Three Days Grace Playing RBC Center
Three Days Grace , Adelitas Way, and Chevelle will be coming to the RBC Center on Saturday, April 10.
Canes Poised for Playoff Run?
After an abysmal start to the season, the Carolina Hurricanes enter the Olympic Break as the NHL’s hottest team. Is there room to make the playoffs? Let’s see…
The boys are only about 8 points out of being in the conversation. Had they just won 1 game every month, we’d be right about where the team is in the standings most seasons. Perhaps the playoff cutoff will be lower than the typical 93 points, because the current 8th place team is going to have to go 14-3-1 to get to 93.
So maybe the cutoff isn’t 93 this season. With around 20 games to go, and with a playoff-level team winning 60% of the time and, therefore, earning 24 more points, I’m thinking the cutoff will around 87 for the East this season.
In order to get 87 standings points, the Canes will have to get 32 points in the remaining 21 games. So, they will have to close out the season with a 16-5 (76%) record. So really, Rutherford should trade every unrestricted free agent, limit practices, and perhaps have the team meals at the Raleigh Convention Center to assure that this team tanks and gets at least a decent draft pick for putting the fans through that horrible first third of the season. There sure are some nice draft picks to get this year.
Michael Franti & Spearhead to Headline Band Together
Band Together NC , a nonprofit organization that uses musical events to raise funds and awareness for select Triangle charities, has announced that acclaimed reggae, hip hop fusion artist Michael Franti & Spearhead will top the bill for this year’s charity concert May 22 outside Lincoln Theatre in downtown Raleigh. Visit www.bandtogethernc.org to purchase tickets starting at 10 a.m. on Friday, Feb. 19.
Last year’s Band Together NC concert featuring Rusted Root, the Rosebuds, Chatham County Line and HOBEX attracted more than 2,700 music lovers and raised more than $141,000 for the Lucy Daniels Center for Early Childhood. Supporting acts and activities for 2010 will be announced as the event date approaches.
Throughout his musical career spanning nearly 25 years, Franti has combined political and social themes with diverse musical influences such as hip hop, funk, reggae, jazz, folk and rock. After playing with the Beatnigs and Disposable Heroes of Hiphoprisy, Franti formed Spearhead in 1994. The band has released numerous albums including “Home,” “Chocolate Supa Highway,” “Stay Human,” “Yell Fire!” and the recent “All Rebel Rockers,” which marked their highest Billboard Top 200 Album Chart debut ever. The band’s song “Say Hey (I Love You)” was a hit in multiple formats last year. It was one of the most added recordings on multiple radio formats (Top 40, Hot AC and Alternative) and its music video has already exceeded 1 million views on YouTube.
Known for energetic live shows and Franti’s penchant for going shoeless, the band has gained a passionate worldwide audience through extensive touring and appearances in alternative media. As advocates for peace and social justice, Michael Franti & Spearhead have played numerous benefit concerts worldwide, including their own Power to the Peaceful Festivals in San Francisco that have recently drawn more than 50,000 attendees.
“As a musician and a man, I more than anything else want to be a unifier,” Franti explains. “I want to bring people together through music and its unique power. And I hope that somehow that sense of unity extends beyond the music.”
In October 2009, Band Together NC’s Board of Directors announced that the charity recipient for 2010 would be StepUP Ministry , an interfaith nonprofit organization that teaches low-income and homeless people to become self-sufficient. Founded in 1988, StepUP annually helps empower nearly 600 individuals in Wake County through two life-giving programs: job training/placement and life skills training.
“Our goal this year is to raise $150,000 for our charity partner,” said Danny Rosin, president and co-founder of Band Together NC. “But that’s not all. Amazingly, StepUP Ministry has pledged to match our fundraising efforts dollar for dollar, so there is a potential that we could generate up to $300,000 for this wonderful and deserving organization.”
Through corporate and individual donations, Band Together has already raised more than $70,000. Commitments have come from Cargill, S&A Cherokee, Blue Cross and Blue Shield of North Carolina, Davenport Investments, Duke Realty Corporation, Lincoln Theatre, Synergy Commercial Advisors, RPG Solutions, Brand Fuel, Trisure, Capstrat, Prometheus, Hosted Solutions and Manning, Fulton & Skinner, PA.
