Best? Worst!
I enjoyed your “Best of Charlottesville” issue [August 5] very much, but to my dismay there was one superlative listed that was in extremely poor taste. You said, “Best Unsolved Mystery: The Serial Rapist.” Unless I am mistaken, “best” is an adjective that means something is the most excellent, most favorable or surpassing the rest. I hardly think that a man going into local women’s homes and beating and raping them is excellent or favorable.
Shannon Morris
Charlottesville
Astro turf war
I read with disgust Rob Brezsny’s recent horoscope section [Free Will Astrology, August 5]. Not only does he throw around the words “prophecy, divine, god,” and “guru,” he also lies. He quotes someone, structuring the sentence to mean it is a fact that the most sacred Islamic site on earth looks like a vagina. The Ka’ba, the first house that Abraham built for God, is described as “a large cube in a mosque.” Then he asserts that Islam is a “male-dominated religion that has suppressed the feminine aspect of the divine.” It is funny that more than 600 million women in the world don’t have this view, but they must be waiting for Operation-Rob-Brezsny’s-Liberation-of-Muslim-Women.
This reminds me of a recent TV show, where two people were supposedly presenting the two sides of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. The two sides came to the same conclusion favoring Israel. A caller then asked about the religion of the person supposedly presenting the Palestinian side. The rest is history.
We know Brezsny’s motives, the $1.99 (or perhaps pieces of silver) per minute phone calls. But I consider C-VILLE 100 percent responsible for this camouflaged bigot spreading trash. My ancestors, who invented the science of astrology more than 7,000 years ago, must be shaking in their graves with disgust. This is the horoscope section, not the religious total-misinformation-system-of-the-fifth-column section.
Nader
Charlottesville
Punching bag
I just wanted to write and say how disgusted I am that your publication gave free publicity to the local gym ACAC [“Gonna make you sweat,” July 29]. For the past six years of my life I have been enrolled at a total of four gyms. The gyms to which I have belonged have been top-quality businesses with exceptional equipment. By utilizing such resources I have kept myself in top physical condition. In November I moved back to Charlottesville and all that has changed.
My second day in town I went to ACAC to check on membership costs. I was told it would be more than $150 to join and $75 a month thereafter. Not only that, but there was a required 12-month agreement you had to sign. No month-to-month memberships and more than $1,000 for the first year? I was shocked. This was 50 percent more than I have ever paid at any gym in my life. ACAC may have brought “accessible fitness” to Charlottesville, but who will bring affordable fitness to Charlottesville?
To those who want to get in shape I recommend buying a pair of running shoes and some dumbbells. Take the $900+ you saved and invest it. In a few years you can buy a gym of your own and start gouging the rest of Charlottesville that does not already belong to ACAC.
Will Retzer
Charlottesville
Game on
Regarding “Serve yourself” [Ask Ace, August 12], there’s a wall at the PVCC courts to practice tennis. I see people there a lot using it.
Frank Wilmot
Charlottesville
Dean’s deal
While I admire Ted Rall’s audacity (the left needs a loud-mouth counterbalance to the Rush Limbaughs of the airwaves), occasionally his rants fall over the polemic edge.
In his last column [“Rall’s rule of ideological balance,” AfterThought, August 12], Rall paints presidential hopeful Vermont Gov. Howard Dean as a liberal extremist. Anyone who has read Dean’s press releases and investigated his record know this is simply not so.
The liberal journal American Prospect, who one would think would embrace such a “radical,” calls Dean “a centrist who is fiscally conservative and socially liberal”—a characterization that suits the mainstream well, but continues to rankle liberals on the far left.
Sure, he’s pro-choice, and an advocate of environmentalism. But Dean also supports capital punishment. He has an “A” rating from the NRA, opposes medical marijuana and drives an SUV (despite his impressive environmental record). He favors a strong military, although he does tie national security to energy independence. His support for now-flagging international treaties is largely provisional. His outspoken criticism of the Iraq war—radical to some, but arguably a mainstream opinion—has focused primarily on how the war was fought, not on its rationale.
Indeed, he’s left of Lieberman. Who isn’t? But he’s far right of the only true progressive with a snowball’s chance in the race: Representative Dennis Kucinich. If Rall’s “rule of ideological counterbalance” is valid, then how better to offset Bush’s far-right neo-con agenda than with a single-payer health plan ensuring universal health coverage, a living wage, a promise to sign all those treaties, a drastic reduction of the Pentagon budget, full funding of education pre-K through college, maintaining affirmative action, ending capital punishment, ditching the WTO and NAFTA, ending the war on drugs, and (heads up, City Council) tearing up the USA PATRIOT Act. Now, that’s radical.
Brian Wimer
Charlottesville