Monthly Archive for June, 2006

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JPJ Arena Too Loud?

Reader Charles Marsh sent me this: “Two weeks ago, around 10:00 on a Wednesday night, the Venable neighborhood was treated to intermittent blasts of exceedingly loud music which continued for an hour and a half period. The next day, we learned that the source of the music had been the new John Paul Jones arena, whose managers had run tests on the new state-of-the-art sound system. The cause for concern to Venable neighborhood residents is great. In every neighborhood meeting with arena planners over the past three years, our questions about potential noise problems have been answered with the promise that the arena would be acoustically insulated; noise pollution should be the least of our worries. But the music from a routine sound test in the arena could be heard loudly inside our homes and thus portends a long and difficult future for arena-community relations. The failure to keep this simple promise threatens the quality of life in a neighborhood that has been remarkably supportive of the university’s ambitious plans for growth.”

Did anybody else experience this? If the volume of concerts is going to be that loud, I think the resulting fight is going to be much worse than the Belmont/amphitheater volume problem.

Craigslist Expands to C’ville

If you listen carefully, you can hear the city’s three newspaper publishers sobbing softly. This evening, classifieds-killer Craigslist expanded their city-specific listings to include hundreds more cities across the nation, including Our Fair City. There are only a half dozen listings at this moment, but that’ll number in the hundreds in a week or so, and in the thousands not too long after that. As the San Francisco Chronicle explained yesterday, Craigslist’s free online classifieds have left newspapers’ balance sheets in tatters, thanks to a simple, obstinate, profitable approach to their business.

Classifieds are absurdly expensive. Want to run a one-day ad to sell something in the Progress? That’ll be $44.50. Craigslist? Free. Media General is far too large and cumbersome of an organization to be capable of reacting to this incursion prior to 2008, or thereabouts — and that’s no exaggeration. Their advertising revenue is going to slump in the next couple of years, and that means life is about to become more difficult still for the Progress‘ beleaguered reporters.

Blog Carnival: Steve Whitaker Hosts

Steve Whitaker hosts this week’s Charlottesville Blog Carnival, condensing a week of Charlottesville blogging into a sixteen-item digest for your reading pleasure. Not satisfied with the normal format, he’s invented a cool little numbering scheme.

Want to host sometime? (You should!) Drop me a line.

A Year of Charlottesville Blogs

It was one year ago today that the Charlottesville Blogs website was established, in order to aggregate all of the great blogs in Charlottesville. There were only maybe a dozen Charlottesville bloggers at the time: BK Marcus, Bill Emory, Brian Geiger, Colten Noakes, Duane Gran, Helena Cobban, Jim Duncan, Lafe, Polyglot Conspiracy, Ryan Chiachiere, Rick Sincere and Joe Stirt were all running thoroughly enjoyable blogs at the time. Granted, at first it was basically all Book of Joe all the time (face it, Joe, you’re prolific) but as the ranks swelled, the variety and insight represented became more and more impressive.

Today there are 174 Charlottesville area blogs, and I can honestly say that I really, really enjoy reading them. I couldn’t have forecast a fifteen-fold increase in just twelve months, and certainly I never would have expected that the quality of writing and insights would increase at the same rate. I believe I’d be happy limiting myself to reading only Charlottesville blogs, so impressive is the bunch.

Nothing particularly special happened a year ago — Charlottesville Blogs was just a way to aggregate all of the great blogging that was going on, that in some cases had been going on for years. But the explosion in blogging among y’all in the past year has been amazing, and worthy of acknowledgment. So I celebrate this arbitrary anniversary today. What it’ll all look like in a year’s time I don’t dare speculate.

Officers Will Plead Guilty to Corruption

Remember those two cops caught turning a blind eye to prostitution at Maxx in exchange for cash and sex? Liesel Nowak reports for the Progress this evening that Roy Fitzgerald and Charles Saunders are going to plead guilty to plead to lying to federal agents. Presumably the overall case is still proceeding, though that’s not made clear in the article. Apparently not.

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