Category: Virginia

On April 13, 1743, 263 years and one day ago, Thomas Jefferson was born. Rumor has it that it was several days later that a delegation from Fairfax County was the first to call the infant “Mr. Jefferson.”

I have made something of a semiannual practice of observing Mr. Jefferson’s birthday with an assortment of pithy quotes and other reflections (see 2005, 2003), but increasingly the part that strikes the most resonant chord for me is the Jefferson Muzzles awards, given annually on their namesake’s birthday to individuals or organizations who “who in the past year forgot or disregarded Mr. Jefferson’s admonition that freedom of speech ‘cannot be limited without being lost.’” This year there is a podcast of the award ceremony, along with thirteen lucky recipients, including President Bush for the secret wiretaps, the DOJ for abridging the privacy of virtually every web user, FCC Chairman Kevin Martin for proposing that the government take away our choice of viewing and listening material in the name of “decency,” and ten other deserving cases. It should be noted that the Muzzles are no merely liberal mouthpiece: students who heckled Ann Coulter’s speech slamming Cindy Sheehan at the University of Connecticut are awarded a Muzzle, as is a Florida school superintendant who apparently forced the resignation of a teacher for writing an anti-immigration letter to the newspaper.

It was announced today that Katie Couric would become the first Wahoo, and the first Lawnie, to anchor a major network evening newscast, moving to become the anchor on CBS Nightly News after 15 years on the Today show. Ms. Couric (College of Arts and Sciences ‘79) would also be the first woman (and the first Yorktown High School cheerleader and TriDelt) to be the solo anchor of a major network evening newscast.

All Virginia-centric spin aside, congrats to Katie, who, if she wasn’t already a Seven, must certainly now be on the list for induction.

(Aside to Aven Tsai, Paul Stancil, Jim Heaney, Scott Norris, and Tyler Magill: if one of you is reading this and have that photo from Monticello with Ms. Couric in the VMHLB cap in 1993, now would be a good time to scan it and send me a copy.)

Someone came to my blog this afternoon who was searching for katie couric I definitely want Duke [in the Final Four] because I feel sorry for all those kids who couldn’t get in to UVA.

Heh.

Did she actually say that? I haven’t watched the Today Show in years, but I might have to start watching again if she actually dropped that little bomb on the air.

In the We Hate It When Our Friends Become Successful category, I was eating lunch at a local diner yesterday and heard a familiar name on the nearby TV, which was tuned to Fox News. I looked up and there was an old college classmate, Lash Fary (yes, that’s his real name), who has started Distinctive Assets, “a Los Angeles-based entertainment marketing and gifting company.” Briefly, Lash, or the Gift Fary as he’s apparently known professionally, is part of the system responsible for getting high-priced merchandise into stars’ hands through the gift bags and baskets distributed at events like the Oscars (this was the context in which he was on Fox News). He’s also written a book, Fabulous Gifts, about the art of gifting well.

And to think he lived next door to me first year. Man, the places people go.

I think Lash’s story is interesting because it illustrates how an individual can carve out a business path by following his bliss. It’s also interesting because of the overall fabulousness level, of course: “the Gift Fary,” indeed.

Thanks to a tip (which I have sadly neglected for about two weeks) from Greg, the roster of Hoobloggers now has a big ol’ luminary: Melissa Lafsky, the Opinionista, oft-cited on Gawker, newly free of law firm hell, and now following her dreams of becoming a writer. She seems to have picked up more than her fair share of wingnuts, weinerboys, and out-and-out psychotics in the short period since she went public, so I’d like to give her some props for her courage.

Congrats to my native state for electing Tim Kaine as governor last night. The 11th hour appearance of the president, his only swing into the state to support Republican candidate Jerry Kilgore, apparently didn’t help Kilgore as much as it did Kaine. I love this quotation from Mo Elleithee, the Kaine campaign’s communications director: “Can someone tell me where to send the thank-you note? The president fired up our base.”

