I just had a great “holy shit” moment while reading an L.A. Times profile of satirical activist Rev. Billy of the Church of Stop Shopping — he’s married to C’ville alumna Savi Durkee. Billy is in the spotlight for being arrested in Manhattan a couple of weeks ago for the self-parodying crime of reciting the First Amendment in public. #
News and meta-news about Charlottesville, VA, since 2001.
Author Archive for Waldo Jaquith
Page 371 of 744
In this week’s C-Ville, Meg McEvoy has a long look at the local food movement. Like anybody else who’s given it a whirl, she discovers that locally-grown food is almost universally tastier than its flavorless supermarket counterparts and not hard to find. But area farmers complain that state and local laws make it difficult for them to compete against factory farms, so they’ve gotten organized and they’re doing something about it.
The topic of the importance of a strong, self-sufficient local economy and food supply is near and dear to my heart. For more on this topic, see UVa’s 2006 regional food assessment, Michael Pollan’s “The Omnivore’s Dilemma” or Bill McKibben’s “Deep Economy.” Or, on the blogging front, horticulturist Tracey Gerlach blogs about her adventures with producing some of her own food at “Life in Sugar Hollow.”
Peter Kleeman isn’t the only City Council candidate with an active blog about his campaign, Jim Duncan points out — Barbara Haskins is blogging, too. She started her blog on Saturday and, since then, she’s written a series of posts on topics ranging from her party affiliation (she’s not saying) to city/county relations, affordable housing to the debate between the rescue squad and the city. (Mayor David Brown blogs, too, but not about the race thus far.) Hopefully the growing roster of blogging candidates will engage one another through their weblogs, carrying on discussions and linking to one another’s good ideas as other Charlottesville bloggers do. That could make for a really intelligent, civilized election.
I’m glad to see that City Council candidate Peter Kleeman has started a campaign blog. No slouch, he’s written several thoughtful, in-depth posts in the week since he’s started it, writing about the planned McIntire interchange and the city’s plan to sell a 22 acre construction easement in McIntire to VDOT for a buck. If he keeps this up, Kleeman may well provide voters more insight into his beliefs and plans than any council candidate in my memory.
Police are trying to figure out what the deal is with random attacks on people in the greater downtown area, the Progress reports. One attack was on Friday night, when a guy was sucker punched by one kid in a group of a dozen, as he wrote about on cvillenews.com. Another was on JPA a few hours later, when a guy had a rock hurled through his car window while he was driving. And a couple of hours after that, a woman was knocked to the ground by a group of kids on the street outside of the Elks Lodge on 2nd St.
In every case so far, the attacks have come from groups of teenaged African American kids wearing white t-shirts, as is the fashion. This is where community policing efforts are particularly important — a pointed conversation between a friendly police officer and their mothers may be all it takes to nip this in the bud.
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