Don't leaf me

Dear Ace: Based on trends from the past few years, what’s the projection for leaf peepers this year? I think it’s going down.—Ray King-Leeves Ray: Last week, with cold weather quickly approaching, Ace busted out his fall wardrobe and carefully packed away (read: threw stuff in a box) his spring/summer accoutrement. Mother Atkins bought him […]

Passing leafy time

For several years, I’ve known Tamra Harrison Kirschnick as a painter of tangled plant life. The pieces of hers I’ve seen in the past have been large, single canvases, so it was a pleasant shock to enter her current solo show and find that it consists of arrangements of smaller paintings. In each of the […]

Finally official, conservative student group hosts first speaker

Months after a First Amendment controversy threatened the association, Thomas Jefferson now keeps the company of Edmund Burke. UVA’s branch of The Burke Society, a student group dedicated to understanding the theory of the late British political theorist, had their first major event on campus on October 15. The conservative student group hosted flame-thrower David […]

What's in your backpack?

Peter Oliver Age: 24 Hometown: Morehead City, North Carolina Year: Third year medical student What’s in your backpack? Wallet, hospital ID, ophthalmoscope, Tums, Ibuprofen, Band-aid, ear plugs, laser pointer, three pencils, blue pen, $3 in change, poem from mentor, shipping receipt, good luck note from girlfriend, Zune MP3 player, empty plastic food container in plastic […]

Speed racer

In the early ‘80s a class of fifth graders from Stonewall Elementary School in Clear Brook, close to Winchester, took a field trip to White Post Restorations, a car restoration shop in White Post, Virginia. On that afternoon, the kids looked inside some of the most specialized and elite cars ever designed—Bentleys, Rollses, Jags. But […]

Dangerous curves

  Since his childhood, a dream of working on luxury cars has revved Kenny Shreves’ engines. He currently works mostly on Porsches in Werkstatt, his performance shop in Charlottesville, where vehicles like this finished Porsche (top left) are prepped for the track (top right). His current fixation is the Ford GT (center), a $1 million […]

Speed thrills

When I arrived at the Augusta Government Center in Verona, I was immediately greeted by a line of Porsches waiting for their turn to race the circuit. I was supposed to be meeting Sherry Westfall and husband James Condon, social chair and webmaster of the Shenandoah Regional Porsche Club of America, respectively. This was the […]