Author: Jim Cofer

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QUICK TAKE: New Zealanders and The Kiwi

“Kiwi” became THE nickname for New Zealanders and the national symbol of the country thanks to… Kiwi shoe polish.

Kiwi Polish

At the start of the 20th century, there were several nicknames and symbols for New Zealanders, none of them dominant. Among others, symbols included the moa (another bird), the silver fern (the symbol of many New Zealand sports teams, including the famous All Blacks rugby team), the kiwi bird and the Southern Cross constellation, which is still on the New Zealand flag:

New Zealand flag

In 1906 an Australian named William Ramsay developed the shoe polish, which he named after his New Zealander wife, Annie Elizabeth Meek. There were other shoe polishes on the market, but Ramsay’s was one of the first to emphasize making shoes and boots shine, in addition to restoring their color and water-resistance.

Ramsay loaded several cases of the polish onto a cart and traveled to farms handing out free tins to farmers for their work boots. Kiwi rapidly became the best-selling shoe polish brand in Australia. But Kiwi’s big break came in World War I, when the British and American armies started distributing the polish to soldiers. Millions of men became familiar with not just the product, but the “Kiwi” name, too. Soon, everyone was calling New Zealanders “Kiwis”.

Today Kiwi shoe polish is sold in 180 countries and holds 53% of the worldwide market for shoe polish. But even more than that, it’s the only product to give a nation’s citizens their nickname!

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Quote of the Day

“You weren’t anything to him but something that would grow big enough to bury him when the time came, and now that he’s dead, he’s shut of you but you got two hundred pounds of him to carry below the face of the earth.”

– Flannery O’Connor
“You Can’t Be Any Poorer Than Dead”

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(More) Music of 2012

According to Last.fm, here are my top bands of 2012. The number in parenthesis is the number of times I’ve played the band in the past 12 months:

#1: Marsheaux (1,041)
#2: Saint Etienne (353)
#3: The Raveonettes (280)
#4: Ambra Red (278)
#5: Washed Out (165)
#6: Katy Perry (149)
#7: Roxy Music (142)
#8: Beach House (138)
#9: Freezepop (97)
#10: Blouse (96)

And here are my top albums by playcount in 2012. Note that unlike my Albums of the Year list (which was limited to albums released in 2012), the following albums may come from any year. The first number in parenthesis is the year the album was released; the second is the playcount:

#1: Marsheaux – Lumineux Noir (2009) (494)
#2: Ambra Red – Electronic Creations For Special People (2010) (277)
#3: Saint Etienne – Words and Music by Saint Etienne (2012) (227)
#4: Marsheaux – E-Bay Queen Is Dead (2012) (175)
#5: Beach House – Bloom (2012) (133)
#6: The Raveonettes – Observator (2012) (113)
#7: Marsheaux – Peek a Boo (2006) (91)
#8: Marsheaux – E-Bay Queen (2004) (84)
#9: Washed Out – Within and Without (2011) (80)
#10: Freezepop – Future Future Future Perfect (2007) (79)

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The Year in TV (2012)

2011 was a great year for TV. 2012?  Not so much. The first half was pretty decent, but the second half of the year was pretty much a strike-out. So while 2011’s list was a lot of work (because I had to whittle down a huge list to acceptable levels), 2012’s list was also a lot of work (because it was that hard coming up with a list of decent new shows).

And so… the list, keeping in mind that this is all about new shows, not returning ones. There’s also lists of shows that didn’t make it, shows that ended this year, the biggest disappointment of the year, the best news of the year and the best and worst moments of the year. Enjoy!


THE BEST NEW SHOWS OF 2012

Don’t Trust the Bitch in Apartment 23 (ABC) – The premise of this show is simple: June, a naive and trusting Indianan, moves to New York City after graduating college to pursue her dream career. But on her first day the CEO of her mortgage company is arrested for running a Ponzi scheme. Desperate, June becomes the roommate of Chloe McGruff (Krysten Ritter), an amoral scam artist, a swindler and party girl. Chloe is the worst person ever, and is only genuinely nice to her best friend, former Dawson’s Creek actor James Van Der Beek. Unfortunately, the ratings aren’t very good, the writing has taken a turn for the worse in season 2, and ABC is monkeying around with the episode order. I don’t expect it to last much longer.

apt_23

Line of Duty (BBC) – Every year the BBC puts out a really dark police drama in which the police aren’t necessarily any better than the people they’re chasing. Be it my personal fave Luther or last year’s favorite The Shadow Line, there’s always some show about the dark side of police work. This year’s entry is Line of Duty, in which the young, idealistic Detective Sergeant Steve Arnott (Martin Compston) accidentally causes the death of an innocent man during an anti-terrorist raid. Arnott refuses to participate in a cover-up of the incident, and is ruthlessly ostracized by his colleagues for it. To get away from them he joins an internal affairs division led by Superintendent Ted Hastings (Adrian Dunbar). Hastings’ main target is Detective Chief Inspector Tony Gates (the great Lennie James). Gates’ unit consistently has huge arrest numbers, and Hastings knows that this is partly because Gates only takes on cases he knows he can solve, then piles tons of charges on criminals once caught. But Hastings suspects the corruption is far worse. Although family man Gates might not want to admit it, he has a mistress, and she just might get him in a world of trouble.

