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Richey Edwards declared dead

Remember the band Manic Street Preachers? Although this Welsh act were mighty popular in the UK, most Americans probably remember them as a “here today, gone tomorrow” act from college radio. Their rhythm guitarist and co-lyricist, Richey Edwards, disappeared back in 1995. According to Wikipedia,

Edwards disappeared on 1 February 1995, on the day that he and [a band member] were due to fly to the U.S. on a promotional tour. In the two weeks before his disappearance, Edwards withdrew £200 a day from his bank account, which totalled £2800 by February 1. He checked out of the Embassy Hotel in Bayswater Road, London at seven in the morning, and it has been proven that he then drove to his apartment in Cardiff, Wales. In the two weeks that followed he was apparently spotted in the Newport passport office, and the Newport bus station. On 7 February, Anthony Hatherhall, a taxi driver from Newport, supposedly picked up Edwards from the King’s Hotel in Newport, and drove him around the valleys, including Blackwood (Edwards’ home as a child). The passenger got off at the Severn View service station and paid the £68 fare in cash.

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New feature: ShareThis

Hi folks!

I finally entered the 21st century and have added ShareThis to my site! ShareThis allows you to share a post or page with your friends via Digg, Reddit, Facebook, MySpace, del.icio.us, Technocrati, Google Bookmarks, Yahoo Bookmarks, Windows Live, and several other social networking and online bookmarking sites, in addition to email, AIM, text message.. and more!

To use the service, simply click the ShareThis button at the end of each post or page.

For more information about ShareThis, click here.

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Digital Music Outsells CDs at Atlantic

After years of speculation as to when sales of digital music would overtake that of CDs, Atlantic Records has an answer for us: now. In the last quarter, sales of digital music accounted for 51% of all of Atlantic’s sales (even though CDs still count for two-thirds of all music sales).

Another interesting factoid from the linked Engadget article: music sales continue to decline. Back in 1999, record labels took in $14.6 billion; this year, it’s estimated that they’ll take in $10.1 billion.

Although a collapsing economy surely takes a lot of credit for the tumble, a large part of the decline is also due not to OMG TEH P!RATES!!1!!1!, but instead to single track sales at stores like iTunes and Amazon MP3. This, and not piracy, is one of the main reasons that the record labels fought music downloads in the first place: they’d much rather sell 2 million copies of Britney Spears latest crappy CD at 11.99 each ($23.98 million) than 10 million downloads of her latest single ($9.9 million). Of course, I’m using retail numbers instead of wholesale numbers in this example, but the overall drop in revenue would remain the same.

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More Bobcat Bashing!

I like bashing the Charlotte Bobcats on this site. It’s true that I didn’t live here during the brouhaha over the new arena, but Lisa was vehemently opposed to it, as were most of her friends and coworkers. So their “Screw the Bobcats!” attitude has rubbed off on me. To this very day, I have only seen someone wearing a Bobcats shirt or sweatshirt twice; while it’s common to see people wearing Panthers or Tar Heels shirts to the store or mall, you’ll never see a Bobcats shirt. And besides, the Bobcats suck: only the 1-10 Washington Bullets (I refuse to call them “Wizards”) are doing worse. Also, it seems like any time the Bobcats front office had a decision that would either make them “heroes” or “zeroes” in this city, management went out of its way to piss off Charlotteans. So here’s a fun Bobcats bash for you:

I joined Facebook a couple of months ago and quickly found out about Facebook’s “gift system”. Basically, anyone can create a “gift application”, in which you upload pictures of products, celebrities, drinks, etc. to the Facebook site. You then caption each pic and pick an order for them to be revealed to end users. Once someone sends another user a “gift”, more of your “gifts” are unlocked to them.

Well, I thought it was kind of fun, so I created my own gift application: “Gifts From Charlotte”. I filled it with Cheerwine, fried chicken from Price’s Chicken Coop, ice cream from Tony’s, fried pickles from The Penguin, and other Charlotte treats. Imagine my surprise when I searched for it in the Facebook directory the other day and noticed this:

(click to embiggen)
(click to embiggen)

The “Charlotte Bobcats Fans” group is the largest Bobcats group on Facebook. It has 310 active users. There are a couple of other Bobcats apps; as you can see, they have 3 members here and 5 members there. All told, the Bobcats have around 320 active fans on Facebook.

My silly “Gifts From Charlotte” app… the thing I threw together on a whim one day… has 1,108 monthly users – which is almost 3.5 times as many fans as the lowly Bobcats. The UNCC 49ers fan app (the first entry listed above) has 1,490 members. So UNCC – a local college that has a respectable, if unspectacular, basketball team – has 4.6 times as many fans as and NBA team!

Lord, the Bobcats are sad!

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The Luckiest Kid Ever

Check this out: this 19 year-old kid spends his birthday on the set of The Price is Right. Not only does he make it to contestant’s row, he literally wins everything he can. He didn’t win both showcases, and he didn’t win the $100 for getting with price right on contestant’s row… but that’s about all he didn’t win.

The kid walked away with almost $80,000 worth of prizes on his 19th birthday… pretty sweet!

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Santa Monica bans sit-ups!

