When it comes to plans for New Year’s Eve, this week’s cover story has you, well, covered. You’ll find everything from local dining specials and cocktails made with champagne to cocktail dresses ready for a swanky night on the town. Or, if shuffling through crowds just ain’t your bag, we’ve got plenty of suggestions for what to watch on TV in the comfort of your own home. Click here to access it all.
Month: December 2010
After a year that tested both the physical virtuosity and emotional solidarity of the UVA lacrosse program, men’s coach Dom Starsia was named NCAA Men’s Coach of the Year by FieldTurf, a sports surface manufacturer. Starsia last received the award in 2008.
The award arrives one week after UVA released its lacrosse schedules for 2011. While the team posted a 16-2 overall record during the last season, its most challenging moment arguably occurred off the field, when fourth-year student-athlete George Huguely was arrested and charged with the murder of Yeardley Love, a fellow lacrosse player and Huguely’s ex-girlfriend. Huguely’s defense attorneys were recently denied access to Love’s UVA medical history, which they sought in connection to an Adderall prescription to support a competing cause of death.
Starsia was scrutinized following Huguely’s arrest and news of a prior altercation between Huguely and a teammate, after media questioned Starsia’s knowledge of the situation. However, UVA ultimately stated the players involved did not disclose "the underlying facts or gravity of what had actually occurred" to Starsia, and declined his assistance in resolving the matter. News of the reported assault surfaced on the day that Starsia’s 86-year-old father died.
Starsia is currently 11 wins short of the all-time NCAA Division I record. The 2011 season will be Starsia’s 19th with UVA, and puts the record within reach.
AT&T customers rejoice! Just in time for the holidays, the company announced today that it will upgrade 15 sites that will extend the wireless network coverage—specifically, on Route 53 to Lake Monticello; on Routes 29 and 33 to Stanardsville; and on Route 250 and I-64 to Ivy.
"Our goal is pretty simple: We want you to have an extraordinary experience when you make a call, check e-mail, download a song or video, or surf the Internet on your AT&T device," said Erika K. Thompson-Kemp, vice president and general manager for AT&T in Virginia and West Virginia, in a press release.
The upgrades are part of the $75 million investment in Virginia that the company announced in early September.
Retirement, said Hemingway, is "the ugliest word in the language." For former UVA President John Casteen, one of the most pleasant phrases in the language might be "board appointment."
Yesterday, President Barack Obama announced Casteen as an intended appointee to the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars’ Board of Trustees. And judging by the other board members—including "medical thriller" author Robin Cook and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton—it looks like a heck of a time! In February, Casteen was elected to the board of directors of Altria, the parent company of Philip Morris. In September, he joined the board of directors of the Virginia Foundation for Community College Education.
Wilson center board members serve six years, meaning Casteen will have the job through the next presidential election. According to the Woodrow Wilson center’s website, board members serve on various development and investment committees. Looks like that $3 billion capital campaign is paying off before it’s completed.
We all act funny when we go home for Christmas, go to bed weary from travel and wake up in our childhood beds. Nowhere is strange holiday behavior more apparent than in our choice of entertainment. Suddenly, stripped from jobs and friends, we find ourselves sitting in front of the TV, watching A Christmas Story 10 times in a row before sinking into It’s A Wonderful Life. It gets weirder from there.
Sometimes it’s good on Christmas to watch movies that are not Christmas movies, per se, but happen to be set on Christmas—say, Die Hard 2, Home Alone 2, The Royal Tenanbaums, where Christmas is not the topic itself but serves to augment whatever emotion, whether it’s Bruce Willis wishing he wasn’t getting all beat up, Macaulay Culkin wishing his parents hadn’t abandoned him in New York, or a family (almost) wishing it could function normally.
The only Christmas movie that my family was ever able to agree on was Terminator 2. It has nothing to do with Christmas, and Schwarzenegger makes for a pretty weak Santy Claus. But watching a robot-man toss a roadhouse hood onto a kitchen burner while George Thorogood’s "Bad to the Bone" blasts over the surround sound puts me in the holiday mood in the same way that, say, the scent of chestnuts roasting on an open fire does for others.
It’s no Emmett Otter’s Jugband Christmas, but hey. For me it’s home.
What will you watch this holiday weekend?
Gone Christmasin’
Unless something major happens in the world of UVA athletics, the blog will return December 29th with a preview of the UVA-Iowa State hoops game.
Also, I will be guest hosting for Mac McDonald’s radio program December 30, and December 31. You can listen in locally on 1400 AM from 3-6 p.m.
Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays! All I want for Christmas is to beat the Hokies in football next season (or ever again)… Go Hoos!
