Good morning, RVA! It's 51 °F, and the chillier weather continues. Today you can expect highs in the mid 60s with even cooler temperatures moving through tomorrow. Don't be afraid to put on an extra layer—yesterday, on my ride in to work, I big-time regretted not wearing gloves! On Thursday, overnight lows bottom out in the low 40s, and then things start to heat up from there. I think next weekend might even be the weekend to move some plants outside.
Water cooler
tl;dr: I set up a Mastodon server for folks trying to figure out how to get off of Twitter but confused or intimidated by how Mastodon works. Twitter is bad, and the person running Twitter is also bad. Unfortunately, a lot of news takes place exclusively on Twitter and nowhere else—stuff like transportation survey announcements, live coverage of public meetings, and sometimes our elected officials even make official statements and only put them on Twitter, which, again, is a bad place run by an incredibly offensive and unserious person. Honestly, if Twitter were a brand of cereal or a fast-food chain we'd all have boycotted it years ago, but, since Twitter provides a valuable service, we begrudgingly give all of our content to a childish memelord. This frustrates me! So I thought about it, and I felt like I could maybe be helpful in getting people in Richmond to move off of Twitter and onto something else. To that end, I set up a new Mastodon server at rva.fyi. This server is, for now, open to anyone, but I'd particularly like it to be a place for people interested in the types of things that would show up in a Good Morning, RVA. Like I said, there are a million Mastodon servers floating around out there, and, in fact, Mastodon just announced a default server for new users that you're more than welcome to join instead! There's nothing special about rva.fyi, other than I wanted a new project and wanted to make it as easy as possible for local people to take two steps back from Twitter. Truthfully, I don't know that Mastodon is the best alternative to Twitter, but it's here, it exists, and I've been enjoying my time on it over the last few months! Come check it out and see how you feel, it might be awesome!
On Sunday, Twitter user Wyatt Gordon posted a picture of the Cannon Creek Greenway closed at Dove Street as crews begin to prepare the nearby Highland Grove site for development. Gordon notes that the proposed development includes building at least two new streets, creating new crossings (aka conflict points) on what's currently a really lovely and safe stretch of bike-and-pedestrian path. Better Housing Coalition, the developers in question, weighed in later in the thread with a few more details and that they're "working closely with DPW & PDR on a temporary & safe detour." First, I don't know how we are still, still!, not requiring developers to provide an alternate safe path through construction when they close existing access. If you close a bike lane or sidewalk, you should be required to provide a temporary bike lane or sidewalk replacement. One-for-one! It's nice that BHC is working with the City on a solution, but that solution needs to be figured out ahead of time—not only after someone complains on Twitter! Second, Richmond still lacks a body with the necessary authority to review projects like this and advocate for better multimodal transportation options. This could be a true-blue Department of Transportation or perhaps a powered-up version of City Council's Safe and Healthy Streets Committee. Whoever it is, someone needs the authority to step in with a new development like this and advocate for better and safer transportation solutions. We can build more and more affordable housing in Richmond and make it safer to move around in our City—it's not a zero-sum game. We just need to make doing so a priority, and this situation shows me that it clearly is not. P.S. Note this whole conversation played out exclusively on Twitter!
Charlotte Rene Woods at the Richmond Times-Dispatch has an interesting follow up to the Governor's chief diversity official, Martin Brown, declaring that Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion work is dead. Woods reports that two Democratic lawmakers have asked the Attorney General if Brown can just disregard the portion of the Code of Virginia that defines his role (which is to literally promote equity).
Have you ever seen folks riding around town poppin' wheelies with cool, carefree ease and thought to yourself, "Dang, that's so rad. I'm obviously way too old to do that, but, nonetheless, I must learn how!" If so, today, the second official day of RVA Bike Month, offers you a chance fulfill your dreams with the How-to: Wheelie Clinic at 5:30 PM at Forest Hill Park. According to the Eventbrite, flat-bar mountain bikes with gears may be the best choice to bring out to the clinic tonight—along with a young-person's sense of wonder and confidence.
This morning's longread
“Your gal ain’t doodly-squat”
What's more interesting than the origin of mild, infrequently used curse words? Doodly-squat, I say!
Doodly-squat (meaning ‘nothing/anything at all’ or ‘an insignificant amount’) might seem like a mild topic for Strong Language, but there’s a lot going on under the surface of that frivolous-sounding word. The Oxford English Dictionary surmises that the doodly part comes from doodle as a slang term for ‘excrement,’ and the squat part comes from the use of that word as a verb meaning ‘to void excrement.’ Over time, doodly-squat would get eclipsed by the variant diddly-squat, which the OED calls a “probably euphemistic” alteration. Both doodly-squat and diddly-squat, as well as plain old squat, are prime examples of what linguists have called “vulgar minimizers” or “squatitives” (more on that later).
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Picture of the Day
Creepy or charming tree face—I can't decide.
