Hello Everyone,

I’m writing you on behalf of everyone at Spicy Bear.  We’ve had a lot of fun over the last two years or so.  Things were fun and innocent for a long time.  cVillain grew from a handful of readers to a web audience that rivals anything else in town.  We’ve had too much fun drinking, raising thousands of dollars for charity and bantering all day long about everything from politics to local restaurants. We always wanted the site to bring honesty to Charlottesville. It’s been a great party, but now we need to remove ourselves from cVillain because it turned into a stressful endeavor which exposes us to unneeded issues.  The small things have gotten overly burdensome in recent months and life is more important.

I do care a whole lot about cVillian; it’s not about the money.  It’s about a peace of mind and picking your battles.  I feel like every time we have to stand up for cVillain, it’s standing up for the entire community in one way or another.  You have all been incredibly supportive whether it’s offering to pay for lawsuit threats, writing articles, buying advertising on our site, or just continuing to read our site. I feel though we’ve taken cVillain as far as awe can and now it’s time to focus on other things that reward us mentally.

Honestly, I’m tired of the issues and we want to give cVillain back to the community, but we don’t want to manage it.  If someone wants to step up email me at kyle@spicybear.com . If we can’t find someone, then we will turn it off completely.

The issue really is about priority of time.  It’s a good thing to have an addiction to certain things, but not when those things aren’t exciting anymore.

Several specific events lead me to remove ourselves from the website:

C-VILLE Weekly and the cover story, Is This the New Face of Evil?

When Cathy Harding and Scott Weaver approached me to do a cover article, I was excited about the exposure it would generate for cVillain.  Having not dealt with local media, I naively agreed to it.  As it turned out, C-VILLE turned the article into a clever hatchet job.  The article cleverly mixed together insults and untruths about my profession and created the appearance of some nonsensical fight between Kate and myself.  C-VILLE had me pose for that picture explaining that they intended to use the headline “King of Local Media” or something along those lines.  The “New Face of Evil” was embarrassing and an unethical choice on their behalf.  In addition to this I’ve had many non-public issues which don’t need to be shared, because I’m not going to stoop to that level.

Rosenberg Lawsuit

When people can take advantage of a legal system for frivolous means, you know there is a whole lot more coming.  It’s not worth fighting these people for a website that doesn’t have the financial means to defend itself.  I discovered being a public figure of a popular local website must expose you to a lot of this riff-raf. Secondly, the failure of these types of people to see the service and benefit provided to the community confuses me. I think with anything new and undefined, you face people who are resistant to change and don’t attempt to understand things.  Restaurants, for the most part, have a really hard time taking criticism.  But guess what?  Having conversations with people, a la cVillain or any other public forum, is how you resolve things.

Dealing with Negative Perpetuated Rumors

When one of our advertisers told us that the word was going around that we “lied and cheated” our advertisers, I couldn’t believe it.  Dealing with negative image about your character, wherever it came from, is not fun and not something I want to manage.

Starting CrossFit Charlottesville & Managing my Consulting Business

I’m about to start a new hobby, a gym we’re launching called “CrossFit Charlottesville (website up soon).” You’ve probably heard some rumors about that, but I want to be able to devote 100% of my free time to it.  I also make a living consulting and doing M&A work for companies. That’s about to get a whole lot busier as the economy turns around and, quite frankly, I’d rather do that than deal with a website that causes more problems and takes more time and money than anyone would be happy about.

I guess that’s all.  I’m sure some will celebrate and others will be sad.  For those who wanted this day to come, just remember, it’s about choosing your battles and I don’t care to fight the little things any more.  For those who are sad, don’t worry. I’ll still be out and about, running a gym and generally being a Charlottesville citizen.

Our final day will be July 30th, 2009 and we thank all of you for being such a wonderful community.

If you’ve been following our website, you probably know about the threats and lawsuit from Charlottesville photographer Matt Rosenberg.  I’m happy to announce that we’ve settled and the lawsuit will be withdrawn for $750.

As part of our settlement agreement, we must make the following statement:

The parties have resolved the issue and regret the misunderstanding that this issue has caused.

In the future, email us if you have any problems.  We’re happy this is over.

As you know we’re opening a gym pretty soon called “CrossFit Charlottesville.” I won’t tell you too much about it just yet other than it’s going to be awesome.  We’re struggling with a t-shirt slogan and wanted your input.  CrossFit works better than any other fitness program because we do functional movements, constantly vary our movements and do them at high intensity (more on all this later).

As for the slogan, we just want it to be funny and doesn’t have to be specific to CrossFit.

Here’s what we like so far:

• Specialization is for single-celled organisms.
• Not just for ninjas.
• Where dudes love to clean and chicks love the snatch. These are olympic lifts.
• “I’m not a ***** anymore”
• The only thing that makes Chuck Norris cry.
• The only thing better than cold beer.
• Cure for the Common Workout.

If we pick your slogan, you get a free t-shirt.

If you want to win tickets to Artini, we’ve got you covered.