Tickets for the event will be $22 in advance or $25 day of the show. VIP tickets are $150. Sponsorships begin at the $150 level. Event attendees must be 21 years or older.
Valentine’s Day is Time To Fertilize
Of course, you know, I’m talking about nurturing a drought-resistant lawn that is beautiful year round, right? The three times to fertilize a Tall Fescue lawn are the beginning of September (with seeding), Thanksgiving, and Valentine’s Day. The first two are most important as they aim at stimulating good, downward root formation. The Valentine’s Day fertilization promotes a hearty top half of the plant. Fertilizing once the weather is warm is a recipe to creating a lawn that grows too fast and requires too much water to live.
In order to fertilize, one needs to evenly put the adequate amounts of fertilizer down. The rules of thumb around here are 75 lbs of limestone per 1000 feet (to bring pH around these pines and azaleas up), 1 lb of nitrogen per 1000 feet, and 6lbs of tall fescue see per 1000 feet (if seeding, but remember that seed placed in the spring never has the chance to grow downward, and will therefore have to be watered all summer).
In order to fertilize correctly, measure the square footage of the lawn. Then look at the fertilizer offered in the store. There are three numbers XX-YY-ZZ, and the first (XX) is the nitrogen. Divide 100 by this amount, and multiply that resulting number by the number of thousands of the lawn’s square feet. This will result in the correct number of pounds of fertilizer to use.
North Hills Harris Teeter: Failure on Multiple Levels
The new Harris Teeter at North Hills East opened this week and introduced a new concept in grocery shopping to North Carolina, the 2-story grocery store. The design is part of the New Urbanist-styled North Hills East, which replaces a failing, low-rise apartment complex with a tightly-designed, semi-urban mixed use design. Judging by early reviews, the store has major, unrecoverable flaws that will prevent the store from sustaining its ambitious goal.
To be fair Harris Teeter has done an outstanding job stocking the new store. Along with their full compliment of non-perishables from their distribution centers, the store also stocks an impressive array of fresh food. The produce section is outstanding, and stocks some exotic fruits and vegetables that aren’t typically seen at even high-end grocery stores. A prepared foods bar and salad bar are positioned to rival that seen at Whole Foods, while fresh pizza and made-to-order sandwiches at a reasonable price add some value to the store over others in the area. The fresh breads are superior to Whole Foods, while the cheese and meat counters pale somewhat, but are still outstanding in their own right. This somewhat to be expected for a new store, and it will be interesting to see how the store is stocked once the constant clientele settles in.
That said, the rest of the store is a complete failure, and it goes back to the design stages. In residential real estate older houses blessed with a charming design and strong foundation, but need some cosmetic work are said to have “good bones”. On the other hand there is this Harris Teeter, which will stand for decades as an example of “bad bones”.
Most notable is the two-story design. I am all for breaking paradigms to find new solutions. We didn’t get where we are today without some people taking some risks, and to that, Harris Teeter and Kane Realty are to be commended. This implementation of the vertical big box concept, though, is horrible at best.
The second story hovers over the left half of the store, and contains aisles of housewares, baking goods, cereals, cosmetics, pet foods, and juices. It essentially is all of the stuff that exists in that 3rd, 1/4th of a normal grocery store. The problem, however, is that in order for one to get their cart upstairs, they must use an elevator, which in this instance, is not a glass elevator and only holds two people and two shopping carts. During fairly busy times, there is a line of people trying to get on at the top and the bottom. The design team did not account for this, and did not allocate an adequate space for the queues.
The aisles feel tight. While the central aisles in a store like the Cameron Village store are also tight, the end aisles are wide, and there is a high ceiling. Not so at North Hills. The end aisles are just as narrow as the grocery aisles, the ceiling is low, and there is no natural light entering the space, creating a nightmare for claustrophobic people.
The store did a poor job with signage inside the store. Brown aisle makers with small, beige type are hard to read from the end aisles.
