🐍 Good morning, RVA: Wastewater is cool, state budget, sweetgum spikey fruit

Good morning, RVA! It’s 51 °F, and we’ve got a warm day ahead of us. Expect highs in the 70s and a skinny chance of rain—mostly later in the afternoon. If today looks good, tomorrow looks fantastic. Enjoy!
 

Water cooler

It’s Tuesday, and the COVID-19 Community Level is LOW for Richmond, Henrico, and Chesterfield. In fact, most of Virginia sits at the low level, with just a few counties at medium (including Powhatan County to our west). Across the country and across the commonwealth cases, hospitalizations, and deaths are all trending generally downward. Personally, I think it’s a great time to take advantage of the lower risk levels to get out there and do some stuff…because those risk levels—and the amount of disease spreading around in our communities—are bound to change. To that point, here’s last week’s State of Affairs post from Katelyn Jetelina, which mostly focuses on the rise of BA.2 across Europe and its possible impact on the United States. Jetelina also links to this fun(?) wastewater monitoring website which does show an increase in COVID-19 detected in wastewater pretty much everywhere. As you can see from the graphs, using wastewater surveillance to detect COVID-19 can act as an early indicator to actual cases of COVID-19. So, given the increases, will we soon see another coronawave? A coronaplateau? Some other coronashape? We’ll have to wait and watch, unfortunately. Anyway, aside from the deadly disease aspect of things, wastewater surveillance is pretty neat and useful stuff, plus it’s sewer-adjacent so you know I love it. P.S. Caveat to the aforelinked site: I have no idea where their data comes from and which cities participate, but you can find the CDC’s wastewater surveillance data here if you want to poke around.
 

I don’t know that I’m smart enough to understand what’s going on with the state’s budget! Patrick Wilson and Michael Martz at the Richmond Times-Dispatch have this General Assembly update from yesterday’s Special Session, and it sounds like budget negotiators from either side are generally optimistic? I dunno. The Governor’s still out there trying to roll back the gas tax despite he himself acknowledging that there’s no guarantee the tax cut will actually save anyone any money, and that sounds like one of the major remaining political sticking points. Democratic Leader Eileen Fill-Corn was certainly unhappy with the situation, though, that’s for sure. I guess we’ll learn more later this week?
 

City Council statements about replacing George Wythe continue! Today you’ve got one from 6th District Councilmember Ellen Robertson. You can read the full statement here (pasted from my email into a text document and uploaded to the internet because who can even find a way to link to Constant Contact emails on the web??). She calls the situation a “crisis that Council faces and the School Board faces” and a “watershed moment.” She also says she’s “committed to compromise,” which makes me think that she doesn’t have a ton of interest in handing over the money to start redesigning a George Wythe replacement without at least some sort of movement towards building a bigger school.
 

Via /r/rva, this incredibly in-depth discussion about sweetgums and what to do about their spikey fruits that pile up in yards across the region. As Wikipedia says, in surprisingly tight prose, “The long-persisting fallen spiked fruits can be unpleasant to walk on; sweet gum is banned in some places for this reason. In abundance, they can leave a lawn lumpy.”
 

Finally, in my scrub through that really neat video from Richmond in 1970, I missed some important details about the protest featured in the back half of the film: At least one of the signs says “This store should be on Monument Avenue”! @cagraham on Twitter places the location at 28th & Leigh and points out that it’s probably a protest of a white-owned business in a predominately Black neighborhood. Like I said yesterday, I’d love to learn more!
 

This morning’s longread

I would like to be paid like a plumber

I don’t know that I have a ton of interest in the recording industry, but I found this letter from an engineer to Nirvana pitching them on why they should hire him to record In Utero fascinating.
 

I think the very best thing you could do at this point is exactly what you are talking about doing: bang a record out in a couple of days, with high quality but minimal “production” and no interference from the front office bulletheads. If that is indeed what you want to do, I would love to be involved. If, instead, you might find yourselves in the position of being temporarily indulged by the record company, only to have them yank the chain at some point (hassling you to rework songs/sequences/production, calling-in hired guns to “sweeten” your record, turning the whole thing over to some remix jockey, whatever…) then you’re in for a bummer and I want no part of it. I’m only interested in working on records that legitimately reflect the band’s own perception of their music and existence. If you will commit yourselves to that as a tenet of the recording methodology, then I will bust my ass for you. I’ll work circles around you. I’ll rap your head with a ratchet…
 

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Picture of the Day

Cobra Cabana at night—good urban fabric stuff going on here!