We have two $50 tickets which we will give away to one lucky commenter.

Please leave a comment on this post with your real email address to be entered to win. We will select the winner at 5PM and email them their ticket information. Only one entry per person. Thanks!

Update: Winner has been notified. We’re waiting for confirmation…

David Witmer wants to bring reduced-cost MRI scans to Charlottesville, but faces a lot of resistance.

When an old friend called me a few weeks ago to talk about bringing an MRI scanner to the Charlottesville area, it initially sounded like a story which was probably better left for the back of the Daily Progress. With all the talk about health care reform, the ever-increasing cost of health care and the fact that, as an entrepreneur, I’ve payed insurance that’s increased 50% in 2 years, I quickly realized that the issue went far beyond a clanking magnetic scanner.  Explanations for increased health care costs are: overuse and misuse of insurance, the cost of treating the uninsured, increased prevalence of malpractice lawsuits, limited supply of health care providers,  low growth in productivity (the ability to efficiently service patients) and more expensive treatments for people who live longer.  Today, this issue has become very local.  We look at how anti-competitive regulation more than doubles the cost for MRI services in Charlottesville.

Dave Witmer’s an orthopedic surgeon who told me several times that “no one is going to like me over there.”  »Read More

Update 3:40PM 5/29/09: We are turning off commentary on both posts related to this issue. Lets all take a break from this for now. We will let you know if there are any updates.

Does anyone remember the threatening letter we received from Matt Rosenberg, the Daily Progress Photographer and guy who is sometimes behind their twitter account?

What happened was two thumbnails of Matt’s photo were used on our site.  Matt threatened us claiming we infringed on his copyright. He claimed he had sent us a fax (which was never received); he never attempted to contact us and has no record of this fax.  We took the thumbnails down within 24 hours and stated that we hadn’t violated any copyright.  Many of you asked what happened…

We had offered to settle Matt’s claim for $200, but apparently that wasn’t enough.  Just today, we received a complaint from Matt’s Charlottesville-based personal injury lawfirm Tremblay & Smith which alleges that we violated Matt’s copyright and need to pay a lot of money.  This time we actually have to hire a lawyer and defend ourselves. We’ll figure out what to do, but in the meantime here is a copy of the letter and the complaint.

»Read More

Many of you read and offered some interesting commentary on the anonymous letter I received from someone who labeled themselves as a “sort of cyberstalker.”  Last night an interesting event unfolded.

Two friends and I parked a car in my office lot near the downtown mall at about 9:30 at night.  We needed to go into my office to pick up someone’s things before we headed out for the evening.  Nothing seemed out of the ordinary walking into the office.

We headed back out side and when we walked through the atrium and out the door, my friend kicked something by accident.  She told me to look down.  I did and there was (guess what)…

»Read More

What do I do with this?

Click for full size.

Hello cVillain readers.  Many of you have asked about publishing information about your business, sales, specials and events on our site.  As you know, we reach about 40,000 visitors each month and have the largest, most interactive online audience in Charlottesville.  We can’t cover everything, but that doesn’t mean you can’t reach our audience.  We’re going to start experimenting with clearly labeled sponsor posts (in addition to our standard banner advertising).  Sponsors’ posts will not be published more than 3 times per week.

You can write whatever you want to our readers and you can choose your publish date.  It’s really effective and that’s why a lot of the major blogs are doing it. If you are still buying print advertising, you are probably overpaying.  Make sure your message is read by sponsoring posts!

Benefits and details after the break… »Read More

APRIL FOOLS!

Dear Charlottesville and cVillain Readers,

While the last two years have been an exciting foray into the internet, Charlottesville culture and restaurants, we’ve never had any major complaints or issues (excluding the photography lawsuit threat).  Sure, we’ve dealt with some ethical violations in our local media, we’ve had writers come and go, but overall, it’s been an awesome experience.  As always, we have our audience to thank, because without you, this site would be a group of mimes, alone on their computers, typing, on the internet.

Our recent post regarding drugs in Charlottesville, seemed to have rubbed a rather wealthy alumnus of the University of Virginia in the wrong way.  As of yesterday around 3PM, our ISP has been issued a court-ordered sub-poena to take down our website starting at Midnight on Friday, at 12:00AM.  We are not allowed to publish any information about the lawsuit given advice from our lawyers.  It’s a little complicated legally and I hope I can share more details with you in the future.

Unfortunately, this is not just a threat, and something with serious legal ramifications, we have decided to shut down Spicy Bear. We cannot afford to hire the lawyers to fight this alumnus. Given the time requirements of the site, we all thought it was better to fold rather than spend hundreds of thousands of dollars defending ourselves.  We’ll be having one final hurrah and I’ll be contacting you via E-Mail with those details.  Please feel free to leave a comment, but understand we cannot answer questions about the case.

Kind Regards,

Kyle, Francesco, Thor(s), cocoNUT, Scowly, Vanillavy and the rest of the Spicy Bear Team