databending and glitch art primer, part 2: sonification

welcome to part 2 of my databending primer! sorry about the lengthy delay between part 1 of this primer and part 2. if you haven't already read part 1, you may want to do so, as part 2 depends on various terms and concepts that were introduced in part 1.

this part is about sonification, and about databending with audio software. i'll show you how to coax databent sounds out of your windows hard drive using a type of audio software called a wav editor. then, i'll give you some tips for using the wav editor to create databent images.

sonification, put simply, is the act of converting data into sound. wikipedia points to some well-known examples, such as the geiger counter and sonar. it's an extremely broad field; here i'll be focusing on sonification in a databending context, or using sonification techniques to create art.

my first exposure to databending came in 1995 or '96. i'd been using a tracker program called scream tracker to create music on my computer, but scream tracker used an obscure file format for its audio samples. i wanted to be able to record my own sounds and sequence them, so i switched to a program called impulse tracker. quickly i discovered that impulse tracker not only let me use wav files, but it let me open up any file on my hard drive as if it were a sound file, and then play and sequence the sounds. i was immediately hooked, and a couple years later i'd write & record an all-databending EP using impulse tracker: dissonance is bliss. obviously, i'm still databending today, though i've since moved on to other software.

techniques

if you have programming/software development skills, then the potential here is pretty limitless: you can sonify data in any way you can imagine. for the purposes of this primer, i'll be using off-the-shelf or freely available software.

one simple way to sonify data is to convert it to MIDI. MIDI (musical instrument digital interface) is a language that computers and synthesizers use to communicate with each other. if you're a musician who uses MIDI in your setup, you could use programs like GoMinimal!, Midifier, Midge, or GMC to generate an endless amount of "random" MIDI files. personally i've never had much use for MIDI, myself.

also, you can use programs like voice (and the java applet version) to "draw" sounds, somewhat similar to xenakis's UPIC system. and programs like metasynth and coagula can be used to do fun stuff like hiding pictures in your sounds to be viewable with a spectrograph. but these aren't exactly databending, at least not by my definition.

the unix and linux operating systems provide perhaps the easiest way to sonify data: piping data directly to the sound card.

if you're on windows, you can do something pretty similar using wav editing software, which is what i'll be focusing on for the rest of this post. i'll be using adobe audition for my screenshots, but these techniques should work with any windows wav editor (or at least every one i've tried). if you don't have a wav editor installed, goldwave has a good free demo, and i've heard good things about audacity, which is open source. [update: check the comments for more on making this work in audacity.]

opening files in a wav editor

a wav editor is an application for recording waveform audio. you can think of the waveform as being as being a digital representation of a sound wave. the wav format is at the center of windows audio—when you rip a cd to mp3, you're actually ripping it to wav first, and then encoding mp3s based on those wavs.

so how do you open a non-audio file using a wav editor? if you read part 1 of this primer then you may have already figured this part out. sonifying data in a wav editor is as easy as clicking "open"!

launch your wav editor. click the "open" button, or click the "file" menu and choose "open". the "open" dialog box will appear. as in part 1, the key here is the "files of type" setting at the bottom. in most applications, you want to set that to "RAW". (some applications will let you use "all files (*.*)"—including adobe audition, which is what i'm using for screenshots—but this won't work in many applications.)

you should now be able to select any file on your hard drive. if your wav editor has a "preview" feature ("auto play" in audition), you may even be able to listen to your files without actually opening them up. but let's open a file to see what happens. select a data file and click "open". a dialog box will appear with settings for you to choose (which settings are available will depend on what software you use). adobe audition actually has two dialog boxes:

here, you can just accept the defaults, or play around with them. the settings you choose will affect what your file sounds like. for example, increasing the sample rate will make your sound shorter (faster) and higher in pitch; decreasing the sample rate will make the sound longer and lower.

once you've made your selections, click OK, and your data file will be converted into a waveform. congratulations! you can now resave your file in WAV format and do whatever you want to it: sequence it, run effects on it, whatever!

what data sounds like, and what data sounds good

patience is a virtue when it comes to databending. the range of sounds you can find are virtually limitless, but actually finding them will take time—your hard drive may have millions of files on it, so it will take time to find the best-sounding ones.

the types of sounds you're most likely to find are slightly distorted "electronic" sounds. if you're old (or unfortunate) enough to be familiar with the sound a dial-up modem makes as it connects to the internet, then you'll find a lot of sounds like that. databent sounds could also be compared to 8-bit or chiptune sounds.

so what types of data sound good when sonified? obviously, this is subjective, but here are some tips.

compressed files generally just sound like static or white noise. this is because of how file compression works: all the relevant data is smooshed together as much as possible, so any patterns in the original data are lost. if you're looking for white noise (maybe as a background texture, or maybe you just want a fraction of a second to create hihat-like sounds with), they're great, but they're generally not of much use to me. examples of compressed files include ZIP, tarball, RAR, cabinet files (CAB), as well as compressed image formats such as JPG and PNG. also, most video file formats are compressed.

