Month: November 2010

The struggling Virginia football team travels to Massachusetts to play BC on Saturday at Noon. Virginia’s leading rusher, and leading scorer Keith Payne is not playing because of a lower extremity injury.

Virginia is 0-3 on the road this season, and BC is 3-3 at home so far in 2010. Both back-up quarterbacks (Metheny, Rocco) should see plenty of action Saturday if Marc Verica struggles again with interceptions, or if Verica does not move the team down the field. This is the fifth game in the series, and the Hoos have never beaten BC.

BC’s coach Frank Spaziani was a long-time assistant on George Welsh’s staff, and UVA’s coach Mike London spent 4 seasons on the sideline for the Eagles.

The Eagles (5-5) will attempt to run shifty tailback Montrel Harris all day long. Harris’ 113 yards per contest lead the ACC, and Virginia’s run defense is dead last in the conference.

Virginia (4-6) has lost 11-straight games in November. Wow. Enough said.

The Hoos can win this game if they cut down on penalties, find someone at tailback to give them 100 yards, Verica does not throw any picks, and the defense shuts down Harris. But, I don’t think any of those things will actually happen. Prediction? Hoos 17 BC 37 

Virginia had a shot at an upset victory over Boston College, but Marc Verica’s hail mary was thrown just short of the end-zone as time expired.

BC’s Montrel Harris was one yard ahead of his season average as he finished with 1 TD and 114 yards on 24 carries.

Marc Verica threw for 284 yards on 31/49 passing with 1 critical interception in the loss. Keith Payne did not play because of a lower extremity injury. In Payne’s absence, tailback Perry Jones rushed for 67 yards on 12 carries with 1 TD. Virginia had no touchdown tosses on the afternoon.

Virginia’s kicker Robert Randolph missed a late 4th quarter field goal to bring the Hoos within one point. If Randolph had made the field goal, the last drive would have been winnable with a field goal instead of the chuck to the end-zone.

Tony Bennett’s Wahoos committed 18 turnovers, and late Thursday night lost to Stanford 81-61 in their first road game of the 2010-2011 season. Mustapha Farrakhan led Virginia with 14 points.

Virginia shot nearly 60% in the first-half, but struggled in the second-half shooting only 29.6%.

Stanford’s Jeremy Green led all scorers with 21 points.

Virginia heads to Maui to continue their road-trip as they play Washington on Monday, either Kentucky or Oklahoma on Tuesday, and a to be determined opponent Wednesday in the Maui Invitational. Virginia is now 2-1 on their young season.
 

If you’re interested in checking out the most famous thing to come out of Central Virginia since…well, maybe ever, the Dave Matthews Band starts its two-night run at JPJ this evening. There’s plenty of fanfare surrounding those events, including a pre-show at the Jefferson with frequent Dave collaborator Tim Reynolds and his band TR3; after Saturday night’s show comes a’tootin’ a group called Trombone Shorty & Orleans Avenue. Get your Dave fix to last you through 2011, cause he ain’t playin’ until 2012.

At Live Arts tonight comes TechnoSonics XI: Mediated Nature, a free show from the Virginia Center for Computer Music that explores the intersection of nature and technology using musical composition. TechnoSonics is always a good way to keep tabs on what’s happening with UVA’s graduate students in musical composition. So expect lots of treats tonight: Auto-Tuned whales, a Shofar looped with a string quarter and, of course, musical robots. Read this week’s Feedback column about TechnoSonics here.

Or if you’d prefer some to hear musicians on the upswing, the

Red Satellites

release a new EP tonight at the Twisted Branch Tea Bazaar called

TheTriangle.TheTree

, which I write about in next week’s Feedback column. Check out the band tonight, and form your own conclusion about the band’s tight, exciting new material.

What else is up this weekend?

Despite chugging far beyond everyone’s expectations, Charlottesville’s daily Amtrak passenger train service may not survive past 2011. The train, which began service on October 1 of last year, travels from Lynchburg to Charlottesville and then onto DC. According to the Daily Progress, the train is more than doubling officials’ expectations and brought in almost $6.4 million in the past year.

In a press release,  the Department of Rail and Public Transportation (DRPT) said, “Virginia has no dedicated source of state rail operating funds today. Governor McDonnell and the General Assembly authorized up to $6 million in Rail Enhancement funds to support operating costs in FY 2011, but there is not sufficient funding identified beyond FY 2011.”

In essence, the state does not even have the funding for the train in 2011, which is why it pulled $6 million from the Rail Enhancement fund. That was the first signal of danger for Meredith Richards, founder of Cville Rail.

The state allocated $10.6 million over three years for this train. However, allocation does not equal appropriation, and the state needs more funding to keep the train going. (The train costs about $5.48 million each year for its four daily trips from Lynchburg to DC and back.) The state and Amtrak are currently in negotiations over how much the state will fund in 2011, says Richards.

While it is currently unclear how severe this threat is, Richards and DRPT are striving to ensure the train stays operational. Richards says it would be “counter-intuitive, irrational for the state not to continue this train.” 

Senate Resolution 63, sponsored by Senator Yvonne Miller, has DRPT researching how other states fund their trains and report back to the General Assembly. Richards also expects DRPT to propose the establishment of a rail operating fund at the next General Assembly session, which may be another solution. Whatever the solution, Richards says, we need a “sustained, dedicated source of operating funds” to keep the train rolling.

