Good morning, RVA! It's 35 °F, and this week’s promised excellent weather starts...tomorrow! Today’s no slouch, with lots of sunshine and highs right around 60 °F, but set a reminder for tomorrow morning to get stoked on six consecutive dry days with temperatures in the 70s.
Water cooler
Another COVID-19 update! That’s two in as many weeks! Last week, CDC updated their guidance on COVID-19 vaccines for folks aged 65 and older. Here’s the direct quote from their website:
People aged 65 years and older who received 1 dose of any updated 2023-2024 COVID-19 vaccine (Pfizer-BioNTech, Moderna or Novavax) should receive 1 additional dose of an updated COVID-19 vaccine at least 4 months after the previous updated dose.
So, if you’re over the age of 65 and got your last COVID-19 vaccine early this past fall (before Novemberish), you should schedule an appointment at your local pharmacy and get yourself an additional dose. Most other folks don’t need to do anything at all—unless you never got the updated vaccine last fall, which, if that’s the case, you should just go and knock that out this week.
City Council meets tonight and you can find their full agenda here. First, the proposed changes to Council’s rules, including those tweaks to the public comment period, sit on the consent agenda (RES. 2024-R007).
Second, the only item on the regular agenda is ORD. 2024-051, which is an interesting zoning-related paper. A homeowner on the Northside has requested to build a driveway in a neighborhood where the zoning clearly bans driveways. And for good reason! Driveways remove street parking, break up sidewalks, and create dangerous conflict points between drivers and everyone else using the street—City staff say as much in their staff report. However, the previous homeowners built, like, half of an illegal driveway and never fully connected it to the street, leaving the current homeowners with a sort of useless patch of concrete. So the current request is actually to replace the illegal, nonfunctional driveway with a real driveway. The neighborhood association is fully supportive (but notes they do not want to set a neighborhoodwide driveway precedent), yet City staff recommends denial based on a lot of the above-mentioned good reasons. Fascinating! What will City Council decide? Tune in tonight to find out, and, remember, if you hop on early you can catch Jason Roop’s City Council pre-show!
P.S. Without knowing any of the specifics other than what’s mentioned above, if I were Council, I’d listen to staff and deny the request. It’ll cost the homeowners a bunch of money (or sweat equity) to break up that concrete pad and haul it away, but think about how nice it would be to replace it with a bunch of plants? Or, I dunno, maybe, instead, install a basketball hoop or tether ball pole? Half a pickleball court? Lots of options, is what I’m saying.
The 2024 General Assembly session has officially wrapped...well, sort of. The Governor now has 30 days to plan his next steps, warm up his veto pen, and to try and figure out a way to get a budget passed. He put out this statement on the next steps and, of course, just couldn’t pass up the opportunity to make an off-handed dig:
Thank you to all 140 legislators that made the huge commitment, sacrificing time away from their families, their careers and their livelihoods, to serve the Commonwealth and all Virginians. The General Assembly sent me more than a thousand bills plus backward budgets that need a lot of work. We’re going to have a busy 30 days going into the reconvene session. Nonetheless, I’m grateful for the tremendous commitment and sacrifice that our General Assembly and their staffs have made on behalf of the Commonwealth.
Backward budgets! I hate this kind of stuff, and I’m exhausted by the constant combative framing of every dang thing. I’ll tell you what would get the Governor closer to the pro arena he wants so badly: Fewer shady comments in the media!
The 2024 edition of the Richmond Black Restaurant Experience kicked off yesterday, and continues straight on through the week. I recommend you print out this list of the over 35 participating restaurants and hang it on your fridge (assuming you have access to the ancient “printer” technology). While you should definitely stop by a handful of these spots over the next couple of days, it’s not like they close up shop and turn into a pumpkin come midnight on Sunday. You’ve got plenty of time remaining in 2024 to check off each and every one and give your yearlong support to Richmond’s Black culinary scene.
Congratulations to the UR women’s basketball team for defeating Rhode Island, 65-51, in the A-10 tournament championship game this past weekend! Unfortunately, VCU got bounced in their quarterfinal match against Saint Louis, 63-65.
This morning's longread
The New York Times’ New Game Is Genius
The first part of the below paragraph is the best description of why I hate crossword puzzles and trivia that I’ve ever read—I don’t want to guess what some smug puzzle designer was thinking when they got to work that day! Wary of the New York Times’s abundance of puzzle designer smugness, I was pretty skeptical about the NYT’s new puzzle game, Strands. But Strands is great! It’s breezy, doesn’t penalize you for incorrect guesses, and has, at least twice so far, made me smile. Go check it out if you haven’t already.
Many people take great pleasure from Connections. I do not. If Wordle makes me feel smart, Connections makes me feel stupid. It’s a Guess what I’m thinking puzzle, except you, the player, don’t know anything about the mind whose thoughts you are guessing. Mason clarified that this is very much her team’s goal: “We want to make games where people can feel the person on the other side,” she said. But the authorial voice behind a given puzzle, whether it’s Connections or a crossword, can feel remote from the solver. Mason, who manages the team that makes the Times’ games, talked to me about a particular puzzle of Wyna’s, or of another editor named Joel; the app shows a byline credit for each one. But for outsiders, these names can feel like they refer to faceless puzzle overlords administering shrewdness from on high. The puzzle-maker risks coming across as better, smarter, and more clever than the rest of us.
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Picture of the Day
Everyone’s doing fine.
