Good Morning, RVA: Cloudy with a chance of awesome
Let’s make this the best Thursday of 2016 so far!
Photo by: C. VanHook (vanhookc)
Good morning, RVA! It’s 38 °F which is a heck of a lot warmer than yesterday’s 19 °F. Today’s highs will settle into the mid-40s and the sun will likely settle in behind some clouds. Good news: the chances of weekend rain are dropping by the hour!
Water cooler
Police are reporting 2016’s second homicide; Djan R. Robinson was found shot to death early yesterday morning. Meanwhile, WTVR is reporting a separate fatal shooting this morning, but I haven’t seen anything official from the police yet.
You’ve got until January 8th to weigh in on high-speed rail in the Richmond region, and I suggest that you do so. Right now they’re looking for feedback on the station and line layout–like using Main Street Station only and getting rid of Staples Mill, building a new station on the Boulevard and deleting both Main Street and Staples Mill, plus a couple of other options. This is part of a long, long (but well-funded) planning process, so don’t expect trains to start speeding their way through Richmond on the way to DC anytime soon: The Department of Rail and Public Transit says we’ve got a decade before the service could open. You can read a very helpful FAQ on the project right here. BTW, Eugene Trani, former president of VCU, is a big fan of the Boulevard option.
Ned Oliver reports that Richmond’s director of public works spent “at least 38 hours at work on church-related conference calls during a 1½-year period.” Now, that’s a half an hour per week (75 weeks x .5 hours = 37.5 hours, maybe implying a weekly 30 minute conference call), which does not seem like a super huge deal to me. However, the church in question is Mayor Jones’s church, and that does seem like an impropriety–or at least a couple steps toward Sketchtown.
North Korean nuclear explosion seismic data transformed into audio! The perfect amount of nerdiness to start your day.
CNN will televise President Obama’s town hall meeting about gun violence in America, tonight at 8:00 PM.
This morning’s longread
The Home
I’m cleaning out my list of 2015 longreads and here’s one that I meant to share over the holidays but totally forgot: Cormac McCarthy’s ‘Home Alone.’
He is alone, the parents gone in the morning. It is nothing to him. He revels in their tedious wake. Eats milk and cream. Breaks and steals property and rubs himself in oils strange. He sleeps ’til near the sun’s noonhigh meridian, his whited hair splintered and splayed like some infernal broomhead. At night he carnivals with dervish fervor, watches plays of mindless violence. He is wild and drunken, bestial, howling into the darkling primordial. There is no echo. He is a changeling.
It is not long before the robbers come. The leader is squat and wears a gold tooth. Bestride him is another with crazed eyes and a figure gaunt like a starved and preyless mantis. Their coats are ashen and their boots trudge black against the snow. The squat signals to the redclay hovel before them, assuming its vacancy. This’s it, he says. The mantis nods. It is the hermitage of the kid.
This morning’s Instagram
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Ross Catrow
Founder and publisher of RVANews.
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