Yesterday I got an unusual opportunity when Devin Floyd, with the Blue Ridge Discovery Center, led me on a small hike to a very large tree.

We started out in Kemper Park and walked a very short distance up the Secluded Farm trail, noticing some of the marked trees along the way. One of these is a small Black Haw Viburnum (viburnum prunifolium), a tree I’d never given any thought to before. My own ability to i.d. trees is pretty limited–I can show you tulip poplars, cedars and "some kind of oak"–but Devin is a pro at this.

So it’s not surprising that he and some of his companions were the ones to spot an unusually large Black Haw, a few weeks ago, a bit further down this trail. It’s hidden in plain sight, looking like an old apple tree. Devin describes how the find occurred in his blog post here (and do follow the subsequent posts as folks chimed in to help him identify the tree).

The big Black Haw, with Devin and daughter Eva for scale.

He’s waiting to have the Black Haw i.d. officially confirmed, and has submitted the tree’s measurements to several organizations to see if it may set a state or even national record for its species! What’s interesting to me is that, as trees go in general, this is not a giant. (Its height is about 33 feet, and circumference 76 inches.) But for its kind, it’s enormous. It’s tough to say how old it is, but Devin speculates that rich soil in this spot may have helped this tree achieve its size.

Wouldn’t it be cool if we could claim a national champion tree right here in Charlottesville? Keep an eye on the BRDC blog, and this blog too, to see how it turns out. The Black Haw makes tiny edible fruit, and I think it would be really fun to make some National Champion Black Haw jam next fall.

Charlottesville writer Kathryn Erskine won the National Book Award last night for her young adult novel, Mockingbird. The story follows a young woman afflicted with Asperger’s who struggles to move forward after losing her brother in a school shooting.

Erskine, a lawyer-turned-writer, said in a recent interview with Publisher’s Weekly that the book was inspired both by her daughter’s struggle with Asperger’s, and her own search for answers after the Virginia Tech shootings. "My thoughts went to what it must be like to be related to one of the victims and to how a kid like mine who sees the world so differently," she said in the interview, "who doesn’t feel heard or understood, how frustrated she gets and how frustrated other people get with her because they don’t understand how her mind works."

The "Oscars of the literary world" took place last night in New York, at a ceremony for 600. The award carries a $1,000 cash prize for being nominated, and $10,000 for winning. Other winners included Patti Smith for her memoir Just Kids (which we reviewed) poet Terrance Hayes for Lighthead, and Jaimy Gordon for Lord of Misrule. Read all about it here.

Erskine’s next book, The Absolute Value of Mike, comes out next summer.

Now where are we gonna slap that gold label?

UVA astronomers, with the help of NASA’s Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE), have confirmed the discovery of a new star. According to UVA Today, this star is a cool brown dwarf star. These stars are characterized by a mass so small they are unable to burn hydrogen into helium, which leads them to burn out over time.

Last December WISE was launched into space on a 12-year, $320 million mission. The explorer uses infrared light to photograph images of space, which are color-coded by wavelength. Brown dwarf stars have a green tint, due to the methane in their atmosphere.

"Until now, the coolest brown dwarfs ever found have a temperature of about 450 degrees Fahrenheit, about the temperature of a hot oven; but WISE is hot on the trail of even cooler ones, ‘room temperature’ brown dwarfs," UVA Astronomer Mike Skrutskie told UVA Today.

For this study, UVA astronomers used the infrared camera system at the University’s Fan Mountain Observatory and the Large Binocular Telescope in Mount Graham, AZ, of which UVA owns a share. This is the first confirmed brown dwarf star to be spotted using WISE. The WISE team already has more brown dwarf candidates and expects to find and confirm many more.

The Charlottesville Regional Chamber of Commerce reports that area retail sales are slightly up for the first three quarters of this year compared to the same time last year.

Albemarle County saw a 3.4 percent increase, much improved from the 9 percent decrease registered last year, compared to the same period in 2008.

In Charlottesville, however, retail sales to date are down 1.86 percent compared to 2009. As in the county, last year’s numbers compared to 2008 were down 7.29 percent.

But there is some positive news. In September, county retail sales showed a 4.02 increase compared to last year.

More importantly, the city and the county combined accounted for $1.5 billion in total retail sales, an increase of $16.8 million over the same period last year.
Augusta County sales were up by 8.7 percent and Louisa saw the biggest jump at $31.4 percent. Sales-year-to-date fell in Greene County by 0.48 percent and in the City of Waynesboro by 7.52 percent.

In the fat times, a short five years ago, Patricia Kluge and Bill Moses pleged $1.2 million to PVCC to build a science building that would support, among other courses of study, the community college’s enology and viticulture programs. But now that Farm Credit of the Virginias has foreclosed on Kluge Estate Winery and Vineyard, is the donation jeopardized?

Mary Jane King,  the school’s director of institutional advancement and development, says no. A 10-year pledge, the gift is half paid already. And King says that in early November, after the bank shut down Kluge Estate Winery’s operations, "we were contacted by the donor and assured of their commitment to pay the gift in full. And that’s where we are," she says.

The Kluge-Moses Science Building opened this year. "Students love it, faculty love it. The science labs are excellent," King says.

By the terms of the pledge, Kluge and Moses have five more years to pay the remaining $600,000.