Now it’s Old Dominion University’s turn to weather a scandal. When critics questioned the legitimacy of the degree that Virginia Commonwealth University awarded to then-Richmond Police Chief Rodney Monroe, the Richmond university found itself standing waist deep in muck as Monroe left to take the reins of the Charlotte-Mecklenburg, N.C., police force.

Sometimes, a jilted lover needs a one-night stand. So a group of us left baseball-dry Richmond one evening in July and headed to Petersburg. From our vantage point in a beer garden—no brew allowed in the bleachers—we watched the home-team Generals come from behind to beat the Edenton, N.C., Steamers at the Petersburg Sports Complex.

Rural America may be an ideal spot to raise children, but it’s increasingly no place for mom and pop. Wal-Mart Stores Inc. wants to plant its giant footprint in eastern Powhatan County. And family-owned Powhatan Pharmacy & Gifts lies right in its path. In this case, mom and pop are Carol and Jim Gregg, who have run the pharmacy for 35 years. “We were here when you didn’t have any stoplights,“ Jim Gregg recalled yesterday.

As the Shockoe game plan for downtown Richmond switched from bats and balls to scalpels and sutures, Carey and Cookie Padgett pitched bird-watching as a boon for the Bottom. On Tuesday evening, the West End couple visited 17th Street in search of purple martins, which return each summer to swoop and swirl around the Bottom’s Bradford pear trees.

As she sat on a wall outside the North Avenue Public Library yesterday, Angel Harris recalled a raucous scene six weeks ago across the street at the Cultural Diversity Center. Angel, 15, said a guy at a CDC teenage dance party pulled a chair into the middle of the floor in anticipation of a lap dance from another teen. Security prevented him from getting his wish during what was billed as a “bikini and short-shorts” party, she recalled.

Upon learning that the restroom at Amtrak’s Staples Mill Station was off-limits to cab drivers, Ray Muhammad fired off a letter to the boss of the passenger-rail service. “We provide a vital service to Amtrak riders by getting them to their final destinations and had always viewed train and taxi services as complementary,“ he wrote to Joseph Boardman.

Columnist Michael Paul Williams is out of the office. His column will resume Saturday.

Sounding more like Malcolm X than Patrick Henry, Virginia political candidate Catherine Crabill warned of armed insurrection during a Northern Neck “tea party” last month. “We have a chance to fight this battle at the ballot box, before we have to resort to the bullet box,“ said Crabill, the Republican nominee for the 99th District seat in the House of Delegates.

The Burial Ground for Negroes could have provided a teachable moment for Virginia Commonwealth University. Instead, the repaving of a parking lot built near, or possibly above, Richmond’s oldest municipal cemetery for blacks has again pitted the educational leviathan against a small but vocal group of protesters. Rather than excavating the site north of East Broad Street near Interstate 95, VCU is heaping yet another indignity upon the buried slaves and free blacks. It’s moving us further away from a Shockoe Bottom campus connecting the long-buried pieces of Richmond’s slave-trade history.

MICHAEL PAUL WILLIAMS Local Columnist Chesterfield, you have a problem. It’s not, as some readers suggest, clueless Yankee drivers, “locals who drive as if they’re in a coma” or “fat people yakking on their cell phones.“ It’s drunken drivers, speed demons and folks who refuse to buckle their seat belts, all with deadly results.

The disinterment of graves as part of an alleged scheme to resell funeral plots at a Chicago cemetery recently outraged a nation. But at historic Evergreen Cemetery along Richmond’s border with eastern Henrico County, families feel compelled by its neglect and desecration to dig up the remains of loved ones and bury them elsewhere. Where is our outrage?

Gates, chairman of the Afro-American Studies Department at Harvard University, had been arrested at his Cambridge, Mass., home by police Sgt. James Crowley, who is white. President Barack Obama accused police of acting “stupidly.“ Battle lines were drawn, much as they had been at Gates’ Harvard Square residence. No one could accuse the National Organization of Black Law Enforcement Executives of closing ranks around a police officer. NOBLE President Joseph A. McMillan expressed concern about “the arrest of a man in his own home, after he had provided proper identification and proven that he was not breaking into the home, but was the home’s owner.“

Thirteen months before the notorious school massacre, a file was created on the future killer. It contained damning evidence against Eric Harris, whose Web site contained violent threats. Harris, along with Dylan Klebold, would kill 12 students and wound 21 others at Columbine High School on April 20, 1999. According to author Dave Cullen in his book “Columbine,“ the file compiled by a Jefferson County, Colo., detective on Harris was never acted upon and mysteriously disappeared.

Robert Miller, who says he just discovered the missing mental health files of Seung-Hui Cho, should have said the dog ate it.  People might have believed that.

Neat or on the rocks? Single or double? Shaken or stirred? Or how about the question foremost on the minds of Virginians who purchase alcohol: public or private? Republican gubernatorial candidate Bob McDonnell is serving up the latest recipe for privatizing li quor sales in Virginia. And it comes with a twist. McDonnell would dedicate the revenue from this privatization of the state’s 335 ABC stores to the state’s road-maintenance fund.