Good morning, RVA! It's 27 °F, and I’m pretty sure that’s the first below-freezing temperature I’ve typed out in this email for a while. Today, and over the weekend, you can expect sunshine and highs in the 40s with similar vibes carrying through the next weeksworth of days. Bundle up, stay warm, and lets get ready for winter!
Water cooler
As of last night, Richmond, Henrico, and Chesterfield continue to have low CDC COVID-19 Community Levels. The 7-day average case rate per 100,000 people in each locality is 164, 19, and 76, respectively, and the 7-day average of new COVID-19 hospital admissions per 100,000 people is 8.4. Look at that extreme discrepancy between Richmond and Henrico’s case rate! I have no idea what it means but do have a hard time believing that the artificial city-county line on a map, which viruses certainly don’t care about, leads to nearly zero reported cases in Henrico—especially since all of its neighboring counties have case rates that are six, seven, or eight times greater. Regardless, the CDC’s Community Level is still low in our region, and we should take advantage of that before we head into classic respiratory disease season. Speaking of the stew of respiratory disease we have floating around, Katelyn Jetelina over at Your Local Epidemiologist posted a State of Affairs a couple days ago that’s worth reading. She’s “concerned” now that we’ve added COVID-19 to flu and RSV as our standard set of seasonal viruses. Keep an eye on things, stay home if you’re sick, wash your hands, and be ready to change your behavior if the viruses’ behaviors change! Oh, and, of course, make sure you get your flu shot and your bivalent COVID-19 booster.
Anna Bryson at the Richmond Times-Dispatch continues to report on Governor Youngkin’s proposed history and social science learning standards. Yesterday, despite Governor Youngkin having appointed a majority of its members, the State’s Board of Education rejected the new proposed standards, and “voted 8-0 to direct the department [of education] to create a new draft document, using the Youngkin draft as a baseline, fixing all mistakes and incorporating elements of the Northam document.” How many weirdly racist-adjacent additions and omissions are we willing to accept as mistakes before the whole process feels like an intentional whitewashing of history? Forgetting Martin Luther King Jr. and Juneteenth? Not mentioning President Obama? Calling America’s indigenous people “the first immigrants?” That’s a lot of “mistakes” all on one side of the ledger.
It’s certainly a part of the current Republican playbook to bring in national right-wing organizations to draft extreme policies and then try to pass them off as no-big-deal, thoughtful, local updates. We saw it in Hanover with their anti-trans policies, and it really feels like we’re seeing it here, too. Just a year in and how many times have we’ve seen this administration try to quietly slip some extreme person or policy past the public without them noticing, it’s blown up in their faces, and they’ve had to backtrack and try again (the false starts with Andrew Wheeler, charter schools, and the teacher snitch line come to mind). What a mess.
I’ve been lightly following the City’s attempts to nail down their cold-weather shelter plans for at least a couple of years, and reading this piece in VPM by Jahd Khalil about their faltering steps forward makes me feel like there’s just a lot going on in the background that I don’t know about. How did we get all the way to the middle of November with no opening dates for permanent shelters? I care less about assigning blame and pointing a handful of fingers and more about who needs to take the next step. Is it Council? The Mayor? Richmond’s non-profit community?
Richmond BizSense’s Jonathan Spiers has some updates on Henrico’s GreenCity development, which he says will break ground early next year. Of course the proposed pedestrian bridge over I-95 interests me most: “The new bridge would replace the existing Scott Road bridge, which Green City Partners is planning to convert to a pedestrian bridge in coordination with the Virginia Department of Transportation. The proposed mass-timber replacement bridge would be the first glue-laminate bridge construction across an interstate the continental U.S., according to Future Cities. It would connect with the Fall Line Trail that’s planned about a mile to the west...” I’m pretty excited to ride my bike up the Fall Line Trail, over to GreenCity, and catch an Atlantic10 tournament—assuming my old-man knees aren’t shot by the time it’s all completed.
Tonight and tomorrow, 1708 Gallery will host the 15th annual InLight, an outdoor exhibition of light-based artwork. This year InLight will take place at Bryan Park, which is easily accessibly by bike via the Hermitage Road bike lane and by the #14 bus. This event is always worth your time, so head on over between 7:00–11:00 PM and explore Bryan Park by the warm glow of art!
This morning's longread
The Sweet and Sticky History of the Date
OK, this is by far the longest and most interesting thing I’ve read about dates in my entire life—great date pictures, too!
The date palm is a very old plant. Fossilized remains show that its ancestors were already flourishing 50 million years ago. It was only recently, around 4000 B.C., that enterprising humans in the vicinity of modern-day Iraq domesticated the trees. In the right conditions, a modern date palm can reach the height of a five-story building, live past 100, and produce more than 150 pounds of fruit a year. Long before refrigeration, dried dates could keep for years, making them invaluable for travelers across seas and deserts. They can be turned into honey by boiling and straining the fruit; in fact, the biblical phrase “land of milk and honey” refers to honey from dates, not bees. They can also be fermented into liquor, like the date wine enjoyed by ancient Babylonians, according to the historian Herodotus. The tree itself was a source of fiber for ropes and baskets, fronds for shelter and shade and columns for construction. That led one rabbi to remark at least 1,500 years ago, long before environmentalism was cool, “This date palm—no part of it is wasted.”
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Picture of the Day
Spent too much time setting up this artsy bike pic, and then nearly broke a couple ribs five minutes later.
