Good morning, RVA! It's 39 °F, and you can expect some rain this morning and highs right around 50 °F as the day progresses. Looking ahead at the 10-day forecast, though, and I do see some warmer temperatures and sunny days later this week. Not trying to jinx it, but, at this point, the coming weekend looks really lovely.
Water cooler
City Council will hold their second budget work session today at 12:30 PM, the first since the mayor introduced his proposed budget last week. You can watch them get into it live via the City’s website or wait until I get the audio up on the Boring show later this week. Immediately following the budget session, Council will move into their Informal Meeting to discuss a personnel matter and then head right on into their regularly-scheduled meeting. Sounds like a lot, but!, because Council recognizes their own limitations and, more importantly, the finiteness of time, they’ve continued almost everything on their agenda to a later date—giving themselves a budget buffer should they run over during this afternoon’s meeting. Smart thinking (or maybe it’s just that no one should sit in six or more hours of continuous meetings with the same eight people).
Last week the 2nd and 5th District Councilmembers hosted a combined public meeting to discuss Those Three Zoning Changes (eliminating parking minimums, allowing ADUs, and tweaking the rules for AirBnbs). Over the weekend, Councilmember Jordan sent out a PDF of the City’s presentation in her Second District Newsletter, and, honestly, I think it’s one of the better slide decks I’ve seen on complicated zoning issues. I love how City staff broke up each zoning change into “what is the context,” what changes are we proposing,” and “what are the benefits.” So smart and easy to understand! Presentation formatting aside, I’ve said for however long we’ve been kicking around These Three Zoning Changes that I support getting rid of parking minimums and permitting ADUs everywhere, but the lack of a residency requirement in the Airbnb tweaks made me nervous—nervous that someone could buy up ten homes in a neighborhood, just for Airbnbs, and remove a ton of housing off the market. However! It looks like the Department of Planning and Development Review has come up with a compromise to retain the residency requirement in residential zones and remove it in mixed-used zones. So: you’d only be able to Airbnb the home that you live in a neighborhood like Ginter Park, but you could buy a bunch of condos in Scott’s Addition and run a small Airbnb empire. I’m not smart enough to think through all of the impacts this change will have, but I’m glad to see a compromise in the direction of “we need more places for people to actually live”.
In 2022, local artist Faith Rowland was hit by a driver at the intersection of Cowardin and Bainbridge. The driver fled the scene, leaving Rowland in the middle of the street with life threatening injuries. Rowland survived, and, yesterday, RVA Mag published a letter she wrote to the person who hit her with their car. You should read it, but, fair warning, it’s very intense.
Nathaniel Cline at the Virginia Mercury continues to follow the Virginia Department of Education’s attempts to roll out a history and social science standard. Criticisms of the third-times-the-charm draft still seem serious but have maybe started to scale down in scope from the earlier draft’s large-scale mistakes and omissions.
The Oscars—aka the 95th Academy Awards—were last night, and, to be conversant with the movie people in your life, you can find the full list of winners over on Wikipedia. Truly one of the best movies I saw last year, Everything Everywhere All At Once won Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actress, Best Supporting Actor, Best Supporting Actress, Best Original Screenplay, and best Film Editing. Michelle Yeoh became the first woman of color to win the Best Actress award since Haley Berry in 2002 for Monsters Ball. RRR, easily the most fun film I’ve watched in a long time, won best Original Song for “Naatu Naatu,” which you stop whatever you’re doing right now and go watch on YouTube immediately.
The 2023 NCAA tournament bracket was finalized yesterday, and, to be conversant with the sports people in your life, you can find the full bracket over on the NCAA’s website. Probably most important for local folks: #12 VCU will face #5 St. Mary’s on Friday and #4 Virginia will take on #13 Furman on Thursday.
This morning's longread
Listen Up! These Are The Silent Letters Of The English Language
Spoiler: Every letter in the alphabet can be silent except for V and sometimes R. I’d never thought about this before! English truly is the Wild West or Outback Steakhouse of languages.
You probably already know that English features many, many words with silent letters—letters that appear in the word but aren’t pronounced and often make us wonder what they are even doing there. For example, the letter B in the words debt and thumb. Or whatever the heck is going on in the words colonel, queue, and bourgeoisie. Even though you’re probably already familiar with silent letters, you might not realize just how many words in English actually use them. To demonstrate just how common these silent letters actually are, we quietly gathered up a list of as many examples of silent letters as we could find.
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Picture of the Day
A forsythia that, I swear, I am going to chop back this year and encourage to look more like a bush and less like a dangly yellow spider.
