Good Morning, RVA: Damp vibes

It’s a great day to be a mushroom.

April 8, 2015; 7:02 AM • by Ross Catrow

Photo by: Dave Edens

Good morning, RVA! It’s 60 °F, and rain is on the way this morning. After the showers pass through, expect dreary, damp vibes to continue for most of the day.

Water cooler

The New York Times reports a white police officer in South Carolina fatally shot a fleeing black suspect in the back five times. The officer has been charged with murder. How do we make this stop?

Today at 11:00 AM, VCU will formally introduce Will Wade as their new men’s basketball coach (in a press conference that’s at the Siegel Center and open to the public). Wade was an assistant under Shaka Smart and had found success as the head coach at the University of Tennessee Chatanooga over the last couple of years. Aaron Williams breaks down what you can expect from the Coach Wade era at VCU. Spoiler alert: the exciting, pressure defense stays.

Speaking of VCU basketball, Style Weekly has this slightly enraging bit entitled “Shaka Smart’s Swift Re-brand.” Ram fans, read only if you want to feel some negative emotions first thing this morning.

It’s not just California that needs to worry about their water! By 2040, Virginia will increase its daily water supply demand by 32%–that’s an extra 450 million gallons of water each and every day! Luckily (I guess?) we should be able to just build more reservoirs? I dunno, it all seems very terrifying. You too can be terrified by reading through this massive list of PDFs on the Department of Enviornmental Quality’s website, or check out this summary in the RTD by Rex Springston.

That’s all she wrote for horse racing and off-track betting in Virginia; Colonial Downs and its betting locations are no more.

Sports!

• Nats and Mets at 7:05 PM in Nationals Park, assuming the rain doesn’t ruin things.
• Caps take on the Bruins at 8:00 PM in their penultimate game of the regular season.

What to expect

Later today on RVANews:

• This town loves live music, so you should go forth and experience some! Andrew Cothern will guide you.
• Looking for things to do with your family this week? We will have five to choose from, courtesy of Valerie Catrow.
• Some people in town care deeply about our specific spot on the earth and do a ton to protect and conserve it–let us shower them with awards!

This morning’s longread

Want to help prevent online bullying? Comment on Facebook

But then an interesting thing happened. After hours spent boosting the positive comments and purging most of the brutish ones, the tide started to turn. People started to write things like, “Brave woman. My first reaction was negative before I even clicked the link — then I realized that was the whole point and why she was the perfect person to give this talk.” Or, “Politics aside, I respect the fact that Ms. Lewinsky is now demanding to write her own story. Too often we allow shame to silence our stories.” The flood of vitriolic comments dried up to a trickle.

Surprise, surprise, the comments on Monica Lewinsky’s TED talk were awful! It sure seems like a lot of work to wade through a cesspool of internet comments like that, but, turns out, sometimes it can be rewarding.

This morning’s Instagram

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April 8, 2015 7:02 AM 0