line_of_duty

Copper (BBC America) – And speaking of dark police dramas, BBC America debuted its first original series, Copper, about Kevin “Corky” Corcoran (Tom Weston-Jones), a rough and tumble Irish cop in 1860s New York City, specifically the notorious, crime and poverty ridden Five Points neighborhood. Like a lot of men at the time, Corky went away to fight the Confederates in the Civil War, and while he was away his wife and daughter were murdered. Much of the series is about his investigation into what happened to them. He’s helped by Robert Morehouse (Kyle Schmid) a wealthy industrialist who was his major in the Union Army, Eva Heissen (Franka Potente), a Prussian madam who knows a lot of secrets, and Dr. Matthew Freeman (Ato Essandoh), a black physician who seems to know more about forensic science than any other doctor in America at the time (one of my small beefs about the show). Many disliked the show, saying it was too slow, and the fact that it was set in a time-frame similar to the slightly more popular Hell On Wheels didn’t help. But if you stick with it, you’ll be rewarded. It’s a well-done series with rich characters and well thought-out stories.

Copper

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Top 10 Tunes

From the home office in London, here’s my list of Top 10 Tunes for the week ending December 8, 2012:

1) The Raveonettes – “She Owns The Streets”
2) Roxy Music – “The Space Between”
3) The Raveonettes – “You Hit Me (I’m Down)”
4) Jessica Bailiff – “If You Say It (My Friend, My Love)”
5) Jessica Bailiff – “Violets & Roses (For a Black Romantic Heart)”
6) Jessica Bailiff – “This is Real (Soft & Feral)”
7) Foretaste – “Goodbye Horses”
8) Ladyhawke – “Magic”
9) Class Actress – “Careful What You Say”
10) Wild Nothing – “Disappear Always”

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My Top Albums of 2012

Hi ho, folks! The end of the year is approaching, and it’s time to roll out my “Best of” lists for the year! I decided to start with music this year, because my TV list is a giant mess. Seriously. If the TV list was a middle school book report, I’d give poor Ms. Kilgore a heart attack. She’d have to buy a hundred red pens to edit it for me! So enjoy the music list first!

As always, remember that this list is about complete albums and not individual songs. Yes, there may be songs from 2012 that I liked better than anything on this list… but, as a whole, the following ten albums are my favorite of the year!

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#10: Brian Eno – Lux

As I said in my Best Albums of 2010 piece, I’ve never been a fan of Eno’s pop music (aside from his work with Roxy Music, of course). His other works, like Ambient 1 and Discreet Music are two of my all-time favorite albums, period. I put Small Craft on a Milk Sea on my “Best of 2010” list, and am doing the same for this year’s Lux. I actually hesitated with this one, though. Where Ambient 1 and Discreet Music were groundbreaking albums, this one isn’t his best. It’s pretty good, technically speaking, but it just doesn’t leave much of a lasting impression. Having said that, mediocre Eno is better than 90% of the other crap out there, so he makes the list with this album, too!

10_brian_eno

#9: Madness – Qui Qui Si Si Ja Ja Da Da

I’ve been a Madness fan since “Our House” hit the US charts back in 1982. I rushed out to buy the single, then bought every album and EP of theirs I could find. And while a lot of 80s bands are still releasing new albums of mediocre material, Madness never really went away, culturally speaking. I really dug 2005’s The Dangermen Sessions Vol. 1, but just didn’t warm up to 2009’s The Liberty of Norton Folgate. In fact, I deleted the album from my digital collection just a couple of weeks ago. Thankfully, Oui Oui Si Si Ja Ja Da Da is a return to form. Whereas Liberty seemed like a love song that only invited Londoners to the party, this new disc is for everyone. It’s pretty solid – especially the opening tracks –  and is surely worth a listen on your part.

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#8: The Vaccines – Come of Age

I don’t know why, but I just love The Vaccines. Certainly they crank out catchy guitar-pop tunes with awesome hooks… but I think it’s their cheekiness that really sells me on them. The first time I heard “Post Break-Up Sex” I was almost in stitches; they did a pretty good job of capturing the… awkwardness one feels immediately after a break-up. So when heard that they had a new disc out, I rushed to find it… and it didn’t disappoint. Songs like “Aftershave Ocean” and “Teenage Icon” encapsulate everything I love about the band. They almost make me feel like a teenager all over again, but at the same time their often sarcastic lyrics make me appreciate being older.

