Akeelah and the Bee (PG, 112 minutes) In case you hadn’t noticed, Hollywood is in the midst of a red-hot spelling bee craze. In the wake of Spellbound and… um, Bee Season, comes this drama about an 11-year-old girl from South Los Angeles who tries to make it to the National Spelling Bee. The story […]
Last week, 5,993 of y’all turned out to vote for two City Council seats and three School Board seats—that’s 26 percent of all registered voters. About 600 more city residents voted this year than in May 2004, due in part to massive voter registration efforts in the November 2004 presidential election, which added about 2,000 […]
A local Muslim group is petitioning Charlottesville\’s Board of Zoning Appeals to make an exception to City zoning codes for the construction of a new mosque.
Maria sighs, leans against the wall and smiles wearily: “I’m tired,” she says. “I already worked today, at the dry cleaners.” It’s nearly 5pm and Maria is about to start her shift as a UVA housekeeper, cleaning Bryan Hall. “It’s a lot of hours,” says Maria, but she depends on both part-time jobs to pay the bills. Neither provides benefits.
Jennifer L. Geddes, an associate professor of religious studies and co-program director at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture at UVA, is currently researching a book titled The Rhetoric of Evil, How People Think and Talk about Evil. Her work has been gaining national notoriety at a time when politicians and cable news personalities increasingly use “evil” to describe everyone from murderous despots to members of Congress. We asked Geddes why we should think twice before declaring something “evil.” Here\’s some of what she had to say.âJay Neelley
Earl Washington, Jr. came within nine days of state-sanctioned deathânow he\’s looking for some compensation. Proceedings in a federal civil suit began in Charlottesville last week, pitting Washington against the estate of Curtis Lee Wilmore, the investigator who produced a false confession from Washington in 1983 for the rape and murder of Rebecca Lynn Williams. Washington\’s lawyers charge that Wilmore violated questioning procedures by feeding their client details that led to a false confession.
A few weeks ago, Susan Marcell returned from vacation to find that her neighborhood roads had been re-surfaced. “It’s uneven, it’s got ridges all over it, it’s still kicking up pieces of tar under cars,” says Marcell. “There are whole sections that have been missed or that are miscolored. I can’t believe this is always what happensâbut if it is, we’ve got a problem.”
Local Dems are not heeding Democratic Congressional hopeful Bern Ewert\’s advice: Don\’t “gamble away this golden opportunity to beat [Republican incumbent Virgil Goode Jr.] with a fifth run for public office by Al Weed.” The delegates in the Fifth District have, it seems, done just the opposite.
Tuesday, April 25
Good thing Lollapalooza isn’t a geometry festival
About seven years ago Adam Busch formed a band in Charlottesville and dubbed it Manishevitz in honor of the Kosher wine that tastes like Robitussin. Today, the “metromix” section of the Chicago Tribune online heralds the band’s invitation to Lollapalooza. Now living in Chicago, Busch sells records by day and plays guitar for the six-member band by night. The band’s sound has evolved from its early emo days, Busch says. “We try and work more with melody and harmony, and how full we can make the sound come across between the six of us. It’s not like a triangle or a pyramid or something, where it comes to a point at the top, and it’s me and I’ve got this bandâ¦It’s more like the six of us making a square and seeing what we can collectively sound like.”
Akeelah and the Bee (PG, 112 minutes) In case you hadn’t noticed, Hollywood is in the midst of a red-hot spelling bee craze. In the wake of Spellbound and… um, Bee Season, comes this drama about an 11-year-old girl from South Los Angeles who tries to make it to the National Spelling Bee. The story […]