Month: June 2010

UVA fights back against Cuccinelli over global warming subpoena

In the ongoing Ken Cuccinelli versus UVA saga, the university has thrown the latest punch.

According to The Daily Progress, UVA lawyers argue that subpoenas by the Attorney General for information about research grants received by former UVA climate scientist Michael Mann are "unlawful" and a burden to tax payers.

The article states that, in a court filing, UVA’s lawyers presented arguments for putting aside Cuccinelli’s suit. One of the arguments says that "compliance would require the university to expend substantial effort at the Commonwealth’s expense to identify, collect, review and produce all the information requested."

In an earlier jab, Cuccinelli argued in a legal filing that his demand should be granted because it does not affect academic freedom (as UVA argued), and the First Amendment is not a shield against fraud investigations.
 

Escaped chicken spends night in tree

Lately, my husband has enjoyed letting our chickens out of their fenced-in area for freedom-loving sessions in the yard. He keeps an eye on them so they don’t destroy the garden, and they very happily strut around finding all kinds of bugs and other goodies. Usually, he lets them range not too long before the end of the day, so that the hens will be inclined to return to their coop without a lot of coaxing.

Note the one on the left: contemplating escape!

It’s certainly very cute, but the new diversion may have created a monster. This morning, we woke up to what seemed like unusually loud clucking. It turned out that one of our hens was right outside our bedroom window. Whereas we usually hear them a little distance away, clucking to be let out of their coop, this girl was mere feet from our heads, agitating to get back in.

It seems that she’d spent the night outside. Because we got home after dark, we didn’t realize that she wasn’t on the roost with the other birds (though my husband says he’d gotten a funny feeling that someone was missing when he closed up the coop). We figure she must have flown over the electric fence sometime during the day, roosted in the trees for the night, and then gotten alarmed when her little chicken brain couldn’t figure out how to fly back over the fence.

As my husband said, it’s fine for the chickens to leave their fence if they observe two simple rules: Don’t eat the garden, and don’t get eaten. Neither of these is a real good bet. We’re hoping our idyllic little chicken setup isn’t entering a breakdown mode.

Virginia Football adds University of Texas at San Antonio to schedule for 2013 and 2014

UVA has inked a deal to play a home and away series with the University of Texas at San Antonio beginning in 2013 in Charlottesville.

Virginia will return the game November 8, 2014 at the Alamodome in San Antonio.

Former Miami Hurricane’s coach Larry Coker is the coach at UTSA.

The Roadrunners have applied to become full members of the Football Subdivision (FBS) starting in 2014. They signed their very first recruiting class this season, and they will red-shirt all their players from the first class.

UTSA also has announced home-and-home series with: Louisiana Tech, Colorado State, Houston, Kansas State, Arizona, Arizona State and Baylor. Go Hoos beat the Hokies!

Albemarle Police Chief announces retirement

Albemarle County Police Chief John Miller announced his retirement after 21 years on the job. Miller’s retirement will be effective September 30.

According to a county news release, the search for Miller replacement “will get underway immediately.” The County force numbers 123 sworn officers.

Among Miller’s accomplishments throughout the years is the accreditation of the county’s department by the Virginia Law Enforcement Professional Standards Commission (VLEPSC) in 2000 – making Albemarle only the 24th locality to receive it. Miller also created the Police Foundation, a nonprofit organization that supports crime prevention efforts.

“We appreciate the outstanding leadership and dedication that Chief Miller has provided to the police department during his tenure,” said County Executive Bob Tucker in the release. “Under his guidance our police professionals have ensured a safe and secure community and have focused significant effort on important issues such as traffic enforcement, internet crimes against children, and drug enforcement with measurable success.”
 

Albemarle may generate additional $200,000 in court fees

When it comes to collecting delinquent court fees, Albemarle County Commonwealth Attorney Denise Lunsford recently found it might be more rewarding to do it yourself.

"As far as I know, the Office of the Albemarle Commonwealth Attorney has always elected to have collections enforced by the Department of Taxation, which resulted in all of the funds collected going to the state," she said in a recent press release.

Not anymore. Where the state formerly enforced court fee collections, Albemarle County will take over as of July 1—a move that will generate an estimated $200,000 for the county, and offset cuts to the county office of the Commonwealth Attorney.