The upstairs section consists of about 7,500 square feet of stock space. One has to wonder of the store would have been better served by a North Hills design that just implemented 8,000 more square feet of space on their footprint. It isn’t like there is a scarcity of land that required this usual design. It would have made an enormous difference in the convenience level for this store.
Second to the disastrous 2-story design is the store’s strange parking-deck-only entrance. The only way to access the store is from the parking garage. Did I mention claustrophobia? While I tend to favor parking garages for their relatively constant temperature and always dry settings, this parking garage design is horribly inefficient and dangerous. There are two stories of the garage that are designated for Harris Teeter shoppers. Cars coming from Six Forks enter the upper level, which is a simple ring with a downramp in the middle. The bombastic lower level is accessed also by the St. Alban’s Drive traffic. All traffic entering the lower level moves in a counterclockwise direction, and there is only one way, one lane out of the deck’s lower level. What happens when some big SUV wants to back out of a space? The entire line of traffic leaving has to wait. What happens when a second car backs out? Urge to kill rises.
To top it all off, before reaching the garage’s exit, this steady stream of exiting traffic makes one final sweep, right by the store’s front doors where the pedestrian concentration is highest. It is a design that is so bad and was so preventable, that is makes me wonder if the architect who is responsible for this should be allowed to stay in his/her profession.
Because the store sits on the ground level of a 7-story apartment building, I was only able to get spotty cell phone and internet service on the store’s main floor, and had absolutely no connectivity on the second floor, where all of the cafe seating is. This is a solvable problem, but a big one as while shopping I like to access my recipes and rolling shopping lists in Evernote as well as call home to check on current pantry inventory.
So what is the shopper’s best plan of attack? During hours that are likely to have light traffic, just park in the lower level. It won’t be that dangerous. During times where the store is likely to be crowded (and this morning is an example of that. The store was far more crowded that the old North Hills store ever was), though, I recommend parking in the upper ring and using the parking lot elevator. This upper ring can be accessed two ways: from the main entrance on Six Forks Rd, and from the State Street entrance. (State street is a little one-block long street off St. Albans, parallel to Dartmouth Drive, perpendicular to St. Albans.)
I also don’t like the store’s placement as it pertains to the entire North Hills development. The North Hills master plan would have been better served by putting this store at the Dartmouth/Six Forks corner, facing St. Albans with its back to Six Forks. The store could have been the base for a very functional, attractive building that would join the flow of the existing North Hills to the new East. As it stands now, one of the major advantages to living in The Alexan, an accessible grocery store, is gone.
I fear for the store’s future as I have heard nothing but thumbs down so far. Judging by the people I overheard and talked to in the store, most ITB shoppers will go to the Harris Teeters at Glenwood Village and Cameron Village, as well as the big, nearby Kroger. Those to the north are most likely to use this HT store, but that is not the demographic this particular store aims to reach. It is a BIG problem that the boys in Charlotte will have to address (most likely by eventually removing all of the labor-intensive, short-life fresh-cooked items that make the store special). As it stands now, the architects picked by Kane have done a great disservice to not only the Harris Teeter corporation, but also the residents in the North Hills region of Raleigh.
Hurricanes’ Top Minor League Team Moving to Charlotte
Charlotte Checkers owner Michael Kahn today announced his purchase of the AHL’s Albany River Rats, a Carolina Hurricanes affiliate. The AHL team’s new name will be the “Charlotte Checkers”, and the team will play its games in the Time Warner Cable basketball arena in Charlotte. The ECHL Charlotte Checkers will move elsewhere, likely to another North Carolina city if the team is not sold to another owner.
What this means to the Hurricanes is perhaps a strengthened fan base. As fans in the western part of the state follow the Charlotte team, they are bound to follow the players’ journeys up to Raleigh. It also greatly increases the chances of seeing the Carolina Hurricanes hold an exhibition game each year in Charlotte (after the already-booked 2010 preseason). Hurricanes GM Jim Rutherford clearly made the point at the press conference today about this being a part of the franchise’s long term strategy of growing the sport of hockey in the state of North Carolina.
