And back to our regularly scheduled programming, we’ve discovered a little website called the Thomas Jefferson Health Food district that documents all the health inspections for Charlottesville area restaurants. It brings up a lot of violations from our favorite food places. Most of these violations are silly things like the lack of signs.  But, here are some of our favorites/most scary (some seem overly picky, no?):

Zo Ca Lo:

Critical Repeat A review of the menu with the foodservice operator indicates that there is no consumer advisory for the steak tar tar and the duck that may be served raw and/or undercooked

To our suprise, White Spot doesn’t have ANY critical violations.

Bodo’s

Repeat Honey stored on the floor or food stored less than 6″ above the floor.

Take it Away

Employee (Female staffer had bang dangling out of bun) observed working in the food service area without proper hair restraints.

El Tapatio

Critical Repeat The following equipment food-contact surfaces were observed soiled to sight and touch: Meat slicer. Owner stated that this was for personal use, but needs to be labeled as such and not be out in regular prep area.

Burger King

Corrected During Inspection Critical Using chlorine at a concentration exceeding 200ppm for soaking whole tomatoes.

Little Johns…hehehehehe that’s why you don’t eat here sober

Critical Cooked barbeque chicken and sliced turkey noted not being adequately cooled to prevent the growth of harmful bacteria.

Repeat Cleaning is being done during periods in which food is exposed to contamination. Spray cleaning floor in rear while cooling cooked chicken.

Repeat Food stored in a location where it is subject to splash, dust or other contamination–adjacent to handsink at service area.

There are a lot more if you want to look through them.

[pic from cupcakes2/flickr]

This weekend is labeled “Big Ass Arts Events” because it’s full of arts events.  It’s going to be hot, muggy and sexy.  You will probably get wasted at Artini and see debaucherous things.  Here she goes..

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The guy had his problems, but Michael Jackson’s undoubtedly the king of pop music. Yesterday, Jackson collapsed in his rented LA home and his physician attempted to resuscitate him.  Jackson reportedly slipped into cardiac arrest.  Medics attempted CPR in an attempt to revive him as they rushed him to the hospital.  He was pronounced dead at 2:26 local time.

Rest in peace, Michael.

My favorite song after the break…

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Quiznos, McDonald’s, Burger King, Hardees, I can’t get over the level of marketing stupidity you have when you associate fast food with hot women, sex, blow jobs and all the other stuff which has NOTHING TO DO with your crappy food.  It doesn’t make the food taste any better.  Walking into McDonald’s the other day I couldn’t stop thinking about the “Awesome Threesome” and how gross that would be if it were included in any real (read: non-food) sexual experience.  Burger king, you just kind of piss me off with Seven Incher ad.  Anyone else notice a recent rise of the porno food ads?

Quiznos Tasty Torpedo

More sexually dirty food advertising videos after the break… »Read More

Remember when we predicted the future and said you would get swine flu?  Well, it happened again. UVa hospital explains:

On Tuesday, June 23, the University of Virginia Medical Center’s epidemiologist, Dr. Keri Hall, sent an email to all Medical Center employees informing them that a small number of healthcare employees had been diagnosed with novel H1N1 influenza. As has been widely reported, the symptoms of this virus have ranged from very mild, cold-like symptoms to more severe influenza symptoms. It is generally being described as seasonal flu.

Dr. Hall advised U.Va. Hospital staff that they should not come to work if they develop flu-like symtoms. Symptoms include fever, sore throat, chills, runny nose, nasal congestion, headache, nausea, and vomiting. Employees were asked to immediately contact Employee Health to be evaluated if they had any worrisome symptoms.

“Please be vigilant about noticing any visitors who appear to be ill or have a significant cough,” Hall added. “Sick visitors should be asked to avoid visiting until their symptoms have resolved.”

Time to stop making out with everyone and licking each other’s hands.

[pic from kozumel/flickr]

Chris Anderson, who many of you techies may know, is the editor of Wired magazine and has published the renown book about internet business models called “The Long Tail.”

Waldo Jaquith was reading a promotional copy of Chris’ new book, Free, in which he found many instances of copied text from, you guessed it, the free *cough*online encyclopedia, wikipedia and several other sources. Waldo emailed Chris and his publisher alerting them to this fact.  Chris responded:

All those are my screwups after we decided not to run notes as planned, due to my inability to find a good citation format for web sources…

This all came about once we collapsed the notes into the copy. I had the original sources footnoted, but once we lost the footnotes at the 11th hour, I went through the document and redid all the attributions, in three groups…

Obviously in my rush at the end I missed a few of that last category, which is bad. As you’ll note, these are mostly on the margins of the book’s focus, mostly on historical asides, but that’s no excuse. I should have had a better process to make sure the write-through covered all the text that was not directly sourced.

I think what we’ll do is publish those notes after all, online as they should have been to begin with. That way the links are live and we don’t have to wrestle with how to freeze them in time, which is what threw me in the first place.

Nice find Waldo.  Very well done.  This is a bit unnerving coming from such a hot shot internet journalist.

P.S. If anyone wants to make funny edits, you can find the original Free cover here.

[via VQR] [spicybear/flickr pic]

It’s never fun bringing bad news, but we’ve got problems right now.  Things aren’t looking any better for our local economy.  Sure, the downtown mall rebricking is complete and under-budget, but between unemployment rates, general business activity, a slow real estate market, mall vacancies and increases in welfare recipients, our recession looks like it’s getting worse, not better in the near term.  I talk about each in detail after the break…

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Off topic: Does anyone know this NBC news anchor?  She’s hawt.

Anyway, the pool offers Charlottesville water fun of epic proportions. From its corkscrew slide, to the water bucket to the thing that sprays water on your head, how can you complain?  Oh, you can bitch about enough things if you are a grinch.  I love the neighbors complaining about parking. Are you serious? You just have a park that will seriously increase your property value and you already lived next to a park.  Wow.  Here we go:

Top 10 Most Ridiculous Reasons to Not Go to the New Pool (aka list for a Grinch): »Read More

(via @JimDuncan)

You might know you are in Charlottesville when you read a craigslist ad that required that you only eat vegetarian food.  We know that because we did a post on it and it was actually advertised on the Charlottesville Craigslist.

We can now add “Voted for Obama” to the list of Charlottesville Craigslist Elite (CCE).  For real, check out this Craigslist ad titled “Must Be Awesome:”

Hi!
My roommates and I are looking for a 4th to share a house in Fry Springs (JPA).
We are looking for someone who shares our values:
*Respectful
*Artistic
*Only one of us is vegetarian but we all eat like it.
*Positive
*Voted for Obama
*nonjudgmental. unless you didn’t vote for Obama.
*our DVD collection is full of romantic comedies. But you don’t have to watch them.

We are 2 women and 1 man. 2 of us are UVa employees (1 professor and 1 office drone) and the 3rd is a bank employee. We occasionally have people over but always ask each other first. We’re not partiers, but we are social.

So now it’s cool to discriminate against people who don’t think share your political beliefs?  I guess the hardest part really is sharing artistic values.  Oh the irony of being nonjudgemental unless you didn’t vote for Obama irks me!  This is worse than discriminating against vegetarians, but I guess you probably would really want to live in that house if you were a staunch XXXXXXX supporter, since, you know, they are so nonjudgemental, positive and respectful.

Maybe we can put together a cVillain craigslist housing ad which would include: »Read More

One of our readers, Heart Above the 45th, asks:

Thinking of getting a piercing… Any recommendations in town? Price averages?

Let’s also debate the best place to get pierced. Please keep the poll choices clean.

[pic from Sukanto_Debnath/flickr]