This is from PCA…

Piedmont Council of the Arts (PCA), The Bridge | Progressive Arts Initiative, and Siteworks Studio collaborate on a unique public art project for Charlottesville Parks and Recreation’s Summer Camp. The StoryLine Project will join local artists and designers with young people (grades 4-6) in the Parks and Recreation Summer Camp to creatively explore and interpret the places where they live.

PROJECT OVERVIEW
The project centers on a walking expedition of the neighborhoods of downtown Charlottesville, during which participants will learn to use close observation and creative expression as a means of understanding spaces, places, and the stories that enrich them. During the StoryLine walk on July 9th, four teams of young people and artist mentors will gather information and ideas about their neighborhoods through personal interviews, poetry, sketching, photography, journaling and more.  The project will culminate with the creation of a collaborative mural on the Community Chalkboard on July 16th.  The mural will illustrate the young participants’ layered visions of their StoryLine walk and the neighborhoods it explored.  A micro-exhibition to share and celebrate the project will take place in August at the Bridge | Progressive Arts Initiative.

PROJECT SCHEDULE »Read More

Lame, but from the City…

The Charlottesville Fire Department would like to remind city residents that all fireworks are prohibited in the City of Charlottesville.

Nationally during the 4th of July holiday over 10,000 injuries occur each year from the use of consumer purchased fireworks. “Consumer purchased fireworks are not only illegal in the city but also just too dangerous to be used” said Charlottesville Fire Department Operations Battalion Chief Robert Bragg. It is also one of the busiest days of the year for the fire service with over 32,000 fires reported last year half of  which were caused by illegal fireworks according to the National Fire Protection Association. “With the density of the city and the dry summer weather, fireworks are a major concern of the department. Fires caused by fireworks put both citizens and fire fighters at risk for unnecessary injuries” said Bragg.

The Save the Fireworks citizen committee, with support from the City of Charlottesville, will be providing a free fireworks display to celebrate the 4th of July, at McIntire Park shortly after dark on Saturday. In addition on Saturday, the public is welcome to join the community at the main firehouse on Ridge Street for the annual fourth ceremony at the liberty bell replica that has a home in Charlottesville.  The ceremony featuring local children from the Boys Scouts and Girl Scouts begins at 2pm.

The Charlottesville Fire Department encourages everyone to have a safe and happy 4th of July weekend.

For further information contact PIO Robert Bragg 434-531-3531 or Fire Marshall W.A. Hogsten 434-970-3325

From Blue Ridge Eco Shop…

The City of Charlottesville and Albemarle County both now have a $30 Rebate on New Rain Barrels! If you’ve been considering buying a rain barrel, now is the time. Both rebates are grant based, meaning there is only a limited amount of money for the residents. Once the funds are gone, they’re gone. Stop into the Blue Ridge Eco Shop to pick up your rain barrel today! We have rebate forms to give you so it really is that easy! Want to learn more? Read Here.

Free Upcoming Events @ the Eco Shop:

Saturday, July 18th: Free Composting Class at the Blue Ridge Eco Shop @ 11 a.m.

Back by demand, we will be holding a FREE composting class. Come ask all your composting questions and pick up a composter if you don’t already have one.

Saturday, July 25th: Rain Water Harvesting @ The Habitat Store 8:30-10 a.m.

Part or our Women With Nails learning series, Come learn about Rain Water Harvesting taught by Paige Mattson at the Blue Ridge Eco Shop. Also learn how to fix your leaky faucets. Free and open to the public.

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.

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…

»Read More

Back in early 2008, we discovered that well over half of you text while driving (even though only about 20% of you do it regularly).  Today, thanks to a birdie, we found out that reading or sending texts will be illegal while driving.  We have no idea how they will enforce the reading part of that or why you are allowed to read a map, but oh well.

[via NBC29] [pic from inhisgrace/flickr]

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]

From a reliable birdie…

Don’t know if this is blog worthy, but maybe something to share with friends to see if we can get the word out.  The news stations are reporting “a string” of car thefts around town this weekend.  The police spokesperson didn’t seem to give them an accurate picture of what happened.  Cars were vandalized and stolen along Park Street and into the Greenbriar neighborhood.  FIFTY would be a conservative estimate of the number of cars damaged. I have heard a few numbers, all higher than that.

Related links:

http://www.nbc29.com/Global/story.asp?S=10569999
http://www.charlottesvillenewsplex.tv/news/headlines/48736147.html

[looking for pictures, please send to gossip@cvillain.com]