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The candidates are hammering at each other, talking over each other, each tossing out talking points like crumbs to the pigeons. You come away from a presidential debate with some vague notion of who prevailed, but what actually got said? It flies by so fast, it's hard to recall.

So, to sort out Friday's debate between John McCain and Barack Obama, I took the text of the debate as transcribed by Congressional Quarterly and reported by the New York Times and converted each candidates remarks into two different quick read visualizations. One is a tag cloud, and the other is something called a "word tree." Read more »

Well, the evidence is in. It's not a pretty picture.

The health department released reports from the latest inspections of the Roanoke City Market Building's 10 restaurants on Tuesday. What emerges is not the image of a small rodent issue. Mouse "excreta" - poop to us regular folks - was found in essentially every corner and every stall of the building.

The building was shut down and all its vendors' licenses suspended after a health department inspection Friday. Read the reports yourselves here. Links are on the left side of the page about half-way down.

Some had worse problems than others. Read more »

The Roanoke City Market Building and its 10 restaurants are about an 8-minute walk from my office. I eat there twice a week at least. I've never looked at the Virgina Department of Health's inspection reports for those restaurants, even though I have link to the search in the DataSphere.

I guess I preferred my ignorance of how clean the building is.

But over the weekend the building was shut down because of a rodent problem found by health inspectors. Details are thin at this point on exactly what inspectors found. Actual rodents? Droppings? What kind of rodent? And where?! One shudders at the possbilities.

Now, curious, I've been looking at past inspection reports online, and thought it worthwhile to remind you, gentle reader, that you can do the same on the VDH website. There's a search box on the left side. I searched on the word "market" to get a list that included all of the restaurants in the market building. You can click down to details of the violations cited in each inspection. Some are as recent as last month. Others go back to December.

Rather than summarize the results for 10 different vendors, I'll let you see what's there for yourself. You'll find violations for pretty much all of them at some point.

Some of the violations will be called "critical." But I encourage you to read what the actual violations are, and to check out their definitions. You hear the word "critical," and you think of Band Aids in sandwiches and roaches in salads. But more often those critical violations have to do with proper storage of food with regard to temperature, or things like food workers drinking from soda cups with no lids in the food preparation area.

To be sure, there are disgusting things documented among the critical violations, but not every critical violation is something so horrifying as to make you nauseous.

That said, you might also consider not only quality, but quantity. What if a restaurant has not a couple of critical violations, but, say, ten? (And, in fact, one restaurant -- Zorba's, where the Jamaica Joe's special is one of my favorites -- did have 10 during an August inspection.)

And then there's rodents. Yeah, I think that meets my definition of critical.

None of this covers the latest inspection which prompted the building's closure. Again, what was found -- and where?

In the urge to assess blame, those things matter.

With ten vendors in one space, can you single out those at fault, or are they all partly responsible? And don't forget the building's owner and management -- the city of Roanoke. What is the the city's responsibility in all of this? Can the city totally shift blame to the tenants, when the building is under its oversight? Or vice versa?

Before deciding that, let's see what this latest report says. Keep watching roanoke.com for that.

Elvis, even in the paunchy, ill-advised jumpsuit era, could put butts in seats.

Ten thousand at a time at the Roanoke Civic Center back in the mid-1970s.

Even my sweet, Catholic and dearly departed mother saw The King there once. She took my grandmother and sister, too. The phony karate poses, sweaty scarves wafted into the crowd, uncountable sequins, and my mother and grandmother in the crowd You get the picture.

That was in the mid-1970s. Who puts butts in seats these days?

My colleagues Mason Adams and Pete Dybhdal have been working on a package of stories about the future of our local civic centers, in Roanoke and Salem, and the extent to which they have to be subsidized because they aren't profitable on their own.

That got me wondering, of all the events held at these venues, which are the best attended?

Both host numerous events where organizations rent the facilities, but I wasn't interested in those. I wanted to know what people are willing to pay for -- and what it might say about our tastes as a community.

Is it Kid Rock, or Keith Urban? The Wiggles, or WWE? The mud bog or the symphony?

Read more »

Baristas, dishwashers, mobile pet groomers.

A healer, an activist for common sense, a happy warrior.

You think political contributors, and you might be tempted to think of fat cats, but a lot of other folks give to presidential campaigns. Regular folks, not-so-rich folks, funny folks.