For a supposedly green-minded person, I have a lot of plastic bags in my life. I often refuse them at the checkout counter, but you know how it is: They enter your universe anyway.
And of course it’s good to have a few around, because they are extremely handy for certain things. But I feel like too much of our food is getting stored in plastic bags.
Martha Stewart does not like it.
Partly, this is a result of my fondness for shopping the bulk aisle. There’s less packaging, it’s cheaper and you can control the quantity you buy. I actually used to bring my own plastic bags for bulk foods, but I’ve fallen off the wagon with that. It’s just so easy to tear a new one off the roll. Then when you get it home, you have something that doesn’t work out all that well in your pantry. I don’t like those long plumes of plastic trailing upward from a little bundle of, say, walnuts.
I much prefer the look and feel of glass jars full of dry goods, but I’d like to know how more organized people manage this. Do they take the jars to the store? Or use the plastic bags just for transporting, then transfer as soon as they get home? That would be an aesthetic improvement for me, but it wouldn’t cut down on waste.
I also tend to swaddle produce in plastic shopping bags. (That’s especially true in CSA season, when we receive lots of unbagged stuff.) It’s kind of gross when you think about it, and it’s probably not optimal for shelf life. I’d love to find another way to manage greens and carrots and so on.
Who’s got a healthful, non-wasteful way to store their food?
A few weeks ago, we were bummed to find out that Southern States, our source for chicken feed, had stopped carrying the Countryside brand of organic feed. We liked it because it was made of whole grains and produced in Fishersville. The alternative comes from Pennsylvania and largely consists of "mash," or ground grains.
You can see the difference!
The hens, too, were hip to the change: They just picked all the whole grains out of the mash and scattered what remained. This was wasteful, and we were going through bags of feed much faster than we wanted to.
So, we were happy to learn that Countryside was back on the shelves at Southern States. Even better, we found out through CLUCK, you can arrange a direct transaction with Countryside: when the driver is making a Charlottesville delivery you can meet the truck in Ivy and get the feed right there. Big savings, chicken lovers!
Anyone have a different source for organic feed?
This morning, Charlottesville General District Court Judge Robert Downer denied a review of slain UVA student Yeardley Love’s medical records and, in doing so, dealt a blow to defense attorneys for George Huguely, the 23-year-old former UVA student charged with her murder. However, Huguely’s attorneys will have access to Love’s Adderall prescription.
Last week, a private medical consultant hired by Huguely’s attorneys testified that Love could have died from a cardiac arrhythmia rather than blunt-force trauma. Love’s medical history, he testified, could show whether her Adderall prescription interacted with another medication and fatally affected her heartbeat. Love’s post-mortem toxicology report returned less than 0.05 milligrams of amphetamine per liter of her blood.
According to the Washington Post, Downer reviewed Love’s medical records and said they contained nothing "remotely embarrassing or unusual for a woman who is a student-athlete." Commonwealth’s Attorney Dave Chapman called the defense’s request for records "grossly overbroad," and told Downer last week that a review of Love’s medical records from her time at UVA would amount to a "fishing expedition."
Virginia plays their last game of their pre-Christmas schedule Wednesday night at the John Paul Jones Arena. Seattle comes to town, and the 4-10 Redhawks are the Hoos’ third first-time-ever opponent in a row. The Hoos have won five-straight games since the losses to Washington and Wichita State in Hawaii. Those two losses seem like a lifetime ago.
I’m almost certain that Tony Bennett’s team is psyched to get back on the hardwood in order to get the Norfolk State almost-disaster out of the forefront of their collective minds. After two key misses from the line by freshman K.T. Harrell followed by the critical tip-in by center Assane Sene and a defensive stop on the other end, Virginia was able to avoid the embarrassing loss to a one-win team and earn their eighth victory of the young season.
The Hoos will be without their best player Mike Scott again, as he recovers from ankle surgery. They will also be without the services of senior Will Sherrill who is still recovering from the broken leg he suffered in the game up in Minnesota.
Virginia has held three-straight opponents under 50 points, and under Coach Bennett the Hoos are 15-1 when they score more than 70 points.
Seattle employs an up-tempo style of offense, and they are coached by former UCLA Bruin Cameron Dollar. They opened up the season by losing to Maryland 105-76, and before the UMD game had not played an ACC school since they lost to Wake Forest in the 1977-78 season. Dollar was on Lorenzo Romar’s staff at the University of Washington for seven seasons.
The Redhawks like to play a three-guard offense, and they don’t really have a true center. Cervante Burrell averages about 13, and Aaron Broussard pitches in nearly 15 a night.
Prediction? Lots of empty seats, perhaps the most empty the JPJ has ever been for a men’s game, and the Hoos win 65-55. Go Hoos!