small files become really short sounds—percussive sounds or clicks. this is obvious if you think about it: a cd-quality sound file uses 44,100 samples per second for each channel (stereo sounds have two channels), so that's a lot of data just for one second of sound.

uncompressed image files including bitmaps (BMP, most TIF), photoshop and image-editor-native formats (PSD, RAW, etc) can be a source of all sorts of interesting sounds.

executable files (EXE, etc) sometimes sound good, or sometimes sound like compressed files—just a bunch of static.

one of my favorite files to listen to are soundfont files (SF2). these files are included with some sound cards to help replicate music and sound effects. each file is basically a bunch of audio samples one after the other—often in different pitches—so when you listen to them consecutively they sound like musique concrete. (for an example, all the background loops on the animals within animals track "this isn't newsworthy" are from a soundfont file, though some of them have been processed. also, all the "bent" ringtones on the bad taste ringtones page are from soundfont files.)

these are just some ideas; there are thousands of different file formats out there, created by all sorts of programs, and you may have something amazing on your hard drive that i've never heard of. as i said before, finding great sounds requires lots of patience.

for a taste of what kinds of sounds you can find when databending, check out my true data 12" (stream it on soundcloud, buy the vinyl here), or download my aforementioned databending EP, dissonance is bliss, which is available for free download starting today. every sound in tracks 1-7 (aside from the vocal samples) was a file on my hard drive.

editing images in a wav editor environment

after a few years of making music out of databent sounds, i was ready to branch out, so i turned the idea on its head. instead of taking an image, converting it into sound, and making music out of it, why not process the sound, then turn it back into an image and see what happens? thus i began my first experiments with databending images, something i'm obviously still doing several years later. (though these days i do most of my bending in wordpad or with a hex editor.)

wav editors aren't the ideal image-bending environment for a number of reasons, but they do offer several unique advantages. first and foremost, they enable you to make dramatic changes using visual cues, in a way that would be difficult if not impossible in other environments.

for example, here is a typical TIF file (interleaved), as viewed in a WAV editor:

okay, that just looks like a big block of data, but if you zoom in closely at the beginning of the waveform, you can often see roughly where the header is, compared to the body of the file:

as usual, you generally want to avoid bending the header, but the body of the data is fair game (assuming you're working with bitmaps like BMP, TIF, or RAW).

here's an image in photoshop RAW format, non-interleaved with 0 headers. sometimes (but not always), you can see approximately where each channel begins and ends:

now we can do interesting things to the data, like running the "reverse" effect. this is the effect we'd use to play a sound backwards; it reverses the order of the specified data. if we reverse the data in the TIF file, we end up with an image that's upside-down:

(note that because i missed a few pixels here, the image is off-center. if i managed to reverse all the image data, the effect would be effectively the same as rotating the canvas 180 degrees in photoshop.)

if we reverse a non-interleaved file (photoshop RAW with 0 headers), we get a similar effect, only the red and blue channels will be swapped:

of course, you can do lots more than just reverse. most wav editors come with a number of built-in audio effects that you can run on your images, not to mention plug-ins you can install. here is the RAW file after running an EQ effect on it:

note the graininess. this is common when running audio effects on image data—a highly destructive form of editing. i'm not a big fan of the graininess, which is why i don't do this much any more (some old experiments are here and here). but maybe you are, or maybe you have the some cool effects that i don't. (i used to have a great one called acoustic mirror.)

what i much prefer doing is cutting and pasting. for one thing, cut-and-paste is one of the few audio effects that will work on volatile file formats like JPG, PSD, or PNG. (most audio effects will cause these files to break, and even cut-and-paste will break your files if you do it in the wrong place, or if the size of your bent file is even one byte over/under the original.) but also, it's a pretty cool effect. here's just a taste of what you can do with bitmap files and cut and paste:

those are all super-simple bends, using only cut and paste with only one source image. you can switch it up by using multiple source images, including other effects and rotation... whatever you can imagine.

tips for editing JPG/PNG/etc in a wav editor

as i mentioned earlier, editing your image files in a wav editor is highly destructive, and most methods will immediately break files saved in volatile formats like JPG, PNG, PSD, and so on. here are a few tips for safely editing those types of files:

never bend the header. the only time i've ever found it advisable to alter a file header is when bending the color table of a file that uses indexed color (namely, GIF and 8-bit BMP). so don't do it.

don't add or subtract bytes. many image formats specify their exact size in the header, and if the actual size of the file is off even slightly, they won't open. so you must be very careful that your file has the correct amount of data. i usually do this by only using cut and paste, and always being sure to paste (once, and only once) every time i cut something to the clipboard. another way is to pay close attention to exactly how long your selection is, and make sure you don't paste too much/too little data.