In all, presidential candidates have rounded up more than 89,000 individual contributions in Virginia this election cycle. Democrat Barack Obama, who refused public money for this campaign and has to raise dough on his own, garnered 44,200 contributions, compared to 14,000 for McCain, who accepted public financing.

Who are these people? I wondered. So I looked through the latest batch of campaign finance data from the Federal Elections Commission.

There are plenty of the people you'd expect, and plenty which, if you didn't necessarily expect, have job titles that don't leap off the list: attorneys, homemakers, vice presidents, CEOs, physicians, professors, teachers, soldiers, sailors.

But I looked for the outliers, the oddballs, the freaks. And I found them.

Read more »

Used to be if you wanted to know anything about who was financing political campaigns, you had to find paper records and peruse them yourself, or wait for some news organization to do it for you -- and then tell you the parts it thought were most interesting.

Not these days. Now you can find scads and scads of campaign finance data on the Web which you can search yourself.

In Virginia, we're lucky to the the Virginia Public Access Project, which offers campaign contribution and expenditure data from statewide races all the way down to your local city council. It's run by David Poole, a veteran political reporter who used to write for us here at The Roanoke Times.

If you want to go federal, check out the Federal Elections Commission. That's where you find stuff on contributors to the presidential campaigns, as well as U.S. Senate and House of Representatives races.

So, dig in and, if you find anything interesting, let me know. Happy searching...

You keep hearing it, and yet, after 10 straight presidential elections in which Virginia has been a given for Republicans, it’s hard to believe that a state which hasn’t gone for a Democrat since Lyndon Johnson is really “in play.”

I’ve looked at the numbers, and I’m beginning to understand why some people do believe it.

There’s plenty of evidence that both Democrats and Republicans believe it – at least for now. When was the last time a Democratic candidate for president made more than an obligatory pass through Virginia? Not in my memory. Yet Barack Obama has made at least a half-dozen stops in the state since he secured the Democratic nomination this summer. And this week John McCain and Sarah Palin came through, too.

A recent Time/CNN poll puts McCain ahead in Virginia.

But do history and the numbers bear out the candidates' sudden interest?

Read more »

So, we’ve got eight weeks or so until time to vote for president.

Still can’t decide which way to go? Sometimes it just helps to have the data, and one organization out there is offering a way to collect the data on your own views and match you up with the candidate that best suits you – as long as it’s a major party candidate.

The site is called Democracy in Motion, and it’s presented as a non-partisan means of helping people get involved in the election. In it’s own words:

“Voters are exposed to so much spin and there is so little substantive discussion in the media, it's hard to know where the candidates really stand.

We highlight the major issues in which the parties substantially differ. We provide a description of each issue and a summary of each party's position. There are also links to official party platforms and other informative sites so you can do more research on your own.”

You click through a series of issues – same-sex marriage, gun control, abortion, taxes, energy – and choose a statement that matches your position. You also rate how important that issue is to you. Or you can just skip an issue. At the end it tells you who you ought to vote for.

Think match.com for politics.

Just made the weekly update to our Roanoke Valley crime data, and the Salem felony data.

As always, let us know if you notice anything interesting. Just drop me a note at matt.chittum@roanoke.com or post a comment here.

Virginia Tech's loss to East Carolina Saturday in Charlotte wasn't a surprise just because Tech was a perennial power ranked #17 going up against a smaller, unranked program from a mid-size conference.

Search through Tech's record under Coach Frank Beamer (The Datasphere's Beamer File), and you find the loss is exceptional in a number of ways.

-- Tech has played seven games in the month of August under Beamer, and lost only one, in 2004, to USC -- ironically the same team that bludgeoned UVa in its opener Saturday. (The 2000 season opener against Georgia Tech was cancelled mid-game due to lightning.)

-- Tech is 15-5 in season openers under Beamer. It's last loss was that same USC game in 2004. For the next opening game loss, you have to go all the way back to 1995.

-- Tech is 9-4 against ECU. For the last loss to ECU, go all the way back to a game in 1992.

UVa's 52-7 shellacking Saturday was less surprising, and not only because they were taking on a visiting USC team that came with a #3 ranking. Here's what The Groh Profile shows:

-- UVa is 1-4 in August since 2001, when Al Groh took over the head coaching job.

-- The Cavs are just 3-5 in season openers under Groh.

-- It was the Cavaliers first game against USC or any PAC 10 opponent, but their third game against a top 5 opponent during Groh's tenure. The were 1-1 before Saturday, including a 2005 upset of #4 Florida State.