Prosecutor makes case

Story by Chris Graham

“Inga.”

It was the big to-do back in 1968 when it was released in America.

“Filmed entirely in Sweden,” a snapshot on movietime.com relates, “‘Inga’ brims with a European sensuality and eroticism that shocked American audiences upon its release in 1968.”

That about sums it up right there, doesn’t it?

“When I got word that a local theatre was about to show the 1968 XXX-rated movie, ‘Inga,’ I wrote a letter of warning, telling them that pornographic exhibitions would not be tolerated,” Staunton Commonwealth’s attorney Ray Robertson wrote in his book, More Tales from the Trenches, released in November, “and that while I could not promise a conviction, I surely could promise a prosecution. They would be showing it at their own peril!” Read more

Downtown vs. The West End: Is economic development a zero-sum game?

Story by Chris Graham

It wasn’t that there was much left downtown, but Phil Lemons knew that whatever traffic there had been before the West End took off with the opening of Wal-Mart in Waynesboro in 2003 was pretty much going, going, gone.

“Having experienced it in other towns, whenever a shopping center comes to the town, it just draws the flow of traffic to that area. It was a natural when that started happening here - that we had to just jump in on it,” said Lemons, who moved Lemons’ Jewelry from its Downtown Waynesboro home of more than a quarter century to a strip shopping center adjacent to the Wal-Mart Supercenter on Lucy Lane in 2005. Read more

Long-term perspective on downtown development

Story by Chris Graham

Somebody asked Don Morris to sign a petition protesting the pending arrival of Wal-Mart in Waynesboro six years ago.

That the longtime Downtown Waynesboro business owner didn’t is an indication of where his thoughts are on economic-development issues.

“That to me was a no-brainer. Staunton had a Wal-Mart, Staunton had a Lowe’s. It might have been different if they didn’t have them. But why not get our share?” said Morris, the owner of Valley Framing Studio and Art Gallery. Read more

Imbalance of power: Rural legislators facing longer odds in wake of Democratic Senate takeover

Story by Chris Graham

Wondering what the new Democratic Party majority in the Virginia Senate means for rural Virginia?

The chair of the Senate Agriculture, Conservation and Natural Resources Committee is from Alexandria.

You know, in Northern Virginia.

Extreme

Northern Virginia.

“That was really the power shift, much more than how everybody’s focused on Republican-Democrat. It’s really the power shift to Northern Virginia and the urban areas and away from rural areas that was the big thing,” said Augusta County Republican Sen. Emmett Hanger, who had been in line to assume the duties as chair of the Agriculture, Conservation and Natural Resources Committee had the GOP retained the majority in the Senate on Election Day in November. Read more

Caged fury: Inside the rough and ready world of MMA

Story by Chris Graham

Amid a backdrop of men of various sizes and numbers of tattoos alternatively kicking and punching the air and occasionally a trainer wielding oversized protective gloves, the almost preternatural calm of Tyler Moyer stood out to me.

At least what I was reading was calm. I soon found out that he was a bundle of nerves inside - and for good reason.

I mean, you know, he was on his way to nine minutes of getting punched in the face and kicked in the thigh and choked and scratched and whatever else can happen in an MMA fight. Read more

No bull

Story by Chris Graham

So I’m talking with MMA athlete Dustin Honeycutt backstage about his match - which he lost by submission - and about the broken thumb that he suffered early on that pretty much ate away his chances of coming out on top. Read more

Standup kinda guy

Story by Chris Graham

The game plan for 24-year-old Adam Prickett going into his Mixed Martial Arts in the Valley IV fight with Eric Ohene-Bekoe had been to keep things at standup as much as possible.

But the Verona man went back to his training at Valley Chute Box in Harrisonburg and decided to shoot for Ohene-Bekoe’s legs just to see where his ground game was.

“I felt it was pretty easy to take him down. And I thought it might be in my best interests to keep it that way. So we changed what we were going to do,” Prickett said after scoring a majority decision over Ohene-Bekoe at the November event at the Rockingham County Fairgrounds. Read more

Scarin’ up trouble: Explanations for things that go bump in the night vary widely

Story by Chris Graham

“Why do you guys always do this kind of thing at night?” a student asked Terry Howell, the founder of the Central Virginia Paranormal Research Group, who was at Randolph College earlier this year to investigate the longstanding tale of ghosts haunting the former women’s school.

“If something’s there,” Howell said in response, “it’s there during the day as well as at night. You know, after the sun goes down, and people kind of get settled down, it’s a little easier to use your equipment.

