City plays pick-up sticks

Limbs collected: Approximately 400 loads, or 12,000 cubic yards* Manpower: 12 in-house employees and 3 contract drivers Time spent so far: 10 hours a day, 5 days a week, 3 weeks total Vehicles used: 7 dump trucks, 2 knuckleboom trucks, 4 pickup trucks Additional equipment used: 2 chainsaws Time needed for project completion: 4 weeks […]

Amusement Pride

Dear Ace: What’s up with that carousel at the east end of the Downtown Mall? I’ve never seen another one like it.—Merrily-Going-Around-Charlottesville That’s because, according to New York/London appraisers Masterson-Gurr-Johns Inc., the little blue carousel on our mall is “the last known kiddy carousel in this country of its type.” The attraction, featuring seven painted […]

Casteen rebukes Attorney General's letter on gays

Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli recently slapped second-year University of Virginia student Seth Kaye in the face. Not literally, but Kaye said that was how he felt when he awoke to an e-mail outlining a letter Cuccinelli sent to the state’s public colleges on March 4. READ MORE Click here to read this week’s Odd […]

God, guns and gays

Well, it looks like it’s kind of a bad news/good news situation for newly elected Governor Bob McDonnell. On the downside, his carefully cultivated campaign image—which presented him as a sensible, well-coiffed, middle-of-the-road pragmatist—is in complete tatters, destroyed by a series of mean-spirited, politically tone-deaf moves against Virginia’s lesbian and gay community. On the plus […]

Bill Hay started the local Tea Party. Now he's backing a Fifth District candidate. Is he jumping ship or setting a course?

During the Jefferson Area Tea Party’s February meeting at Timberwood Grill, Keith Drake, chairman of the Albemarle Truth in Taxation Alliance, made a few introductory remarks. “It’s a lot of fun being a Tea Party patriot these days!” said Drake, who added that he was having a ball “rabble-rousing, bringing us back to our founders’ […]

Cabaret; Four County Players; Through March 20

Musicals are often brushed off as fluffy escapism, and yet the most-enduring ones—from Puccini’s popular operas to Sondheim’s Into The Woods—are about celebrating the frivolity and freedom of youth. That is, until the dread sets in. Cabaret is within this canon and the script is as germane with its politics and rhetoric as it was […]