In the adopted budget for Fiscal Year 2010-2011, state funding of the office dropped to $412,841—a decrease of more than $77,000, or 15.7 percent, from the previous year’s adopted budget. The county will also reap the benefits of a 35 percent "collection fee" that the local Commonwealth Attorney’s office may find a different pocket for in future fiscal years.

 

Categories
Arts

Please Give; R, 90 minutes; Vinegar Hill Theatre

Writer-director Nicole Holofcener seems to get better with every film, and now she’s cruising along the well-trodden path of neurotic New Yorker comedy-drama with grace and comely confidence. 

Catherine Keener and a cast of excellent women star in Nicole Holofcener’s newest low-key emotional rollercoaster, where a family awaits the death of an elderly woman whose apartment they want to expand into.

It should be pointed out that Holofcener’s previous, more strenuous efforts, Friends with Money and Lovely & Amazing, were set very specifically in Los Angeles. It should also be pointed out that Please Give’s view of New York is not the most inviting. But in a way that’s also the beauty of it—the understanding that self-absorption knows no geographical boundaries, and so unites us all. 

At the center of this nonchalant morality tale is an urban family waiting anxiously for the tenant next door, an old woman, to die so that they can expand into her apartment. Catherine Keener and Oliver Platt play the proprietors of a furniture shop whose wares—also typically acquired from families of the recently deceased—vary widely in value, because value itself is relative. 

To get at that apartment next door, the couple first must feign some kind of neighborliness with the unambiguously dour old lady (Ann Guilbert) who lives there—which means making the acquaintance of her two adult granddaughters (Amanda Peet and Rebecca Hall), whom the old woman brought up after their mother committed suicide. The two sisters differ significantly in disposition, but they each have a special stake in what develops, as does Keener and Platt’s daughter (Sarah Steele), who meanwhile has been enduring an especially awkward adolescent moment.

Unfurling as a series of loose vignettes, the film might seem too breezy under anyone else’s command, but Holofcener battens the proceedings with perceptive specificity. Here, plot matters less than empathy for blessed yet restless lives and compassionate wisdom about how even the best intentions can get messy. It’s a small miracle—of casting, of actorly intuition and directorial discretion—that these figures become more endearing even as they become less likable. As their lives get more entangled, we see their gestures of generosity beget humiliation, their pangs of conscience succumb to selfishness. We see our loved ones and ourselves. (Having once meanly quipped that the way to remember Holofcener’s name is to think, “hollow center,” I now acknowledge that the joke—that all-too-familiar ache of emptiness in the middle—is on me.)

Holofcener has a knack for the sort of life slice that can stay with you for days only then to abruptly vanish into the slipstream of emotional memory. The net effect leaves you wondering if what you’ve seen was insubstantial or utterly essential. But in retrospect that seems like exactly the right way to make a film whose business is to ask just what it now means to give of oneself, and to take. 

Categories
News

Waterhouse moves from "tower" to "village"

By his own estimation, architect Bill Atwood is the sort of guy who puts too many ornaments on the Christmas tree. During a recent meeting of the city’s Board of Architectural review—in which he presented a new, significantly reconfigured design of his five-year-old Waterhouse project—the board confirmed as much.

The new design of Waterhouse, which maintains developer Bill Atwood’s goal of mixed use within a more horizontal structure, stands three stories shorter than his last design. Atwood says he has recruited a company for the proposed Downtown structure.

“The whole thing needs to be simplified, really massively,” said board member and UVA preservation planner Brian Hogg. Fellow BAR member Eryn Brennan, president of Preservation Piedmont, agreed.

“I’ll just say briefly: Corbusian cruise ship meets ziggurat Frank Lloyd Wright,” said Brennan.

But if Brennan, Hogg and a few other members took issue with a few ornaments, Atwood’s tree at 218 W. Water Street won a few words of praise. South Street homeowner Brent Nelson told Atwood that his design—lowered to a six-story “village” from a nine-story tower, and extended horizontally towards South Street—was Atwood’s “best design yet.”

