Month: July 2010

For a few weeks my husband and I cared for a group of rescued bats. We were bat sitting for a woman who rescued and rehabbed bats. She delivered the little guys in a mini camping tent. If you’ve ever been to a large sports store or Sam’s Club you may be familiar with the mini-camping tent displays. Apparently, when not used to entice you to buy a collapsible outback palace, these mini-tents function as bat rehabs. While we had the bats under our watchful care, we fed them mealworms from our gloved hands and made sure they had fresh, clean water. I don’t know if it was their broken wings, missing ears, or “special” toes but those little stinkers were cute!

Little Brown bat

I’ve always been interested in bats: their deadly guano, their sonar, their ability to eat copious amounts of insects- specifically mosquitoes. They pollinate night blooming plants and congregate en masse under a bridge in Austin, Texas educating and entrancing crowds of onlookers! I’ve read how beneficial they are to farmers keeping thousands of pounds of pesticides off of our fruits and veggies. So, to do our part we have decided to install a bat house.

I happened upon a sweet cedar bat abode at Circa on Allied Street (Full disclosure: I work at Circa a few days a week). So, for $9 (less with my employee discount, rock!) I had an awesome gift for my hubby and the bats. Aaron braved the salvaged extension ladder and mounted the new house onto the sunny side of our backyard studio.

Bat house installed on Southern exposure of backyard studio (it’s the black box)

As I wait for the bats to arrive I can already feel the tiny breezes as they swoop by to gobble up those beyond-irritating mosquitoes. And if any turn up injured I know a quality mini-tent rehab just down the road.

A perfect time for bats!

Any success with bat houses? Or tips on being hospitable to our bat visitors?

It seems that former Darden professor John Douglas Forbes isn’t the only centenarian to hail from UVA. The New York Times’ City Room blog checks in today with George C. Seward, a 1936 graduate of the UVA Law School who still practices at Manhattan law firm Seward & Kissel. Seward, who also got his B.A. from UVA, formerly served as president of the school’s Arts & Sciences Council.

Like Forbes, Seward seems quite the raconteur. Read about his defense of a UVA janitor here.

• C-VILLE recently gave some love to Charlottesville’s sister city of Besancon, France, when its residents collaborated with locals for a night of gospel music at the Paramount. So how could we not mention that we’ll be welcoming emissaries from our newest sissy city, Winneba, Ghana, at this weekend’s 21st Annual African-American Cultural Arts Festival at Washington Park? 

• Things wind down this weekend over at the Wintergreen Summer Music Festival, which delivered a month of impressive classical programming around the region, including at Les Yeux du Monde, which—if you don’t feel like making the trip out to Wintergreen—hosts a concert tonight. There’s no place like it on a nice night.

• Can you believe that Primus, the band that made and then disowned "Wynona’s Big Brown Beaver," still exists? Well, they do, and they’re playing the Charlottesville Pavilion this weekend with—how long has it been?—Gogol Bordello.

 

A live version of Primus’ "My Name is Mud."

• The Heritage Theatre Festival continues its excellent summer of performances for the stage with The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee. Was the Tony-winning musical written as a fictionalization of this scary documentary, released two years earlier? You be the judge.

Would you believe this blogger if told you he went to middle school with the fella who opens this trailer?

• And finally, on a more personal note, this is a big weekend for this blogger: He’s making the rash decision to move in with his girlfriend. It’s August, and lots of people and making the switch to new digs, some to share quarter with a loved one. To celebrate, here’s a song about domestic bliss:

"Watchin’ My Baby Get Ready," by Greg Oblivian and the Tip-Tops.

About four years ago, before building a cute, understated slant roof dream coop (from salvaged wood, of course) our growing chickens lived inside our home. 

 

The backyard coop under construction

We constructed a chick/pullet village out of cardboard boxes and duct tape. The centerpiece of this village was “The Poulet Rouge,” complete with can-can chickens dancing on the facade. Then those six birds got big, and loud, and dirty.

The "girls" during smaller, quieter times

Our ladies handled the switch to the out of doors well and seemed to enjoy their more permanent domain. But then we had a situation.

Sally, one of our three lovely Rhode Island Reds started acting a little less than lady-like. First “she” started crowing, voice cracking and breaking like a young teenager and then she started assaulting the other hens: jumping on backs, pecking necks and whatnot. So, it was in this unrefined and alarming fashion that we discovered that one of our ‘sexed’ chickens had beaten the system: Sally was really Sal.

Now I’m all for progressive sexuality and reformed feminism and such, but Sal was just too stinkin’ loud. We do live in the city, after all. I tried throwing him onto the pile, so to speak, over on Freecycle but no takers. I asked around in some farmer-type circles but no luck. Poor Sal. We wanted to raise this bird to eat the eggs not eat it!

After a trip to the local library, we landed on one chapter titled “Harvesting Your Meat Garden”. With a quiet blessing and a swift offing we did just that. At one point our neighbor discovered us madly pulling out Sal’s feathers over the compost bin and shrieked, “Did you kill your CHICKEN?!” Well, yes, we did. And then we had a party, ate chicken for the first time in years and we loved every bite.

But we still miss Sal sometimes.

Biggie Shorty, our Plymouth Barred Rock hen 

Have you ever harvested your “meat garden”? Or does the thought make you sad and a little nauseated?

 

Youth-Nex, the UVA Center to Promote Effective Youth Development, hopes to become nationally known for suppressing psychological and social disorders in adolescents, according to a press release from UVA Today.

The center was created with a $4 million commitment from cigarette manufacturer Philip Morris USA. Philip Morris’ parent company, Altria, previously donated $25 million to UVA’s capital campaign in 2007, and also gave to the UVA school of law and Darden School of Business in the past. UVA President John Casteen joined the company’s board of directors in February.

