FLAWS- Tripled rates, spun numbers, and Conservancy conflicts: Why the war on dredging slogs on

Jul 28

4Better Or Worse

The week in review
Hottest: Temperatures reach 102 degrees July 22, so the city and county open cooling centers .

The Dish

Growing power: farms team up to offer CSA
It's surprising that no one in the area has thought of this before–forming a farm cooperative to offer a Community-supported agriculture (CSA) service. That's just wh...
Hopping Good Time: Beer fest takes a second turn
Charlottesville beer connoisseurs rejoice, The Top of the Hops Beer fest will return in September for another round of enlightened imbibing. The festival, now in it's secon...

Essays

Slowing postal: Free Union and the place we won't let go
The United States Postal Service– who needs it? Our whole society has gone electronic. With the availability of email, iPads, and smart phones, you need paper mail de...

Question of the Week

Real Estate - $old

Deep pockets
6/17/11 Helen Phillips to Nicholas & Catherine Marzella & John & Cynthia Tymoff, 158 Hessian Hills Way, Unit 1, $114,000, Albemarle Judy H. Scott to Matthew Woo...

Real Estate - On the Block

Cherry-picked: Redone Fifeville ranch is the bees' knees
Address: 1518 Cherry AvenueNeighborhood: Fifeville Asking: $318,000Assessment: $208,300 Year Built: 1955Size: 1940 fin. sq. ft....

Real Estate Property auctions

Property auctions
July 28 at 11am at the Albemarle County Courthouse Property: 5189 Coventry Lane, Barboursville Debtor: G. Allen and Stephanie S. Gilbert Amount owing: unknown ...

Art Features

Disposable beauty: Wood thinks outside the bag
The ubiquitous plastic bag—flimsily useful for a minute or two and then thrown away without a second thought. Scourge of the environment, tossed-aside plastic bags clog s...

DR. HooK

Not even close: Fast-food joints trump grocery stores
McDonald’s was my happy place as a child: I loved it all, from Happy Meals to apple turnovers that scalded the roof of my mouth. When we first moved to Kenton, OH, there ...

Movie Reviews

Real deal: Kunis, Timberlake show comic chops
Friends with Benefits follows romcom formulas as if directed on autopilot, but that's not to say it isn't fun. This is the second movie this year to ask whether it's possib...

Music Features

City Slickers: California Dreaming with Dawes
"The best rock 'n' roll is never preconceived," says Dawes frontman Taylor Goldsmith. This is hard to swallow coming from a guy whose handsome band hails from Los Angeles, ...

News

$230 million: State board accelerates Western Bypass with cash
Christmas has come early for Lynchburg and Danville. Putting the taxpayer money where the Secretary of Transportation's mouth is, the all-powerful Commonwealth Transportati...
'Stink-bomb': Explosive allegations threaten $10-million award, career
The jury was so moved by 25-year-old Jessica Lester's 2007 death under the weight of an out-of-control Allied Concrete mixer that it awarded a record $10.6 million, the bul...
Hacked Neff: Scammer steals Supe candidate's accounts
Former IBM exec Cynthia Neff has used computers since the 1980s and understands the importance of secure passwords. That's why it was particularly galling to discover a hac...
No arrest: A month after alleged abduction, questions linger
A month after a 42-year-old woman reported being abducted from her southern Albemarle County home and driven 300 miles down the Blue Ridge Parkway to North Carolina by a sl...
Unexplained outage darkens downtown
The early screening of Super 8 at the Regal Downtown 6 had just finished the spectacular Spielbergian train crash, with frightened teens assessing its damage, when the scre...

The Brazen Careerist

Uncovered: Make your intro letter get the job!
Most cover letters are to people you don't know, so stop referring to them as cover letters; they are sales letters. You’re trying to sell yourself to a stranger.Think ab...

Sports Doctor

D1-A payday: 'Full cost of attendance' a disgrace
Thank goodness Rob Burns cares about academics. The rising senior from Northern Virginia had a 4.01 GPA after his junior year at Stone Bridge High School and could have gon...

Strange But True

Falling asleep? What keeps us in bed at night?
Q. Many people are restless sleepers, real tossers and turners, but few awaken on the floor. So what keeps us from falling out of bed at night while we sleep?—M. Mouse

Online only

Blue Hole on a hot day
On a Saturday that hit 96 in town, temperatures– particularly the water temperatures– were significantly cooler in Blue Hole, a swimming hole just outside the S...
Table of contents
COVERFlawsNow flush with money, the Rivanna Water and Sewer Authority is spinning figures to back its pro-dam position even as new reports suggest dredging would provide am...
The Tale of Colin and Gillian
The Decemberists became arguably the most intellectually intimidating art-rockers of the new century thus far largely because they spent nearly a decade writing increasing...
Turks Gap Road
Two kids (who just finished swimming at "Blue Hole" on the south fork of the Moormans River) step off Turks Gap Road– one of the historic highways severed by the 75-y...

Full Stories List for July 28th, 2011 issue #1030

4Better Or Worse