“What this change allows is for a building that more successfully allows for needs on Water Street, but also creates a presence on South Street more appropriate for the houses that lie across the street,” said Nelson. BAR chair Fred Wolf told Atwood to refine his drawings, and then “let this thing be read as a village—a really nice term, the way you described it.” 

Atwood’s Waterhouse village maintains a mixed-use approach, with two stories of office space situated between a lower story devoted to parking and capped by residential units. “If you can recruit a company to be on two floors, and they’re currently on four, and you have an atrium,” said Atwood during an interview, “you can see your company. There’s a one-ness.” Companies, according to Atwood, don’t want towers.

And a company is Atwood’s great hope for seeing his project realized. He told the BAR and C-VILLE that he had recruited a business to come Downtown, and would give its name at a later date. According to Atwood, the business is “a national company that wants a brand.”

At this point, Atwood says he has abandoned the idea of a tower—a significant change from four years ago, when Waterhouse was one of a few nine-story projects vying for the sky in Charlottesville. When the city rezoned Downtown in 2008 to create three separate corridors—Downtown, South Street and Water Street—site plans for both Waterhouse and the Landmark Hotel had been approved. 

And while Atwood calls the Landmark “one of the most devastating things to happen to this town,” he concedes that Waterhouse might have followed the same path, had it not lost a loan when Lehman Brothers filed the largest bankruptcy claim in U.S. history. “We were headed right down that road to building a tall building,” Atwood told C-VILLE. For now, and as long as he stays at the drawing board, Atwood has another shot at the one thing the Landmark does not—a first impression. 

C-VILLE welcomes news tips from readers. Send them to news@c-ville.com.

Categories
Arts

“Top Chef: DC,” “Macy’s Fourth of July Fireworks Spectacular,” “No One Dies in Lily Dale”

“Top Chef: D.C.” 

Wednesday 9pm, Bravo

The new season of Bravo’s popular cooking competition snuck up on me. But now that we’re a couple episodes in, two things are clear. First, there’s a lot of talent in this crop of chefs. Second, the show has the exact same problem it had last time around, specifically that it’s blatantly obvious who the finalists will be from the get-go. We all knew who the Final Four would be in the “Las Vegas” installment by the third episode, and it was pretty boring watching the others get picked off one by one. This time it almost has to come down to insufferable culinary prodigy Angelo and his intense foil, the equally talented Kenny. But I’m personally rooting for plucky former IHOP chef Tiffany.

 

“Macy’s Fourth of July Fireworks Spectacular”

Sunday 9pm, NBC

In this age of massive economic shortfalls and slashed municipal budgets, why can’t we, as a nation, forego July 4 fireworks displays? I understand that they’re patriotic, that they’re pretty, and that they practically define Independence Day, but they cost tens of thousands of dollars apiece—at least —and for what? To blow up some gunpowder for 10 minutes? How is that a good use of money? Obviously, it’s too late this year, but going forward I’d recommend that we all agree to save the cash our towns and cities would regularly spend on fireworks and instead give it to the schools, where it’s really needed. If you need your fireworks fix, you can tune in to the annual New York City display, broadcast by NBC. It’s not like you’re getting to see the explosions up close anyway.

 

“No One Dies in Lily Dale” 

Monday 9pm, HBO

Since I’m originally from upstate New York, I know all about Lily Dale, a small community south of Buffalo. For those not in the know, Lily Dale is unique in that it is home to a collection of psychic mediums who welcome strangers seeking to communicate with their dead loved ones. It’s not a joke; more than 25,000 people come to Lily Dale every year searching for answers. This new documentary offers a portrait of both the grieving pilgrims seeking solace in the town, and the psychics themselves, some of whom are just as conflicted about their abilities as the skeptics who pay them a visit.

Categories
The Editor's Desk

Readers respond to previous issues

 Whole endorsement

 

Gawd—trashy Kmart should be happy to get upscale Whole Foods within feet of them [“City to join Whole Foods suit?,” Development News, June 15]. Did they think it might possibly bring them more business? With Super Walmart coming in, they should count this as a blessing!

