Nearly nine years ago when I was moving back to Virginia, I had to pick a place to live. Somehow, we ended up in southwestern Chesterfield with a house on a lot with huge loblolly pine trees — an attraction that I guess involved me somehow channeling Eastern North Carolina where I had lived off…

Years after the introduction of the Internet, it seems amazing that some citizens of the Old Dominion do not have access to broadband, but that’s the way it is. For-profit companies ignore mountainous areas or poor flatlands because they claim it costs too much to pay the installation costs. For several years, governments have promised…

I took a pleasant spring break trip last week, but my love-hate relationship with Richmond came roaring back to life. That gnawing emotion came back when my wife and I traveled to the Low Country of South Carolina and spent a rainy night in charming Charleston. When I left, I asked myself the usual question…

It’s Good Friday and thoughts turn to the resurrection. But that begs some questions about Virginia, religion, bias and other oddities, not to mention myths. A couple of months ago, I was driving and listened to a “Fresh Air” segment that actually ran on NPR a year before. The guest was Steven Waldman who had…

Consider this, a “Wait, wait, there’s more” posting. Jim Bacon just noted the interest of the Chinese and Russians in using the Internet to disrupt American infrastructure such as electrical grids and the like. Well, Politico reports that the Pentagon has been getting into the act in its own way. Last month, it staged a…

Could it be that there is life in passenger rail in the Old Dominion after all? Such could be the good news now that the Commonwealth Transportation Board has agreed to spend $25.2 million over the next three years to add two new passenger trains from Washington — one to Richmond and the other to…

Months ago EMR promised Larry Gross a response on the issue of Zip Codes as a source of information. Here is an excerpt from Chapter 35 in PART TEN of TRILO-G: ………………… Data from Postal Zip Codes provides an excellent example of what is wrong with current data resources. This post might be labeled “More…

When I worked in Moscow for a total of six years in the 1980s and 1990s, my office was a converted, two bedroom apartment with a small bathroom with a bathtub and a balcony that titled precipitously towards the nine-story drop. We crammed at least five people at any time in the news bureau of…

It’s always amazed me how people tend to fall back to religion when they face confounding times. So it is with conservatives and free-marketers who have become unscrewed by the free-falling economy, the failure of laissez faire theories and the profound sense of apprehension and bewilderment as Barack Obama, an entirely unknown entity, gropes for…

What ARE you REALLY drinking? Yellow River Sweat Equity. Urban Development Zones. Five Acre Urban Lot Realty The 9 March Post TREATING SEWERAGE RIGHT generated several very useful comments. Separating the wheat from the chaff: What ARE you REALLY drinking? and what ARE you REALLY flushing into the ground water, the streams and the Bay?…

GROVETON’S LEXICON AND TMT’S LOCATION VARIABLE COSTS – NOTES FROM UNDERWATER MORTGAGE COMMENTS: Groveton, Good to hear from you. You are right that the term “McMansion” is used to describe a range of inappropriately-scaled shelter options but as far as causing wide-spread confusion, it is not in the same league with the Core Confusing Words.…

For once, the Richmond Times-Dispatch has gotten something right, Or, at least, columnist Michael Paul Williams has, but then he usually does. Williams says that instead of a major, $330 million ballpark and assorted retail, office and condos in Richmond’s Shockoe Bottom, Doug Wilder’s failed National Slavery Museum should be built there. That makes sense.…

The Piedmont Environmental Council case against the high-voltage transmission line across the Northern Virginia piedmont is still alive and kicking. First, the PEC scored a victory in the Fourth Circuit Appeals. This comes straight from a PEC email update: “The US Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals in Richmond yesterday released its decision in a case…

BR readers must read Niall Ferguson’s “The Ascent of Money: A Financial History” (2008). This historian, I say again – historian, nails the current economic crisis when he is writing back in 2007. Calling it blow by blow and laying out the options so accurately validates his credentials. Ferguson’s book is a tour de force…

The horror story of Lynchburg’s Peanut Corporation of America only gets more gruesome. This little company that operated out of a backyard garage is involved with the deaths of nine people and illness of 637 others in 44 states and Canada from Salmonella due to egregiously unsanitary working conditions at PCAs plants in Georgia, Texas…