This being the "Best Of" issue and all, I got to thinking about all the many wonderful things about Charlottesville that make it The Best Town of All Towns in The Universe to me. I love Charlottesville. Probably more than is healthy and certainly more than is necessary.
The list of what makes Charlottesville rock is long: C&O bread, Belmont Avenue, the view from Monticello, the sale rack at Eloise, a sense of "home." In other words, I am never one to say that Charlottesville is lacking in any department…except maybe its online community. It’s a good day for me when I discover a Charlottesville-based blog or website that gives me a chuckle or makes me think; roughly 99 percent of the time, Charlottesville-based sites simply inspire a desire to find another website where I can procrastinate.
That said, over the two years that I have been writing this column I have indeed found some Charlottesville Internet gems. Here is a brief rundown of my top five favorites, in no particular order. A few of them I have written about before, a couple I have not:
1. Book of Joe: Updates are posted multiple times a day and range from the topic of celebrity tattoos to Kit Kat bars. A hodgepodge of useless information.
2. No discussion of Charlottesville’s Internet community would be complete without a shoutout to old Waldo Jaquith. I’ve never written about him in this forum before because, well, it’s just too obvious. But, if you want a summary of local news, Jaquith’s Cville News is a great place to start.
3. The Virginia Quarterly Review‘s site is just what you would expect from the esteemed quarterly: informative and intelligent. Definitely worthwhile if you are having a "stupid day" and want to make an effort to remedy that.
4. Although I just discovered it recently (and wrote about it last week), I really do think that Beaverlike Mammals is hilarious. A repository for sightings of furry animals: What’s not to like?
5. Charlottesville Tomorrow is a development nerd’s dream because it’s a forum that encourages said nerds to get involved in the many and complicated development issues facing our area. And such involvement is exactly what the Charlottesville of tomorrow needs.