Kimberly Farish

Charlottesville

Coal ain’t cool

 

I agree that President Obama’s decision to cancel offshore drilling leases along Virginia’s coasts was a wise decision [“Virginia’s environmentalists push for wind energy,” Government News, June 8]. Given the tragedy that is unfolding in the Gulf, I am at a loss as to how Governor Bob McDonnell can continue to support drilling off Virginia’s coasts.

Although oil exploration along Virginia’s shores has been canceled, the Hampton Roads area faces another threat from a different dirty energy source: coal. Old Dominion Electric Cooperative is proposing to build what would be the largest coal plant in Virginia only 35 miles from the Bay in the small Hampton Roads town of Dendron. The pollution created by this power plant would be devastating and would harm everyone who lives in and around the area. Governor McDonnell must look out for Virginia’s best interest by giving more thought to cleaner and reusable energy sources for our generation and the ones to come.

Ben Calhoun

Virginia Beach, Virginia

 

 

Categories
Living

If TJ did it, why can't we?

When Justin Sarafin talks about being in charge of “dependencies,” he’s not referring to the unfortunate habits of social misfits. Monticello’s assistant curator is talking about the work and storage spaces beneath the great house—many of which have been refurbished and opened to the public for the first time in the past month. Among these, wine enthusiasts, is Thomas Jefferson’s wine cellar, about which we can joke with Sarafin that the other meaning of “dependency” might equally apply. Go ahead and chuckle; Sarafin seems, at the culmination of a restoration project that has taken nine years of his professional life, like a guy who can take a joke. 

The dumbwaiter in TJ’s wine cellar, now plain to see thanks to comprehensive restoration, could transport as many as four bottles—often the finest Bordeaux—to the dining room.

The cellar itself, which used to be visible only from behind a cell-like iron grate, is now accessible, the better to appreciate the four-bottle, wooden dumbwaiter system that eased the passage of Jefferson’s revered French (red) and German (white) wines from the cellar to the dining room above.

Sarafin, who trained in art history and architectural history at UVA, had his interpretive work cut out for him when it came to how Jefferson binned his bottles, which at their peak numbered 980 (at his death in 1826, Virginia’s leading wine lover had 586 bottles stored). Architectural and archaeological evidence—they dug a 5’x5′ area in the cellar in the research phase—did not point to a permanent, built-in binning system. But the prescriptive literature of the 19th century called for bottles to be stored on their sides, so Sarafin believes Jefferson would have taken that approach, too. Moreover, the cellar was not intended for aging wine, because, as Sarafin says, “at the provisioning stage, Jefferson gets the wine at the right age.” In other words, he bought stuff that had already been aged sufficiently to drink—the procurement of which about more below. “There had to be a more improvised ‘plantation solution,’” Sarafin says. “Given the small space in that room, we decided it had to be a vertical type of binning solution.” Hence, the tall, wooden racks now on display. Those racks, by the way, feature both the square-shouldered glass bottles that would have contained Madeira and other fortified wines (more to the English taste) and the sloping bottles of the French wine for which Jefferson developed a connoisseur’s appreciation—the blends of the great Bordeaux houses like Chateau Margaux, Chateau Latour, Chateau Lafite and Chateau Haut-Brion.

So much is already known about Jefferson’s love of wine and his heartbreak at being unable to grow decent wine at home. There is little new to report on that score, but there is one point about Jefferson’s buying habits that takes on renewed relevance in light of a present-day political debate about consumers’ rights. Jefferson’s correspondence shows his penchant for buying wine directly from the winery at hand. “Jefferson’s thinking behind having it bottled there is that it ensures the first quality of the wine,” says Sarafin. “He had tasted lighter French and German wines on site. He wants them, and he wants them not compromised.” Currently wending its way through Congress, H.R. 5034 would severely restrict consumers’ ability to do exactly what our wine-loving Founding Father did, namely, to order wine directly from a winery and have it shipped to our homes. There’s a rebuttal that’s worth a call to your Virginia Congressmen who support the bill. We’re looking at you, Glenn Nye and Gerry Connolly.

We’ll leave this discussion with one more sip of wine wisdom from the third president, this time on the subject of pricing: “No nation is drunken where wine is cheap,” he wrote in 1818. In other words, do the country a favor and splurge a little on the good stuff. Order it directly from the winery. And tell them Tom sent you.