No need to worry about this being Part A of a takeover scheme by the powers that be in Charlotte. For an NHL team to move the Charlotte, a new arena would have to be built. The TWC Arena has a short axis, much like the Dean Smith Center and the U.S. Airways Center (home of the NBA’s Phoenix Suns). The short axis makes for a superior basketball configuration, but results in an unacceptable compromise for hockey. There are several bad options, and the Charlotte Checkers have opted to bizarrely offset the ice such that one of the blue lines runs through the center of the building. The result is that there is absolutely no seating beyond the faceoff circles on one end of the ice.
State/Va. Tech is at 9 Tonight
Tonight’s NCSU vs. Virginia Tech basketball game was originally scheduled for 7:00pm, as a non-TV event. Recently, though, the game was moved to 9:00pm in order for it to be carried on ESPNU. So don’t rush through dinner so you can show up at the RBC Center at 6:30, because they won’t let you in.
This game time, incidentally, coincides with tonight’s UNC vs. Duke game.
Arctic Monkeys Coming to Disco Rodeo
On April 6th the Arctic Monkeys will be playing at the Disco Rodeo. Sleepy Sun will open. Tickets will be on sale Friday morning (see the Cat’s Cradle website for more details).
NCMA Rodin Lecture is Tomorrow Morning
Just a reminder that David Steel, Curator of European Art for the N.C. Museum of Art, will be hosting a free lecture entitled “New Rodin Acquisitions”. Dr. Steel will discuss several of the highlights and behind-the-scenes insights on the entire installation process of the pieces. The lecture is at 10am at Jones Auditorium at Meredith College. Doors open at 9:30am.
Meat House Brings First Rate Butcher Shop
It’s been at least eight long years since I walked into a retail store and was awestruck. That period of time ended when I recently visited The Meat House . The store is a national chain of butcher shops, but don’t be fooled. There isn’t a local merchant within at least 30 miles (maybe hundreds more) that remotely comes close to delivering the incredible product I saw.
The heart of the store is its meat counter, where a myriad of fresh meats are presented for the picking. Seafood is not available (except for some megashrimp), but pork, poultry, and a slew of red meat options are. I counted 10 variations on “steak”. The store also stocks a deep supply of frozen, difficult-to-find items such as venison, pheasant, duck, fois gras, ostrich, and more.
The Meat House is more than just a meat counter, though, as the specialty grocery items are larger in scope than expected. A new kind of tortilla chips I haven’t seen are delicious, as well as the three accompanying sample dips displayed (I especially liked the artichoke dip). The store also stocks prepared meals from Cafe 121 in Sanford. The meat prices are more in line with the Fresh Market, so it is noticeably cheaper than Whole Foods.
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While the Meat House’s standard meat counter is unmatched in the eastern half of the Triangle, the store really shines with its semi-prepared foods. I counted 25 different marinated meats, pinwheel steaks, kebabs, and the like. The store has a grill outside, and they constantly keep a chafing dish with two samples going at all times. I have tried 5 items now and each has been incredible. The chicken wings and the Sundried Tomato and Herb-marinated Chicken were fantastic, and so were a couple of marinated beef tips. The Burgundy Wine marinated Beef Tips, however, were so remarkable I have thought about them while trying to sleep. Not only are the marinades excellent for these items, but the quality and tenderness of the meat is so good that it shines through even the strong marinades.
If the store is a success, the owners will continue their pursuit of a North Raleigh location. I sent along my recommendation (of going in where Blockbuster on Wake Forest Road was), and it appears that their site selection criteria are on par with what will be a true success for Raleigh one day. The nearby Trader Joe’s opened with much fanfare a couple of years ago. However I never felt it was worth the drive to Cary. The Meat House, on the other hand, undoubtedly is.
