Tuesday, September 25
Come on down
The clinical services company PRA International is moving headquarters from Northern Virginia to Raleigh, North Carolina and is giving 37 of its employees a choice: move to Raleigh or Charlottesville. The company, which was bought by a San Francisco-based private equity firm for $790 million, maintains a trials management center in Charlottesville. For those employees who don’t relish the idea of those North Carolina nights, Charlottesville is another option. And really, what’s Raleigh got that we don’t, besides a minor league baseball team and a couple of strip clubs?
Wednesday, September 26
But enough about me…
Dave Matthews: the anti-soundbite guy. Mr. DMB himself gave an interview about, in part, why he doesn’t like giving interviews, namely because they’re usually trite and often oversimplify complex ideas and issues.
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A Charlottesville-area writer was featured in the Belfast Telegraph, and it wasn’t John Grisham. Jennifer Niesslein, former C-VILLE staffer and now author of Practically Perfect in Every Way, went on a self-help binge, decluttering her home, reordering her finances and diving head-first into relationship exercises with her husband Brandon. After two years of this intensive, navel-gazing experiment, she found she wasn’t any happier. In fact, she was a little miserable. Niesslien actually began having panic attacks and started sleepwalking. The book chronicles her journey through self-help America, a journey that eventually returned Niesslein to her old life. “A good life is one where you are basically proud of what you are,” she said.
Thursday, September 27
Free markets and baby veggies
The members of the Charlottesville Regional Chamber of Commerce put on their Thursday best and turned out for the chamber’s annual community government luncheon at the Holiday Inn. The business community hobnobbed with area government officials like Charlottesville mayor David Brown and Albemarle County Supes Ken Boyd and Sally Thomas as groups of name-tagged folks shook hands and exchanged business cards. After the plates were cleared, speaker Dr. Peter Van Doren, a senior fellow at the Cato Institute, drew laughs with his talk about zoning restrictions, as much as libertarian land-use speeches can bust a gut. And then everyone ate chocolate mousse.
Friday, September 28
Dave Matthews’s interview blues
How do you start an interview-driven story about Dave Matthews? By saying how much he hates interviews, of course. The San Diego Union-Times’ pop music critic George Varga writes about his Daveness giving interviews: “He doesn’t need to and doesn’t like to, so why bother?” Well, one reason might be that Mr. Matthews has some interesting, complex things to say about issues like the music industry, pacifism and the petition drive he spearheaded to get U.S. war veterans better and more timely health care. “It’s a mistake to think peace is the absence of war, rather than the presence of sanity,” said Matthews. “I believe more and more that war is the absence of sanity.”
 How to win friends and influence potential moneybags: UVA President John T. Casteen makes an appearance in The New York Times Magazine, talking about how all this billion-dollar fundraising is really cutting into his reading time. |
Saturday, September 29
Intellectual tailgating
What to do on a Saturday morning when the keg goes dry and kickoff is still hours away? Go to a lecture on stem-cell research, of course! The New Jersey Star-Ledger reports that Rutgers University has started holding a free lecture series on Saturdays before home football games. “Rutgers President Richard L. McCormick proposed the idea after seeing the success of pregame lecture series at other football-heavy schools like Notre Dame and the University of Virginia,” writes Allison Steele. UVA began its series last year, tackling (get it?) such subjects as “The Physics of Football” and “Sabato’s Crystal Ball.” The year’s series is a little weightier, with talks on Alzheimer’s Disease, addictions and the ethical concerns about the technological evolution of human life. Don’t worry, though. You didn’t miss this year’s installment of “Sabato’s Crystal Ball.” It’s slated for October 13.
Sunday, September 30
Advice from the top
UVA President John T. Casteen III pops up in this week’s New York Times Magazine, in a story entitled, not surprisingly, “Degree Requirement in Fund-Raising.” Casteen’s heading UVA’s current $3 billion capital campaign, so Times writer Charles Wilson turns to him for rule number seven in university fund raising: Think About Other Things Too. Casteen tells the Times he used to read for eight or nine hours a day; now that he’s out prowling for dough, it’s more like two. Hey, it’s hard out here for a president, when you’re tying to get that money for the resident faculty.
Albemarle County Supe Ken Boyd was on hand for the Charlottesville Regional Chamber of Commerence luncheon, along with other area politicos like Mayor David Brown and Supe Sally Thomas. The room was wowed by Cato Institute fellow Dr. Peter Van Doren, who gave a speech about land-use rights.
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Monday, October 1
You didn’t hear this from us…
But we’ve caught wind of a rumor that Monday kicked off the awkwardly named “Miss Representation Week of Statue Protest” in anticipation of Columbus Day. And with so many statues to protest, how can you pick just one? Easy, you protest the one with Sacagawea submissively crouching behind Lewis and Clark on the corner of W. Main and Ridge/McIntire streets. People have complained about the subservient position of Sacagawea, which raises all kinds of issues from gender to race to Eurocentric colonialism. So this week if you see somebody creeping around Downtown with a grappling hook and a hacksaw, à la vintage Bart Simpson, you’ll be totally in the know.