Back in the 50s and 60s, California had the reputation of being the “wild and crazy state”. People that found the east coast too “uptight” moved to California by the millions. And it was one big party for the next 20 years. But then, sometime in the late 80s (after all the coke wore off), California changed. No longer “wild and crazy”, California instead became “the nanny state”. Smoking was banned, as were trans fats and fast food restaurants.

You can now add stationary exercise to that list of banned items, at least in Santa Monica. It is now illegal to perform any “stationary exercise” (such as sit-ups or jumping jacks) in the city of Santa Monica. Heathen lawbreakers will be fined up to $158 and can spend up to 36 months in the stocks (OK, I made up that last part).

The ban isn’t as ludicrous as it might initially sound. Apparently Santa Monica has many grassy medians in the city streets, and people were gathering there to do pilates and other exercises. They were apparently loud, they tore up the grass, and often left litter behind. The Fourth Street median in particular had essentially turned into an overcrowded, ’round the clock free gym. This didn’t sit well with people that lived there, so they complained. The police then instructed park rangers to start enforcing an existing ban on such activities.

Amusingly, there is no ban against “non-stationary” exercise like jogging or walking.

Read all about it here.

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Comment Line Disconnected

A quick update: the jimcofer.com comment line has been disconnected.

It was provided by AOL as part of their free “AOL Phoneline” service. I recently received an email saying that the service would be discontinued in early January. Since no one ever called the comment line (ever), I’m removing all references to it on this site and will cease checking messages today.

Sorry for the inconvenience and thanks for understanding!

Jim

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It’s GWINNETT, dammit!

I spent the first 24 years of my life living in Gwinnett County, Georgia. When I was born, Gwinnett had a population of 72,349. At the time, much of the county resembled Mayberry from The Andy Griffith Show. Everyone knew almost everyone else, and there was a sense of “community” there that I haven’t really felt since.

During the 1980s, however, Gwinnett experienced massive growth. The county frequently placed at or near the top of “America’s fastest growing counties” lists. The county grew so much that the 2010 census estimates its population at 808,167. More people live in Gwinnett County than within the city limits of San Francisco, Memphis, Charlotte, Baltimore, Boston or Seattle. Hell, the Gwinnett school system – the largest in Georgia – has more students (159,258) than Dayton, Ohio (155,461), Springfield, Missouri (154,777) or Salem, Oregon (151,913) have residents. The Gwinnett Arena, originally considered a boondoggle by many area residents, has hosted concerts by Bruce Springsteen, The Who, Depeche Mode, Snow Patrol, Bon Jovi and more. The county has their own East Coast Hockey League team (the Gwinnett Gladiators) and in January of this year, the Atlanta Braves announced that they were moving their AAA club from Richmond (population: 200,123) to Gwinnett.

Gwinnett is big. It’s for real. So why the hell do people still misspell it? To this day, I’ll see “Gwinet”, “Gwinnet”, “Gwinett”, “Gwinnet” or “Gwinnette” on websites and blogs. Just the other day, I was looking at a band’s page on MySpace, only to find that they were playing the “Arena at Gwinnette Center” soon. And it drove me nuts!

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Time Warner Navigator: Still Sucks

Back in April, I wrote this hyperbolic review of the new Time Warner “Navigator” software that the cable giant is rolling out to all their DVRs. The upgrade had only just happened at the time, and it seemed like a giant step backwards from Passport, the previous software. But a few months have passed now. Maybe I’ve calmed down a bit. Maybe Time Warner has rolled out some updates and fixes for it… Or maybe it still sucks.

Here’s a calmer, more reasoned list of my beefs with Navigator. Time Warner needs to address these issues as quickly as possible… especially since AT&T’s U-Verse just rolled into town:

Boot time sucks: It took the old Passport software around four minutes to boot. Navigator takes just over nine minutes to fully boot. Since I have the same problem on my computer with XP vs. Vista, I can only conclude that Time Warner’s programmers are taking a cue from Microsoft on how to make your software worse, not better. Obviously, rebooting your DVR is not something you do every day… but when Navigator was new and crashed a lot, waiting almost ten minutes instead of four for the TV to come back was (and still is) infuriating.   

Search still sucks: As I mentioned in the original review, Navigator took away “keyword search”, so you can no longer search for “Kate Winslet” and find movies or chat show appearances featuring the actress. As much as that sucks, I could deal with that. But something that really does suck is that Navigator, for some unknown reason, allows multiple entries for the same program. For example, if you want to see who’s going to be on David Letterman this week, you could search for “David Letterman”. You might get three hits. If you click on the first result, you’ll get a submenu that lists Monday and Tuesday’s episodes, and you’ll have to navigate to the second entry to see Wednesday’s episode, then navigate to the third entry to see Thursday and Friday’s episodes. Passport would have a single entry for The Late Show With David Letterman, and all episodes would be listed in a submenu off that single category. So Navigator, for no good reason, makes things harder, not easier. And that’s assuming it works: just the other day I searched for Whatever, Martha!. The show never appeared in the results window, even as I typed more and more of the title. By the time I had fully typed out “Whatever”, I just scrolled down to find the show.

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