Budgets, Poetry and Jomboy?
Cheers RVA!
Cooler today, from 62 to 72, with the chance of rain increasing linearly as the day goes on, to 90% by evening.
the juice:
City Council approves 2025 fiscal budget. The budget starts July 1 and can be viewed here. Here’s a visual summary:
the pulp:
Skill Game debate could stretch into summer, per Mercury Moomaw. See ‘the dive’ for more.
Two separate proposals for 500 apartments in South Richmond, from BizSense
Revised budget up for vote at City Council from Jonathon Spiers. 375k for traffic calming in the 5th district. Who doesn’t love traffic calming? Update: It passed. from 12 on your side
‘Chatbot’ demonstrates sarcasm with GPT-4o from Open AI
Deadly crash at toll booth on Downtown expressway from channel 6. The circumstances of this particular crash are unknown, but folks do like to fly through those narrow concrete barriers.
the haps:
Crossroads Art Center (located near Staples Mill and Broad) is opening an exhibition this weekend: ‘Ode to Richmond’. I first read about this in the RVA 5×5 newsletter from John Baliles. Here’s an excerpt from ‘Ode to Richmond’, a poem by Roscoe Burnems, RVA’s First Poet Laureate, 2021:
A body of tattoos in abstraction and technicolor, of joy, of memories, of hurt.
Richmond is home to some of the greatest art on earth.
A reflection of its people. A tell-tale of its ghosts,
found in the heart of the music,
in poetry, and most
never truly appreciate the frame of thought,
when imagination cannot be caught in woven
cotton and needs space for anarchy
and chaos and craft and desires to be free.
That is when Richmond becomes a gallery.
the tangent:
One youtuber I enjoy is Jomboy, he is known for doing lip readings, but comedically covers a variety of sports topics with a focus on baseball. In this video he shows a pitcher’s disappointment with a home run. The launch angle was 40 degrees and the exit velocity 96 mph; he overlays every other hit this season with those parameters and none of them went yard.
the dive:
Graham Moomaw from the Mercury continues to report on the slot machine lookalikes as he’s done for the past 3 years.
The lobbying effort is being led largely by Pace-O-Matic, a Georgia-based skill game company that’s become a major campaign donor to both parties in Virginia and has made contributions to both Youngkin and Democratic General Assembly leaders. The company has also hired Sen. Bill Stanley, R-Franklin, to perform legal work on its behalf and has hosted other senators at a rodeo event it sponsors every summer in Wyoming.
Yes Pace-o-Matic was created by Michael Pace, the “father of the countertop video game”, who sports a cowboy hat and bolo tie.
Virginians Against Neighborhood Slot Machines, an anti-skill game advocacy group funded by casinos that see the machines as undermining their more heavily regulated facilities, said it’s a waste of time and money to extend the special session to accommodate skill games.
I find it frustrating that so often when legislatures debate the legality of gambling in various states, the two sides arguing both want gambling, but in a different place, while lobbying behind names like “Virginian’s Against Neighborhood Slot Machines”. The 2010 documentary film “Casino Jack and the United States of Money” dives even further into the lengths lobbyists will go to feign caring about communities and the negative externalities of the proliferation of legalized gambling.
the vibe:
Cool downtown photo walk from r/rva:
Have a rainy but beautiful day RVA!
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