FOR A LONG time now I've wondered what it is going to look like when I head up to the top step of the Rotunda and set off on my last walk down the Lawn as an undergraduate.
Almost a month after its controversial performance during half time of the Continental Tire Bowl, the future of the Virginia Pep Band remains sure.
Wayne Russell is a man not easily shaken from the task at hand. Even as a naked student on a bicycle rode down the center of the Lawn on a chilly late afternoon, Russell gave the incident little more than a shake of his head as he went about his work. There was no time to waste -- the University's second annual Lighting of the Lawn is just days away and Russell, the University's electrical maintenance supervisor, and his two man crew still have thousands of lights to hang before the switch can be thrown Thursday night at 9. Sponsored by the Fourth-Year Class Trustees, tomorrow evening's event is expected to draw somewhere around 4,000 University and community members.
Although her establishment sits on a road named Water Street across from the Downtown Mall, Alice Kim, owner and manager of Oxo restaurant, has, like all Charlottesville restaurateurs, seen the resource for which her street is named become a precious and limited commodity in the past two months. This week, Kim and her fellow restaurant owners around the city will finally be able to reconsider their drastic water conservation policies that they have been forced to implement this fall to comply with local water restrictions.
For more than three decades, a small number of University students annually find reprieve from their college monetary woes by locking themselves in a hotel room and blowing their nose for dollars. Last month, a $2.2 million grant from the National Institutes of Health raised the stakes once again for students hoping to gain a spot in this lesser-known University tradition -- the University Health System's annual cold study. The new NIH grant will fund a three-year clinical study on whether echinacea, a popular supplement that is a leading seller on the herbal market, can be used to fight the common cold.
Across the University, students are getting that feeling in the pit of their stomachs that somehow brings to mind the final agonizing days of an adolescent Christmas season.
In the onslaught of pre-class parties, first-year debauchery and general rowdiness that defines late August at the University, the world of American politics gradually has become a dull afterthought in the minds of University students.
I think it was the fourth cup of coffee that finally gave me the courage to introduce myself. For the past 45 minutes I had been sitting on my broken bar stool - waiting, hoping some- one else would make the first move.
As hundreds of potential first years stroll Grounds this week and next, many will decide whether to come to the University based on the taste of the dinning hall food or the cleanliness of the dorm room they happen to visit.
Due in part to an alarming rise in the illicit usage of the painkiller drug OxyContin, the Virginia General Assembly passed legislation earlier this month which will require the Director of the Department of Health Professions to establish the Prescription Monitoring Program.
