Good morning, RVA! It's 60 °F, and it got chilly! Highs today top out right around 70 °F and a slight chance of rain floats back in the picture this afternoon.
Water cooler
Katy Burnell Evans follows up on her piece yesterday about the middle-of-the-night vote to select an interim superintendent with this piece about how wee-hour meetings are a middle finger to open government laws. We'd be upset if our elected officials had all their important meetings at 10:00 AM while folks were at work, so we should be upset when their meetings go on after the bars close when folks are/should be asleep. This goes for City Council, too!
The PDF I was looking for that begins to describes the process City Council will adhere to with their new budget oversight powers now exists! It sets out what format to put things in, how to deal with emergencies, and what to do for budget increases. Good stuff to know, but—and I am not a lawyer or legislator—this seems like the reverse order of operations to follow? Wouldn't you want to know definitions and parameters before voting a whole thing into law?
Did I mention this already? They mayor's holding community office hours over the next couple of months (PDF). The next one is June 8th, at 6:30 PM, at the Pine Camp Arts and Community Center, but there's a bunch scattered all over the city. You could take the opportunity to go talk to the mayor about literally anything! Like, say, the need to continue to increase funding in the city budget for public transit, or our need for a plan to address Confederate art in public places, or just where gets his all his dang socks.
Speaking of possibly boring public meetings, there's an open house today on the proposed rezoning of Scott's Addition based on the super rad Pulse Corridor Plan. And if by possibly boring, I mean extremely fascinating and important! Bring all of your zoning and transit-oriented development questions to the DMV Headquarters at 5:30 PM and have them happily answered by knowledgeable city staffers.
Here's Municipal Waste's Tony Foresta interviewing Mayor Levar Stoney. That's a pretty great sentence I just typed right there, thanks for making it possible, RVA Mag.
The Richmond Free Press reports that the Enrichmond Foundation has purchased Evergreen Cemetery—which is certainly an interesting partnership. Enrichmond works as an umbrella non-profit for a lot of Friends of XYZ park groups around town, and they also handle the 17th Street Market. This Q&A on the Enrichmond site will maybe A a lot of your Qs.
This portable screen printing ice cream truck thing from Studio Two Three sounds amazing.
Sports!
- Weather postponed the Squirrels yesterday, so they've got a doubleheader against Binghamton today beginning at 5:05 PM.
- Nats beat the Dodgers, 2-1, and look for the sweep today at 3:10 PM.
This morning's longread
The Honey Hunters
🐝.
These days, honey collection is performed less as an incidental boon to fishermen working in the spring season than as unskilled seasonal labor on an inflated pay scale. Officially speaking, the honey collection season begins annually on the first of April, when the Forest Department issues permits for roughly 2,500 men (never women) to row into the forest, usually in groups of seven to ten. For two months—or longer in particularly good seasons, which come rarely now—mouals will walk for as many as ten hours each day searching among the high branches for hidden hives, the largest of which can grow to a square meter in size and yield twenty kilos of honey. (Big-story-telling Kholil claimed to have once harvested a hive containing forty kilograms.) These immense hives are built by Apis dorsata, the same giant honeybees that nest on Himalayan cliffs, concrete overhangs in Delhi and Mumbai, and throughout the forests of southeast Asia.