locavores” class starts on Sunday, and there are still slots available. It’s $50, with neither experience nor a rifle of your own required.
[...]Last night I watched With These Hands, a documentary about the closure of the Hooker furniture plant in Martinsville. Hooker sounds like it was a heck of a company. I say “was”—it’s still in business, but they moved all of their manufacturing to China, and it’s really the same [...]