08_vaccines

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My Favorite Android Apps

I’ve used this site to publish lists of all sorts of favorite things: TV shows, albums, radio stations, Firefox extensions… Yet it occurred to me the other day that, despite having an Android phone for almost two years now, I  haven’t done a “Best Android Apps” post yet. So let’s fix that!

Below are some of my most favoritest Android apps. I’ve tried to keep the list as general as possible: I have several sports apps I love, but not everyone loves sports, so I’ve left them off the list. All apps listed below are free, although many have “Pro” or “Ad-Free” flavors, too. Some require root access, but these will be noted as such. All links are to the app’s page on Google Play.

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Shush! – This app silences the ringer on your phone for a given amount of time. But the best part is that there’s no “app”. You just use the volume buttons on the side of your phone to silence the ringer, and a window pops up asking when you’d like the ringer to come back on. There’s also an option to choose the volume level when the ringer comes back:

shush

I use this app every single day: I charge my phone on my nightstand, but don’t want the various notification sounds to wake up me or the missus. So I set it silence the phone until 08:30 or so the next morning. I say “or so” because there’s no way to have Shush! resume the ringer at a specific time. As you can see from the screen cap above, there’s an awkward rotary menu, and it selects time in 15 minute chunks. So if I use Shush! at 23:07, my only options will be to restore the ringer at 08:07, 08:17, 08:37, or 08:47. I kind of wish Shush! also had a whitelist feature, where calls from people I choose could override the settings. I know such apps exist, and I’ve used them before, but I keep coming back to Shush! ‘cos it’s simple and it “just works”!

Alarm Clock Xtreme Free – If there’s one thing Google Play has tons of, it’s alarm clock apps. I should know: I’ve tried a hundred of them. And Alarm Clock Xtreme is my alarm of choice. You can use the app as a traditional alarm clock (choose the time, set the mp3 you want as the alarm), but the reason I like it is that it has math CAPTCHAs. Yes, you have to solve math problems to turn this alarm clock off. And, because of that, I’ve almost never overslept with this. You can choose how many math problems you want, and how complex you want them to be (“11 + 4” or “227 / 6”?). It also has a “graduwake” feature, where the alarm starts softly but gets louder as it goes on. There’s even an option to have “decreasing snooze duration” (i.e. the first time you hit snooze, you get 10 minutes; the second time you get 8 minutes). Despite so many options, the app is simple, and most importantly, the app is reliable. I’ve tried other alarm clocks in the past, and believe it or not, many had problems waking the phone from deep sleep. Like Shush!, Alarm Clock Xtreme “just works”!

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Removing Apps from Google Play

In keeping with this site’s long tradition of being the LAST SITE ON THE INTERNET to bring you important news, enjoy this Android-related article!

If you have an Android device, you probably already know that every app you download is saved in your account at the Google Play store. There are several “official” reasons why this is, the most obvious being that if you upgrade to a newer phone (or your current phone is lost or stolen and replaced), you can simply log in to your Play account and download your apps all over again. It’s also helpful to have a single Play account with all your apps if you have more than one Android device.

Removing apps from your phone is easy: just go to Settings > Applications, find the app you want to uninstall and click on it, then click the “Uninstall” button. But removing apps from your Google Play account used to be impossible. Cynics say that Google did this so that it could inflate the numbers of downloaded apps for PR purposes. Google said it was just trying to help users keep track of their apps.

For most people, the whole thing was a giant pain in the ass. Many went on downloading sprees when they first got their device(s) and now their accounts are clogged with dozens of apps they no longer use. Some apps are only good for a certain time, like the London 2012 Olympics app or the Euro 2012 soccer tournament app. Maybe a user thought they had malware once, and they downloaded several antivirus apps to try and fix it.

The point is, most Google Play accounts are littered with apps users no longer want or need. They’re not really “hurting” anything by remaining in Play accounts, but some of us despise clutter. Why won’t Google give us some way to delete apps we’re absolutely, positively sure we don’t want any more?

Well now they have. Open Google Play on your device and scroll left to the “All” category. You’ll see all the apps in your Google Play account. You may press on any app not currently installed on your device to install it if you wish. But you’ll also see the international “No” sign by any apps not currently installed on any of your devices:

Google Play

Just click the “No” sign and then click OK to acknowledge that you wish to permanently remove the app from your Google Play account. Wait a few minutes for the Play app to sync with the store, and the app will be gone forever! According to some things I’ve read at other sites, users of newer Android versions (ICS? Jellybean?) can long-press on the “No” symbol to select multiple apps for deletion at once; however this doesn’t seem to work on my Gingerbread phone. Regardless, I’m overjoyed to FINALLY get rid of all those useless apps I never, ever use!