“Ghosts are there during the day as well as at night …” he continued, but something interrupted when he said the word “ghosts.” Read more

A last mile in their shoes: Rural communities struggle to get even broadband footing

Story by Chris Graham

It doesn’t take a mathematician to figure out why Nelson County lacks even adequate broadband infrastructure.

The county’s 15,000 residents are spread out over 471 square miles - and without a true population center, it is essentially cost-prohibitive for broadband carriers to be able to lay down the fiber that would be needed to accommodate high-speed Internet-access needs.

That’s not their problem, of course - though the fact that this issue is not the problem of broadband carriers doesn’t make Maureen Corum’s job any easier. Read more

Global Boring and Power to the People

Column by Erik Curren

“The media backlash is just beginning,” says an editorial in the Ecologist, an edgy environmental magazine out of Britain. “Slowly, almost imperceptibly, global warming is morphing into ‘global boring’.”

It’s not that anyone much outside of talk radio questions the science anymore – led by Newt Gingrich, serious Republican leaders are now saying that climate change is real, it’s caused by humans, it’s dangerous, and the only way to fight it is to cut our fossil fuel pollution. GOP presidential frontrunner Rudy Giuliani says he “definitely” believes in global warming and has praised California for its efforts to cut greenhouse pollution, while second-place contender Mitt Romney has started to waffle on climate change but does support a national policy to encourage energy conservation. Read more

Generation Next: Kids of the ’70s, ’80s now taking leadership role in state government

Story by Chris Graham

We grew up with “Family Ties” and cable TV, trips to the mall and video games.

Then they called us Generation X - and no, we didn’t know what that was supposed to mean, either.

Now we’re in our 30s - and maybe it’s the remote control and microwave oven that forced this on us, but we’re not interested in sitting around and waiting for our parents’ generation to hand the mantle of leadership over.

“Here in Richmond, we seemed to have missed a step. We have the 60- and 70-year-olds who are still there - and they never wanted to give up power, and the baby boomers were sort of told, Wait your turn, and a lot of them did wait their turn,” said Jenn McClellan, 34, a Richmond Democrat who represents the 71st House District in the Virginia General Assembly. Read more

The ‘local’ in local TV: Public stations struggle to produce quality programming on tight budgets

Story by Chris Graham

I had an inkling as to what the meeting was going to be about - just from the tone of the e-mail.

The station management at WVPT, a public-television station based in Harrisonburg whose audience over the air extends from Charlottesville to Winchester and by satellite stretches into the Washington, D.C., market, had requested a meeting with me to talk about my fledgling monthly TV show, “Virginia Viewpoints.” Read more

A Little Grill and A Great Idea!

Story by Stephanie Pendleton

When arriving at The Little Grill Collective in Harrisonburg, crowds of fashionable hipsters and health-conscious patrons make lines in and out side of the door.

The place is always crowded. Especially on Mondays. Mondays are free. It’s like a soup kitchen, only the dining is family-style.

Ron Copeland greets his customers with an announcement. He tells everyone that there will be chicken, fries from their own garden, salad, and about five other foods, including a desert of apple pie. Read more

How Not to Decorate Your Home for the Holidays

Column by Matthew Warner

“Let’s face it, lining the walkway to one’s front door with headless creatures, bones and blood is not the way to make a child feel welcome.”

— Jenelle Watson

As I watch Christmas decorations go up, I’m reminded of a fascinating drama that played out last year in my local newspaper, The News Leader of Staunton, Virginia. In Jenelle Watson’s Oct. 22, 2006 column, “Holiday gore just not for me,” she complained that Halloween displays were too scary for her daughters, aged 3 and 4. For example, she bemoaned the “evil-looking devil creature” at the Wal-Mart entrance.

In particular, she singled out a Halloween motif in her own neighborhood, where she’d lived for less than a year. A particular house initially delighted her children by going all out for the holidays - singlehandedly emitting more light (assumably, Christmas lights) than everyone in her tiny hometown could have produced in cooperation. But now her kids were afraid of her neighbor’s “macabre decoration.” She gave anecdotes about how her girls cried and begged not to go near it and how they vowed not to trick-or-treat there “no matter how much candy the owners have.” She concluded her column with a list of “rules” for Halloween decorating based on her polling of preschool children. Good: pumpkins (without scary teeth) and gourds. Bad: spiders, ghosts, and realistic monsters. Read more

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