Good Morning, RVA: Smiling face with sunglasses emoji

Hey weather, great job closing out this week!

June 11, 2015; 7:02 AM • by Ross Catrow

Good morning, RVA! It’s already 71 °F, and today’s gonna be a hot one. The hourly forecast looks like Blind Melon on repeat, with almost 15 straight hours of sunshine and temperatures in the upper-80s and lower-90s.

Water cooler

Jim Nolan of the RTD speaks to Larry Sabato of the Center of Politics at UVA about how low voter turnout affects elections. In the 17th District just 143 voters decided the outcome of the primary, with only 2,527 folks casting a ballot! If you lived in the 17th and knew 1,500 humans, you could have dominated that election. With so few people deciding these contests, that I feel like our legislative body is gonna get real strange over the next couple of decades.

Amazon announced that it will build a huge solar farm, the largest east of the Mississippi, out in Accomack County. The farm hopes to generate 170,000 jigawatts (or, if you’re boring, megawatt hours) of solar power, which is enough to travel back in time to 1955 (or, if you’re boring, power 15,000 U.S. homes for a year). Amazon already gets 25% of its power from renewable resources and hopes to increase that number to 40% by 2016.

“Money is not going to add anything of value to your life,” says a man who just won $3 million and probably paid off any outstanding debts he may have had.

Here is a picture of a baby orangutan at the Metro Richmond Zoo.

Sports!

• Kickers and the Charlotte Independence battled their way to a 1-1 draw.
• Squirrels notched another win against Portland, 5-1. Since losing 15 straight in April, the Squirrels have only lost eight games.
• Nats picked up a win against the Yankees last night, 5-4. They head off to face the Brewers tonight at 8:10 PM and don’t return home until Wednesday.

What to expect

• Food News for you to peruse
• 5 Thing to do for not a lot of bling
• High speed rail–it might not fail!
• This week’s live music, should you choose it

This morning’s longread

Who wrote this amazing, mysterious book satirizing tech startup culture?

A mysterious little book called Iterating Grace is floating around San Francisco right now. At least a dozen people have received the book in the mail–or in my case, by secret hand-delivery to my house. (Which is a little creepy.) … No one knows who wrote the story or created the book. No one knows what the person who did it all wants. Most people I know who’ve received the book, who are all either journalists or authors, think it is some sort of dark-arts marketing scheme. They think Microsoft or Google or some startup is behind this whole production, and that the commercial purpose of this thing will soon be revealed to us.

Make sure you download the PDF of the book and give it a read (it’s just 18 pages long)–maybe before you read through all the fascinating speculation.

This morning’s Instagram

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June 11, 2015 7:02 AM 2