Good Morning, RVA: Summer days, summer nights

You know where they don’t have Richmond’s classic summer weather? Or any weather at all? Pluto.

July 14, 2015; 7:01 AM • by Ross Catrow

Good morning, RVA! It’s 70 °F out there in the wide, wide world, and I bet y’all pretty much know the weather-related deal for today: Hot, humid, and a chance of thunderstorms later on. Today’s angry weather looks like it’ll show up later in the day than it did yesterday.

Water cooler

Richmond’s School Board did not vote to rename Thompson Middle to Allen Iverson Middle. They picked a super boring name, which I guess makes sense as the school formerly known as Thompson should only be around a couple more years while a new school is built.

Today, Michael Paul Williams has another great editorial in the RTD–this one’s about renaming Boulevard to Arthur Ashe Boulevard. What a great idea! It’s not like the thing has a name at the moment, which is weird if you think about it. We don’t have any roads named “Road” or “Street”. Plus, Boulevard connects the tennis courts in Byrd Park where Ashe played to the Arthur Ashe Center up by the Diamond before it changes into Hermitage. This makes a ton of sense, let’s get it done!

Did you know that Richmond played a crucial role in the history of the beer can? It totally did! History is fascinating!

The Sons of Confederate Veterans are hosting their 120-year reunion in Richmond this week. As you can imagine, people are not thrilled and there will be protests. Quotes like this from their members aren’t helping anything: “Northern propaganda has succeeded in convincing most people that the war is solely about slavery.” The tense of that sentence is disturbing.

Pluto update! Around 8:00 AM today, the New Horizons probe will be just 62,258 miles from Pluto–its closest approach. The pictures being sent back are totally rad and worth checking out, and, because the Internet service in deep space is super slow, it will take until November to transmit all of them to earth.

President Obama will talk about the agreement the US, Iran, and other folks have reach on Iran’s nuclear program. Here are the White House taking points, complete with infographics.

Sports!

Whoa! None of the teams I typically cover in this space have a game today. I don’t think that’s happened yet in the entire time I’ve been doing Good Morning, RVA.

What to expect

• Triple Crossing and their gluten-removed beer
• 1708 Gallery and their 10 x 10
• Richmonders and their parking
• Parents and their being bored

This morning’s longread

The Earthquake That Will Devastate Seattle

Well, this is terrifying.

When the next very big earthquake hits, the northwest edge of the continent, from California to Canada and the continental shelf to the Cascades, will drop by as much as six feet and rebound thirty to a hundred feet to the west–losing, within minutes, all the elevation and compression it has gained over centuries. Some of that shift will take place beneath the ocean, displacing a colossal quantity of seawater. The water will surge upward into a huge hill, then promptly collapse. One side will rush west, toward Japan. The other side will rush east, in a seven-hundred-mile liquid wall that will reach the Northwest coast, on average, fifteen minutes after the earthquake begins. By the time the shaking has ceased and the tsunami has receded, the region will be unrecognizable. Kenneth Murphy, who directs FEMA’s Region X, the division responsible for Oregon, Washington, Idaho, and Alaska, says, “Our operating assumption is that everything west of Interstate 5 will be toast.”

This morning’s Instagram

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July 14, 2015 7:01 AM 0