Good morning, RVA! It's 29 °F, and today you can expect more of the same: Clear skies and highs right around 50 °F. The weekend, which approaches rapidly, looks like a washout, though. Maybe start queuing up your favorite holiday films now so you don’t have to have figure it out later. Here, I’ll get you started with a few of my favorites: Scrooged, Elf, Anna and the Apocalypse, White Christmas, Die Hard, and Home Alone.
Water cooler
I feel compelled to link to this story in DCist by Matt Blitz about the new arena for the Wizards and the Capitals coming to Alexandria. I dunno! We just went through our own round of stadium shenanigans here in Richmond, and I think it’s interesting to see how that process plays out in other places—like, with the governor showing up and one of commonwealth’s senators giving comments. This proposed deal does require General Assembly approval, so it’s not a slam dunk. But, with Governor Youngkin and a bunch of Democratic lawmakers already on board, seems like an easy layup (OK, OK, I need to take timeout on the basketball language).
Samantha Willis at the Virginia Mercury has more details on the Richmond Public Library’s plans to expand their Memory Lab with that recent $900,000 grant from the Mellon Foundation. Tap through to learn more from Chloe McCormick, the Main Library’s senior special collections librarian who is also trained as a folklorist! So cool!
I love that “truck spilled interesting items on the highway” is a defined genre of news story. Here’s one in the Richmond Times-Dispatch by Samuel B. Parker about Mountain Dew cans in Norfolk. I take this story—and its premium placement near the top of the RTD website—as a clear sign that we’ve already made our way into the End-of-Year News Dead Zone.
“Why the VMFA pool doesn’t have fish in it anymore” is an example of a great post on /r/rva. The original post is a fun picture and a good joke about a weird local thing, but the comments are filled with all sorts of great stuff, too—including the full text of one of my all-time favorite Ned Oliver articles (from when he was still with the RTD). This tidbit, from a VMFA employee, doesn’t surprise me at all, and I sort of wonder how often it happens: “Definitely seen an influencer strip down to a thong bathing suit and pretend to swim in [the pool] for pictures…”
Speaking of excellent holiday films, the Byrd Theatre will show one of my favorites, Scrooged, tonight at 7:00 PM. This movie’s got it all: peak Bill Murray, Carol Kane, a weird cameo by Mary Lou Retton, and even Bobcat Goldthwait in a role that sorta makes sense! It’s warm, scary, funny, and something I look forward to watching every year.
This morning's patron longread
Why Are So Many American Pedestrians Dying at Night?
Submitted by a handful of folks! This piece in the New York Times took America’s terrifying pedestrian death data and then did something magical: Disaggregated it by time of day. This revealed that pedestrian deaths at night make up the majority of a steep, 14-year increase. What a good lesson in data analysis! You never know what you’ll find when you start slicing and dicing data in interesting ways.
Researchers have found related patterns looking at fatal collisions that occur in the weeks before and after clocks change for daylight saving time. When the 6 p.m. hour abruptly changes from light to dark, for example, even as traffic patterns generally remain the same, that hour becomes abruptly more deadly, too. “It’s purely an effect of daylight or darkness — and it’s huge for pedestrians,” said Michael Flannagan, a retired professor at the University of Michigan. In the dark, pedestrians are harder to see than other road users. They typically don’t wear reflective gear or lights, and their outerwear is often dark in color. American roads also weren’t particularly engineered with this risk in mind. “We literally taught generations of engineers to design conditions for daylight and not to consider nighttime,” Dr. Sanders said.
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Picture of the Day
Bus life.