The tone of the campaign is neatly summed up in the closing paragraphs of the New York Times article:

Mr. Kilgore tried to make character and ideology central ideas, portraying himself as a straight shooter who “doesn’t need a poll to make up his mind” and attacking Mr. Kaine as “instinctively liberal.”

Mr. Kaine tried to build his campaign on the issues of managerial style and bipartisanship, asserting that Mr. Warner and he had—with Republican help—made state government more efficient and effective. But he also questioned Mr. Kilgore’s honesty, and accused him of planning to outlaw abortion if Roe v. Wade was overturned by the United States Supreme Court.

It’s good to see that the voters of my state are too intelligent to fall for the same tired rhetoric of the “l-word” and accusations of flip-flopping.

This is a little late, since she posted this at the end of last month and the awards were posted in, um, June. But it’s still cool to see Slowpoke‘s Jen Sorensen winning awards (from the Association of Alternative Newsweeklies) and being interviewed. Next up: animated Slowpoke a la Boondocks?

Speaking of indie musicians, your friend and mine, singer-songwriter Justin Rosolino returns to Club Passim next Friday, November 18th, opening shows for Lowen & Navarro and Brian Webb. Should be a good show, and an opportunity to see Justin in a format where he can build up some momentum between his songs. And an opportunity to give him hell about this little blackmail photo with the man called W. (See my notes about Justin’s last Club Passim appearance.)

As Fury points out, it was a weekend for upsets, and while Michigan’s 27-25 victory over Penn State is pretty darn dramatic, my money is on Virginia’s 26-21 win over Florida State for upset of the week. Sentences like “beat a top-5 team for only the second time in their history” and (my favorite) “We couldn’t stop that dadgum No. 18” make the victory that much sweeter…and almost erase the humiliation of losses to Maryland and Boston College in the preceding weeks. Of course, Virginia’s return to the Top 25 helps too.

Well, Virginia was off to a strong start. Too bad about Saturday’s game: 45-33 is an ugly loss by anyone’s standards. I DVR’d the game but missed the last five minutes, thanks to the game going over three hours, and consequently missed the last scoring drives from both teams. It really looks like there wasn’t a heckuva a lot of defense going on, though. The polls seem to agree, as we’ve dropped out of the top 25.

Oh well. Maybe I can get to Saturday’s game at Boston College and watch the Cavaliers make up for it.

As reported various places, the University of Virginia (my alma mater) is among the institutes of higher education opening their doors to students left schoolless by Hurricane Katrina. Visiting student registration should be open now.

It also appears that students will be raising funds at the season opener football game on Saturday, as well.

43 Folders: Ye Olde Hipster. Apparently Jefferson carried around a small ivory notebook on which he took notes to be transferred into more permanent storage later; foreshadowing the Hipster PDA (as well, of course, as the reporter’s notebook).

Man. You couldn’t write a story that sounds more like a University Guides tall tale if you were one.

My mail is now working again. For the curious and other UVA alums out there, the problem alluded to in my previous post was caused by bad data in Hoosonline. It appears that when the UVA alumni association migrated Hoosonline from its original custom-developed platform to Kintera, some of the data for lifetime email forwarding was incorrectly migrated. Some people had their forwarding addresses forwarded to their forwarding addresses (holy circular routing, Batman!), while others just had things screwed up. Fortunately, after a few calls to the help number (434-243-2935), I got a live person on the phone named Tammy who was able to fix the problem.

The data issue was apparently compounded by the fact that the mail containing the temporary password for the new system was sent out the day before the changeover. Lesson for implementors of software: always give your users three times as much time as you think they’ll need to adapt to your new platform, or else your support call volume will triple.

I did learn one thing during the process, which is that the team that runs the project, UVAIM, has a blog (though no comments or trackback). Subscribed, obviously. I can only hope they check their site logs enough to find this message and that they consider involving alumni on the web in future decisions that affect alumni services.

Other reactions to the Hoosonline platform switch at the ever-vituperative message boards at TheSabre.com.