Good morning, RVA! It's 52 °F, and another beautiful day stretches out ahead of us. Today you can expect highs right around 80 °F and some potentially overcast skies. It’s probably our best day of the week, weather-wise, at least until Sunday. I hope you get out there and get after it (whatever “it” may be for you today)!
Water cooler
Today, the federal Department of Health and Human Services will end the Public Health Emergency for COVID-19, which, unsurprisingly, means a lot of things. Katelyn Jetelina at Your Local Epidemiologist had a good write up back in February about how bringing the PHE to an end will impact various government policies and services, and you can watch the Virginia Department of Health’s Dr. Forlano explain some of those impacts here in the Commonwealth. As for how we continue to track COVID-19 and make smart decisions about our own personal behavior, it sounds like the CDC’s Transmission Level metric will go away, but I’m still unclear on what will happen to their green/yellow/orange “Community Level” maps. A new update to those maps is due this evening, so we’ll have to see! You can read more in a new post by Jetelina in which she focuses on how the COVID-19 data we’ve all grown accustom to looking at over the past three years (some of us more than others) will also change.
VCU Parking sent out a map confirming the locations of 10 speed tables the City plans to install on and around VCU’s Monroe Park campus over the next week. This is an exciting map, and these are some pretty well-placed traffic calming measures—with most of them situated on long, pedestrian-dense blocks where drivers have the chance to floor it and reach unsafe speeds. I’m especially pleased (and surprised!) that there’s even a speed table planned for Main Street east of Belvidere, near the intersection where a driver hit and killed VCU student Shawn Soares last week. Crews will close roads one by one, and, by this coming Tuesday, we might have 10 new pieces of quick, rapid-response infrastructure designed to make our streets safer for everyone. While I’m mad and frustrated that it took two students dying to move the City to action, I’m really hopeful that this—analyze an area after a serious crash, work with partners and neighbors, and then quickly install infrastructure—becomes a regular practice for Richmond’s Department of Public Works.
Sean Jones at the Richmond Times-Dispatch reports that the Hanover County School Board has decided to rename John M. Gandy Elementary School to Ashland Elementary School. As I’ve said before, I favor schools named after plants and places, but in no way do I think we should be stripping the names of celebrated Black educators off our school buildings. The Board’s action last night sure seems a lot like retaliation for the renaming of Lee-Davis High School a couple years back. I eagerly await Pulitzer Prize Winner Michael Paul Williams’s column on the matter.
Hey this is neat: You can now use RVA311 to report trail maintenance requests in Richmond parks. Previously, requests required a valid street address, but now the RVA311 app will use your GPS coordinates to mark those off-the-grid, into-the-wild trail issues you may stumble across. Important note! Only submit trail maintenance requests in parks: “Non-trails Parks issues should not be submitted using the Trails request. By turning on the Parks GIS layer, other request types can be submitted within Parks. This cannot be prevented due to technical limitations.” So don’t be a jerk—only submit trails requests! With great power comes great responsibility, OK?
Via /r/rva, some absolutely gruesome pictures of an illegal dumping site near Texas Beach. I’m not even going to link to them, because I failed my constitution saving throw and am trying my best not to barf all over the keyboard. Why are people carrying around 55-gallon drums of fat and...I don’t know, guts, maybe? Viscera? I didn’t even know people still illegally dumped stuff in the woods! What is even happening!?
It’s only the 11th—are you exhausted by RVA Bike Month yet? TOO BAD. The month of May is like that scene in A Clockwork Orange where I prop your eyelids open and force you to take in days and days of beautiful bike content while blaring Ludwig Van. Get your eye drops ready, because tonight at 5:30 PM you can take a new-rider bike maintenance class with Park Tool over at the North Library (2916 North Avenue). And, if you’re rad enough, you can join the Broad Street Bullies for what’s sure to be a wheel-poppin’ good time at Carytown Kroger. Wheels up (literally) at 7:00 PM.
This morning's longread
How Weed Strains Get Their (Amusing, Provocative, Downright Wacky) Names
I laughed at a lot of this look into how weed strains get their names, sure, but there definitely are some really smart thoughts in here about how far into the mainstream marijuana has slipped over the last couple of years. Even with a fractured national legalization/de-criminalization landscape, so much has changed!
Weed names have always added to the fun and intrigue (as a teen, even the relatively straightforward Thai Stick sounded entrancingly exotic), but today, as the power dynamic shifts from seller to buyer, and as growers and retailers find themselves strategizing to make their products stand out on increasingly crowded shelves, the names are taking on even more importance. The names. Dear lord, the names. Strawberry Cough. Kosher Kush. Blueberry Mojito. Glueberry Slurm. Pineapple Trainwreck. Donkey Butter. Animal Face. Pink Panties. Purple Haze. Sour Joker. Sweet Jesus. Moby Dick. Fugu. Fatso.Tongue Kiss. Cat Piss. Cat Piss? Who comes up with this stuff … and how? Stoners trying to out-clever each other with inside stoner jokes about oblique stoner references? Advertising creatives at boutique firms working long hours in Stance socks? Gen Z focus groups run by blue-chip marketing firms with execs staring through one-way mirrors, scribbling notes?
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Picture of the Day
More lines under the highway.
