Still waters run thick

Dear Ace: I saw the article in The Daily Progress about algae working its way into our tap water as of late. Should I be afraid?—Al G. Green Al: Look, man, this ain’t no advice column. Ace can no more tell you to be scared of a little algae than he can tell you that it’s […]

Loving it

O.K., it’s official: With the presidential nominating contests finally, mercifully kaput, and the party’s respective candidates solemnly girding themselves for November’s political battle, our quaint little Commonwealth is fast emerging as the key battlefield of 2008’s wide-ranging electoral war.

Bank of America no longer preferred

At the end of May, incoming UVA law school students got word that the student-loan ground was shifting beneath their very feet. An e-mail from Cynthia Burns, the director of financial aid for the law school, informed incoming first-years that the University had ended its relationship with Bank of America.

Lit scholar takes on Cartman, Bart and Captain Kirk

“Maybe I’ll wear my shades,” says Paul Cantor. The UVA English professor flips a set of clip-on sunglasses down over his regular frames and leans back in a black metal chair on the Downtown Mall. “I lead a double life.” While Cantor teaches on elitist seeming subjects like Homer and Shakespeare in a university setting, […]

Public hearing will decide sale of Ridge lots

After receiving only one bid, from the developer they expected, City Council will hold a public hearing on the sale of two lots near the corner of Cherry Avenue and Ridge Street, which, if sold, could usher in dense development on what is some of the only vacant land near Downtown. The two discontiguous lots, […]

Does Charlottesville have a gang problem?

Todd Lucas is a difficult man to doubt. He is earnest and he is forceful and he is a person possessed of an electric personality channeled through a gleaming sledgehammer of a smile. So if Detective Todd Lucas of the Charlottesville Police Department says that there are gangs operating in a fair city such as […]

Smattering of protestors greet Bush

Of the 3,000 in attendance only six were escorted from the premises. Seventy-two others, who left of their own free will, were newly minted United States citizens. Despite the promise of angry protests disrupting the address of President George W. Bush at the 46th annual Independence Day Celebration and Naturalization Ceremony at Monticello, the event went off smoothly.

State criminalizes salvia, nobody notices

At midnight July 1, Salvia Divinorum, the mind altering Mexican plant whose use by teenagers has been sweeping the nation (or so says some media), officially became illegal, giving some Virginians out there a cool, new, felony-level, drug-using past. Last March, Governor Tim Kaine signed into law HB21, the Virginia bill criminalizing the drug. Since […]