Good Morning, RVA: Only love can do that

A frustrating and confusing week continues.

November 25, 2014; 7:06 AM • by Ross Catrow

Photo by: Lies Through A Lens

Good morning, RVA! It’s 64 degrees and there things will stay for most of the day. As evening approaches, temperatures will fall until tomorrow night, when we have a legitimate chance for snow. As of this morning, eccentric Facebook weather guy WxRisk has RVA on the border between all rain and mostly rain.

Water cooler

A grand jury decided not to indict Darren Wilson, on any charge, for killing 18-year-old Michael Brown. Immediately following the announcement, protestors (plus police and national guard) hit the streets of Ferguson. Things did not improve overnight. Some things:

• You can watch a video of the entire grand jury announcement.
• Here’s the Vox explainer of how we got here, what’s a grand jury, and what will happen to Darren Wilson now.
• If you’d like live, often raw and unprocessed, reports from the ground in Ferguson, @AntonioFrench is the Twitter account to follow.
• Protests have popped up around the country, including one on VCU’s campus.

Make sure you read the guest column in today’s RTD by Melinda Skinner about the longstanding culture of rape in our universities and colleges. The penultimate paragraph is just so good: “Once I figured out what was going on, I stopped going out with frat boys and wondered how men who were sons, husbands, fathers, brothers, uncles or friends of women could take part or condone it. Were they clueless, cowards, or just rapists with expensive shoes?”

A while ago, RPS Superintendent Dana Bedden restructured the district’s anti-truancy operation. The RTD’s Zachary Reid has a look into how it’s going. Honestly, it seems…well designed and well executed?

Sports!

• #15 Rams were dismantled by #12 Villanova, 77-53, on a night when VCU looked rattled and out-of-step.
• #8 Wahoos take on the Tennessee State Tigers tonight at 7:00 PM on ESPN3.
• Hokies face the University of Northern Iowa Panthers in Las Vegas at 7:00 PM on CBS Sports.

This morning’s longread

The Rapid Evolution of Emoji, a Wordless Tongue

This absolutely wonderful article about emoji from New York Magazine will work as a palate cleanser after reading this week’s incredibly depressing news.

This is the fun of emoji. The nail-painting emoji, in some circles, has come to mean “I’m not bothered” or “Haters gonna hate.” Man in Business Suit Levitating could mean “jumping for joy,” or it could mean “mystery.” (Online speculators have already nicknamed it “the Man in Black emoji.”) As Wortham explains about her favorite emoji, the Tempura Shrimp, what she loves about it is precisely the fact that it can have many different meanings. Sometimes she uses it to mean a foul or “salty” mood, when she wants to curl up like a shrimp. With some of her friends, the shrimp morphed into a joke that stands in for “Mariah Carey.” (“Something about her complexion and the way she’s always stuffed into a tube-ish dress,” Wortham writes in her shrimp essay.) Others use the shrimp as “quirky filler”–a nod, a wink, an acknowledgment that you’re simply thinking of someone. Tempura Shrimp emoji, she writes, has become “a way to be present when there’s nothing else to say at all.”

This morning’s Instagram

— ∮∮∮ —

Email

Want to automagically get Good Morning, RVA in your inbox every morning? Sign up below!

November 25, 2014 7:06 AM 0