Harris Teeter at The Lassiter’s Last Stand
Back in the early 70’s North Raleigh had just a few grocery stores. North Hills had a Winn-Dixie, there was a Big Star next to the Six Forks K-Mart (where Borders is), and an A&P was in Colony (now Food Lion). As North Raleigh grew and bigger, nicer grocery stores opened, the Winn-Dixie in North Hills Plaza deteriorated progressively, but inexplicably remained open (probably because the Big Star closed and the Holly Park Winn-Dixie came and went). Finally the grocery gods granted us mercy and closed the Winn-Dixie, replacing it with a swank, clean Harris-Teeter about a decade ago.
That store location, the one that has fed me for most of my life, closes at 6pm tonight . With it go many memories: watching the live lobster tank, shouting on the store PA from my child’s seat, the Long Island woman singing about bagels (whatever those are!) on the P.A., racing out to the parking lot to repark our car that had drifted away in neutral, and meeting employees who would become close personal family friends. The memories aren’t just the old ones, either. The Indian store manager has been one of my little girl’s favorite retail personalities. (He, incidentally, is moving back to the Glenwood Village location). The store, while not stocking the wide range we have all had the luxury of knowing in the modern era, was still great for staples and extremely convenient.
Tomorrow everything changes. A new, 48,000 square foot Harris Teeter will open across the Mississippi (Six Forks Road) literally in North Hills East’s parking garage. The store is two-stories, but don’t worry about that second level. It reportedly will contain coffee, flowers, and gift cards. (How long until they recognize that sales of those items will be non existent, and move more necessary household items up there?). The stock from the Lassiter location will be divided among 12 different Harris Teeter locations. Managers and their staff will come in and take an aisle-a-piece in order to distribute the merchandise and offer North Hills customers a turnkey experience during the transition.
Much like the closing of the Cardinal Theatres, the closing of a grocery store in old North Hills Plaza means the end of an era for North Raleigh. Perhaps the store will be filled with books in the moderate future. Perhaps it will be something equally serviceable. What it won’t be is food, and it will never quite be the same. As they say, “the only constant is change”.
Angus Barn Named as All-American Icon
Today the leading foodservice industry publication, Nation’s Restaurant News, has named the Angus Barn to its list of 50 All-American Icon restaurants . The Barn has “become synonymous with hospitality and service excellence” according to Nation’s Restaurant News. That’s one of the primary reasons why the establishment made the NRN 50. The Angus Barn is the only North Carolina restaurant on the list, and joins such noted dining institutions as Commander’s Palace in New Orleans, St. Elmo Steak House in Indianapolis and The Four Seasons in New York City.
This comes as no surprise. The Angus Barn is known for going out of their way to present an outstanding experience. The restaurant has a rigorous training program for its waitstaff, and only hires people who make it their profession. Owner/manager Van will not accept customers waiting unnecessarily. Case in point: I recently stopped by at 5:30pm one day to buy some blue cheese dressing from the gift shop. The refrigerators were out of stock, but the nice, helpful lady who was running the shop went to the kitchen to make a couple for me. When Van found out that I had been waiting 10 minutes for the dressing, she went to the back, got things rolling, and comped my purchase.
If one is paying attention, they will notice some of the many details that go into the experience at the Angus Barn. The restaurant’s Christmas Tree every year is the finest in any restaurant around. The relish station, an unnecessary perk that was put in place decades ago to placate those waiting for a table, is always fresh. Much of the wood from the restaurant was salvaged from barns in the area. Inset in the brick floor of the gift shop is a 6” thick disc of wood from the state’s largest loblolly pine tree. In the last couple of years, The Angus Barn opened The Pavilions, a rustic lakeside special events facility. A trip to the men’s room of the facility is another example of the fine detail that (along with the excellent, consistent food) has earned this restaurant’s status among the nation’s top restaurants.
The Angus Barn was already one of the early inductees to the publication’s prestigious “ Hall of Fame ” list. Magnolia Grill is the only other North Carolina restaurant to receive that honor.
Trio of Country Acts Coming to TWC
Time Warner Cable Music Pavilion at Walnut Creek (TWCMPWC) has added three country shows to its summer lineup that are sure to be big hits:
- July 10: Toby Keith
- August 28: Brad Paisley w/ Darius Rucker
- October 2: Sugarland
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