Poor, poor, pitiful them
I was deeply offended by a headline in your July12 issue of C-VILLE regarding the County’s new law that prohibits collecting money on public roads [7 Days]. The headline read “County drivers forced to look at poor people no more.” I was shocked and appalled at the callous and derogatory manner in which this topic was addressed.
Firstly, the term “poor people” is wholly inappropriate for use by educated professionals. Secondly, the headline treated our county’s disadvantaged population as a spectacle that interrupts the middle-class comfort to which we are accustomed in Charlottesville. By referring to them as “panhandlers” and by treating them as eyesores, you succeeded in objectifying and dehumanizing the disadvantaged, who ought to be treated with the same respect and dignity as any other member of our community.
I hope that this gaffe was simply the result of poor editing and does not reflect the views of the staff and writers at
C-VILLE Weekly.
Mary Caler
Charlottesville
Thrown for a curve
What’s the real story on Zara Mee’s softball pitching speed record for a woman? It’s not 111 miles per hour, as your July 5 article claimed [“How to…throw like a girl”]. It was in Australia. Could the wire service have meant 111 kilometers per hour? That’s 69 mph, a believable softball speed. Heck, Nolan Ryan’s fastball was clocked by the Guinness Book of World Records at only 100.9 mph, a record that’s still in the book. No underhanded softball pitch thrown by woman or man is ever likely to beat that.
Rey Barry
Charlottesville
Editor’s note: Barry is right, Mee’s softball speed was incorrectly reported; it is 111 kph, not 111 mph. For you metric nuts, Nolan’s pitch clocks in at 161.4 kph, by comparison.