Good Morning, RVA: Hello nurse!

Where nurse = the weekend.

December 19, 2014; 6:59 AM • by Ross Catrow

Photo by: Sky Noir

Good morning, RVA! It’s 34 °F, and today looks a lot like yesterday except it’s a wonderful, wonderful Friday. Highs near 50 °F, but the temperature will drop about ten degrees over the weekend.

The completely unreliable seven-day forecast still says there’s a good chance of rain on Christmas Eve and clouds on Christmas Day.

Water cooler

Yesterday, Governor McAuliffe restored voting rights to over 5,100 ex-offenders. He also shortened the application process for some and removed the need for a notary. Voting rights restoration was the topic of Day 92 in our 100 Days to a Better RVA project.

Turns out I was wrong and should have known better. We’ve got a long while before we can blissfully stop hearing about Joe Morrissey.

Today, the Obama Administration will announce some details on a planned system of rating colleges. They’ll use one of my favorite rating systems: a ternary scale of Good, Meh, and Bad.

I know it’s the weekend before Christmas, and you probably have a lot going on. If you feel the need to have even more going on, take a gander at 5 Things, 5 Things for Families, or our events calendar. You’re sure to find something worth cramming into your schedule.

Sports!

• Rams travel to Cincinnati to face the defense-minded Bearcats at 12:00 PM on ESPNU.
• Spiders handled the South Alabama Jaguars, 65-54. They’ll head to Madison Square Gardens on Saturday to take on the Pepperdine Waves at 12:00 PM as part of the Gotham Classic.
• #5 Wahoos trounced the Cleveland State Vikings, 70-54. This Sunday UVA will host 7-1 Harvard at 12:00 PM on ESPNU.
• Hokies and the Citadel match up on Saturday at 12:00 PM on ESPN3.
• Caps moved to 15-10-6 after a win over the Blue Jackets. They’ll face off against the Devils at 7:00 PM on Saturday.
• Washington and the Eagles kickoff on Saturday at 4:00 PM.

This morning’s longread

Seattle’s unbelievable transportation megaproject fustercluck

You think 6th Street Marketplace was a failure? Hardly! One of the possible solutions to this transportation and planning disaster is to just give up and abandon the world’s largest tunnel-boring machine underneath Seattle. The amount of city schadenfreude I feel is high.

OK, so, the project gets underway in 2011, scheduled to be done in late 2015.

In July 2013, they bring in Bertha, the largest tunnel-boring machine in the world, built specifically for the project by the Hitachi Zosen Corporation.

It’s an engineering marvel! There’s a small-scale replica on public view in the historic Pioneer Square neighborhood, the very neighborhood Bertha was to dig beneath.

The massive machine cranks up and jams its enormous snout into the earth, tearing fiercely through rock, soil, and seawater, leaving all the world in awestruck wonder. For a minute, anyway. Then, a thousand feet in — one-tenth of the way through its journey — it grinds to a halt.

This morning’s Instagram

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December 19, 2014 6:59 AM 0