The week in review
Most trespassers: The UVA Foundation charges 23 UVA students and their grad student teacher with trespassing September 23 for taking a detective-fiction class field trip to the derelict Blue Ridge Hospital grounds, Kate Andrews reports in the Daily Progress. Charges against the amateur sleuths are dropped.
Worst career move: The award-winning teacher, Justin Gifford, is fired October 4.
Biggest appeal: George and Lisa Robinson's case in Juvenile & Domestic Court that netted them eight years for serving alcohol to minors, then 27 months in Circuit Court, will be heard by the intermediate Court of Appeals of Virginia.
Biggest brawl: Police arrest six men early September 30 in the parking lot of Wolfie's and charge them with disorderly conduct, public intoxication– and in one case, resisting arrest.
Most common surname among those arrested at Wolfie's: Five out of six bear the name Brock– Lawrence and Miguel of Ruckersville, Douglas, Travis, and Lance of Bealeton.
Biggest pot seizure: Hunters find 115 14-foot-tall marijuana plants in the woods near Barboursville.
Worst flooding: Victory Stadium in Roanoke is under water September 28 after Hurricane Jeanne side-swipes the area. Southwest Virginia is particularly hard hit, with at least one death.
Loudest flood victim: A screaming Landen Eugene Shifflett is charged with public intoxication after he's rescued from the bed of a Ford Ranger stuck in high water in Waynesboro September 21, the News-Virginian reports.
Worst wages: The loss of jobs over the past five years at manufacturing plants such as Comdial, ConAgra, and Technicolor took 3,100 jobs averaging $660 a week. New jobs in food service average $217, according to a study by the Thomas Jefferson Partnership for Economic Development.
Richest students: More than half of last year's incoming class at UVA reports family incomes of $100,000 or more, according to USA Today.
Most expensive speaker: The agent of Fahrenheit 9/11 director Michael Moore is asking for $50,000 for him to come to UVA October 29, according to the Cav Daily. George Mason University cancels an October 28, $35,000 visit by Moore after a Republican state legislator complains about such use of public funds just days before the election.
Worst wait for waffles: Two black customers are suing Waffle Houses in Hopewell and Fredericksburg for allegedly rude treatment and being ignored while white patrons who came in later were served.
Sweetest recognition: UVA alum Edward Jones, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Known World, adds a $500,000 MacArthur Grant to his list of awards.
Biggest bingo embezzlement: $350,000, according to charges filed against Jackie Lee Southern, former president of the Skating Club of Staunton, a nonprofit licensed to hold bingo games, according to the Augusta Free Press.
Biggest "oops": Third, fourth, and fifth graders at tony Alexandria Country Day School are accidentally served margaritas left from a faculty and board of trustees party that kitchen staff mistook for limeade September 10, the Washington Post reports. Students declare the tequila-laced concoction "gross."
Most local connections on Page Six: Former New York Islanders owner John O. Pickett Jr., who sold historic Enniscorthy to indicted former Tyco CFO Mark Swartz, has made another notorious sale, this time in Palm Beach– to President Bush buddy and possible next treasury secretary Steve Schwarzman, who irked the community when he razed the historic $20 million estate he bought from Pickett in 2003. Also, a blind item in the September 29 New York Post column notes the alleged affair of a married network news vet who visited his girlfriend at UVA over the weekend.
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