Good Morning, RVA: Fill out those brackets
Today you gotta pick your bracket, watch city council, and adjust to a time change. Cut us some slack, Monday!
Photo by: cpjRVA
Good morning, RVA! It’s 50 °F, and today the sun will be obscured by fog and cloud. Temperatures will float nicely around the upper-60s, though.
Water cooler
Tonight, City Council will host their regularly scheduled meeting at 6:00 PM and will discuss many things. Taber Bain brings you our annotated Council agenda to get you up to speed before the hot, hot action begins. Highlights include: the loose livestock ordinance, a feasibility study about a program designed to connect panhandlers to day jobs, and the ordinance which would create a single place on the internet for the city to keep documents on all their various projects. This last one I’m a big fan of, but it’s magically continued each and every meeting–making me progressively sadder and sadder.
If you were like, “Man, I need to read a detailed but interesting breakdown of the mayor’s proposed budget with some reactions from City Council, School Board, and community members,” Ned Oliver has excatly that piece. The Budget Battle™ begins in earnest later this month, but a joint Council-School Board meeting will take place today at 9:00 AM at the Police Academy.
Last week we learned that the City had an application in the works for the USDOT Smart City Challenge. This weekend we learned that Richmond was not one of the seven finalists for the $40 million grant. Here’s the full list of finalists: Austin, Columbus, Denver, Kansas City, Pittsburgh, Portland, and San Francisco. Yeah, yeah, yeah, basically the full list of ultra hip cities that Richmond (and Richmond officials) aspire to.
The New York Times looks at the embarrassing movement to re-establish or protect Confederate monuments across the South. Ten thumbs up for Virginia being a counter example in this article and for the NYT resisting their perpetual urge to remind us that Richmond was the capital of the Confederacy.
This piece, titled “Someone Will Die,” about the increasing violence at Trump rallies is terrifying. Pair it with this about face on Trump by Vox’s Matthew Yglesias for an extra blergy start to your week.
Keep your eyeballs out for President Obama’s Supreme Court nominee, which will drop soon–maybe even today!
Sports!
Time to fill out those brackets, folks! It’s March Madness o’ Clock!
- Wahoos lost to UNC, 57-61, but still managed to pull a 1-seed in the NCAA Tournament. They’ll face #16 Hampton on Thursday at 3:10 PM on TRU TV.
- Rams, as a 10-seed, will play #7 Oregon State at 1:30 PM on Friday on TNT.
- Hokies drew a 3-seed in the NIT and will host #6 Princeton at 8:00 PM on ESPNU
- Spiders lost to Dayton in the Atlantic 10 Tournament and will not be playing in a postseason tournament.
This morning’s longread
Weak Leak: CBS Broke Selection Show
The 2016 NCAA Tournament Bracket Leak: A cautionary tale.
For 25 years, the selection show has been the ultimate edge-of-your-seat viewing experience, when the lives of thousands of human are forever altered, from players to coaches to university presidents to athletic directors to students to fans to the poor schmucks with the spit buckets. You couldn’t look away. This is what CBS was counting on: having your undivided attention, having the exclusivity of the most coveted information in sports. Then they decided to be greedy, to make everybody sit and agonize for an extra hour as professional television men babbled and filled time and we repeatedly were informed of the plot for some CSI spinoff.
But then the leak happened, at roughly the same time the bracket would have been nearly announced in total, if the show had been only one hour. For anyone following along on Twitter, all the suspense was gone. All the excitement went away. All the uncertainty — the driving force of the whole enterprise — evaporated. Suddenly, you didn’t need to watch at all.
This morning’s Instagram
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Ross Catrow
Founder and publisher of RVANews.
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