According to the press release, the center plans to focus on preventing a wide range of behaviors including bullying, obesity and even smoking—despite the business of its donor. Professor Patrick Tolan from the Curry School of Education’s Department of Human Services leads Youth-Nex with 10 years as director of the Institute for Juvenile Research at the University of Illinois in Chicago, as well as two years as chair of the American Psychological Association’s Working Group on Children’s Mental Health. His studies include healthy development and risk prevention. A phone call made to Tolan regarding the nature of the center was not immediately returned.

Some early buzz at the Virginia Film Fest, which in a month has received more submissions (130 films, since they’re now accepting short ones) than it did during last year’s submission period altogether, says associate programmer Wesley Harris. They’ll be accepting submissions—free, by the way, for Virginia residents—through September 8.

Also on deck: the fest will unveil a new logo next month that won’t change each year, since, you’ll recall, they’ve done away with the theme. More precious deetz as we approach the November 4-7 dates. Check back here for more after the August 16 announcement at the Paramount, to precede a screening of This is Spinal Tap.

 Will the logo be designed to the right proportions? More below.

Another brief note: Dylan Mulshine (of Rhythm Bandit and the Richmond- and Charlottesville-based music blog Witchmond) is attempting to throw a local music festival on September 18-19 at the Southern. No word on who’s been confirmed to play yet, but check out this page for details.

In addition to the Charlottesville Circuit Court, a business partner and a few clients of his accounting firm, Jim Baldi now has the Albemarle County Police Department looking for him. County police have a warrant for Baldi’s arrest, on a felony embezzling charge. Stay tuned to c-ville.com as the story develops.

Between May and June, the unemployment rate in Charlottesville increased more than 20 percent, from 6.6 percent of the city population to 8 percent. During the same time period, the statewide unemployment rate dropped faintly, from 7.1 percent to 7 percent. Albemarle County found its way to the top 10 list of areas with the lowest unemployment rates, with 5.8 percent of residents jobless.

According to local data from the Virginia Employment Commission, that 8 percent translates to 1,767 jobless in Charlottesville as of June. In the same month, the VEC counted 4,948 job openings posted online—roughly a 1:3 ratio of unemployed city residents to job openings. That ratio is one of the lowest in the state, with only Arlington and Rappahannock counties and Fredericksburg posting lower ratios.

The VEC’s site also notes that, as of July 28, 40 percent of city job openings advertised online require a bachelor’s degree, which only 25 percent of "available candidates" in Charlottesville have.

Bloomberg recently announced that the total number of first-time filings for unemployment insurance in the United States dropped by 11,000. However, the national jobless rate sticks around 9.5 percent.

When it comes to extending President Bush’s tax cuts on the rich or doing away with them, Fifth District Congressman Tom Perriello and fellow Democratic Congressman Gerald Connolly seem to be at odds.

According to a Washington Post article, Connolly, the representative for Virginia’s 11th Congressional District, favor a temporary extension of the cuts.

"I part ways, I think, with the dominant view of my caucus on this subject," says Connolly. "I do not favor a permanent extension of the Bush tax cuts. I do favor extending the current rate for some period of time until the economy is on a sustained and a robust track."

Perriello, on the other hand, wishes to see the cuts expire.

"I think there’s an argument for at least temporarily extending the working-class and middle-class tax cuts, for the same logic of the stimulus," he said. "I think at the higher end, the logic is not there, particularly given that we have a medium- and long-term very serious deficit concern. I think reasonable people can disagree on this." And they may; both representatives are up for re-election and will face tough competition in November.
 

Earlier this year my band and I were invited to play an early slot at Mountain Man Festival in the roughly Charlottesville-sized town of Saratoga Springs, New York. With a confirmed list of headliners like Islands, HEALTH and Real Estate, it sounded like a good deal: a fun weekend with free music, plus nice exposure for my band, about which nobody gives a hoot.

The organizers—two music fans who were about to graduate from Skidmore College—had a fundraising goal of $65,000, which would go toward covering the guarantee for these (relatively) high-profile headliners, all sorts of rentals and, of course, security. Needless to say, the task of raising such a large amount of money was met with Waynestock levels of skepticism around the blogosphere.

I was dismayed to learn, in the end, that the skeptics had won: Mountain Man Fest was a total, sarcastic "A-for-effort"-worthy failure that fell far short of its fundraising goal.

But it wasn’t until I came across the festival’s Kickstarter account that I saw that "failure" probably wasn’t the right word for what had happened: This pair of 20somethings had in fact raised nearly $7,500 for an event that would’ve probably been the most exciting day for Saratoga Springs since Funny Cide won the Kentucky Derby.

Maybe $65,000 was a little ambitious, but you can throw one hell of a concert for $7,500. It got me thinking about how locals have been using the website, which allows dreamers and project organizers to solicit donations over the Internet. (Nobody gets charged unless the project reaches its fundraising goal.) My searches suggest that the local arts community as a whole hasn’t yet taken to the tool. But a few more modest projects have.

In order of increasing strangeness:

• The Charlottesville Community Design Center has an ongoing campaign to raise $3,000 for its annual Design Marathon, during which it provides free design services to area nonprofits. Seven backers have so far pledged $775.

• Thirty-five backers donated $1,369 last year to fund Nourish(meant), a local arts education project for which two locals converted a schoolbus into a biofuel-powered garden and education center.

• Christian Breeden ran a successful $500 campaign to "Fuel the Dragon Wagon," a firebreathing machine for which would chop his grandmother’s Grand Marquis and weld a 20′ dance floor on top. (Check it out.)

What other tools can artists and arts organizations use to float projects?