try tiny cuts. even minor changes can have major effects when working with these file formats, so try making changes of just a fraction of a second, or move things around but move them just a little bit.

files that don't open in one app may open in another. photoshop isn't very good at opening corrupted JPGs. the gimp is much more flexible, as is microsoft paint. if you don't seem to be having any luck, try opening your bent files in another app. also, the same file may render differently in different applications or on different hardware. so if you have two applications that will open bent JPGs, try using both—you may get different results.

your file may still break. even if you do everything right, you may end up cutting the wrong byte or pasting it into the wrong place, making it refuse to open. just be patient and never, ever bend your originals! always, always make a copy of your image, and bend only the copy.

editing PSD files in a wav editor

all the rules from the previous section apply to photoshop's native format—PSD. but in addition to the header, PSD (photoshop) files have a patch of must-not-bend data in between each channel. furthermore, the rule for not adding/subtracting byte applies to each channel of a PSD file. since it can be impossible to tell exactly where a channel begins or ends, you should expect these files to break frequently.

however, PSD files have features not found in most other formats, which offer some advantages. one advantage is support for layers. by editing a multi-layered PSD in a wav editor, you can glitch one layer without glitching the others. here, i've copied lily (our kitten) onto her own layer, and bent only the layer underneath:

another trick involving layers is to use duplicate layers. if you copy an image to a second layer, and then bend the file, you can effectively create two databent copies of the image, simultaneously. of course, this also gives you more opportunities to mess up and break the file.

(note that multi-layer PSD files also contain a composite layer at the end of the file, after all the other layers. this is basically a flattened version of the whole image, and is used for generating thumbnails and such. glitches made to individual layers will not be reflected in the composite layer and vice versa. if you break a layer, photoshop may still try to open the file based on this composite data. of course, each layer consists of three channels—assuming RGB color mode—so a two-layer RGB image will have a total of 9 channels, the last three being the composite layer.)

another advantage of PSD files is their extreme application sensitivity. remember how i said earlier that bent files sometimes render differently in different applications? well, bent PSD files render differently in different versions of photoshop. so here's exactly the same bent file as above, only opened in photoshop 7.0:

if that isn't weird enough, i've found that the same version of photoshop running on different hardware will render differently, and you'll even get different results from the same version running on the same hardware but on a different windows installation!

and the same file will render completely differently when opened with gimp. here's that same file again:

instead of the horizontal banding effect we see in photoshop, gimp treats bent PSD files much like a photoshop RAW file or non-interleaved TIF. (in my experience, different versions of gimp all render the same.) for this file, i made tiny cuts as mentioned above, which resulted in major changes in photoshop, but only subtle glitches in gimp.

why these applications render the same file differently is a mystery that hasn't been solved, but you can use this to become highly productive at databending. by installing multiple versions of photoshop as well as gimp, you can glitch a file once and get 3-4 databent images out of it. by glitching a multiple-layered PSD file and opening it in multiple applications, you can create 6, 9, or more databent images at once. add a second computer into the mix and you could do even more.

conclusion

so that wraps up part 2. we briefly discussed various types of sonification, and i showed you how to open your files in a wav editor and make music out of them. we then discussed databending image files using a wav editor, with some specific tips for editing PSD files.

the plan is for part 3 of the primer to be about reinterpretation—using photoshop to open non-image files, the same way we used a wav editor to open non-audio files, and stuff like that. of course, considering it took me 10 months to post part 2 after posting part 1, it may be a long while before part 3 goes up.

have fun databending, and be sure to post in the comments if you gain any additional insights into the ideas expressed here. ¶

perhaps they should've waited to hit "publish"

when i saw this story this morning i was amused:


it's a self-shortened indy star story! i mean, what else do you really need to know.

but then, an hour or so later, i came across this masterpiece:

a y We have received an appeal to the plat committee approval for the vacation of Grande Avenue from the Garden City Neighborhood Association That means it will be heard before the Metropolitan Development Commission POSSIBLY by June 3rd.

A request by Allison Transmission to vacate 1,354 feet of Grande Avenue was approved Wednesday by a city plat committee. Nearby businesses and residents opposed the measure, saying the closure from 10th Street to Rybolt Avenue will eliminate a needed shortcut to the Indianapolis Motor Speedway. The decision can be appealed to the Metropolitan Development Commission.
Advertisement

if nobody had objected to it it would have been done. now it geos before the full comm and b.c its a vacation then its done.
mdc will have final say,

Town officials want to reinvigorate the slumping downtown, encourage economic development and remake the town into a destination. Their plan calls for rerouting and in some cases closing streets, which could include using eminent domain if they can't reach a settlement with property owners.

Property owners at the meeting shared concerns regarding their land being taken, the closing of Georgetown Road from 16th to 25th streets and the closing of Grande Avenue just south of 10th Street. They questioned the intentions and practices of the Speedway Redevelopment Commission and Town Council and whether the plan even has a chance of fulfilling local leaders' grand vision.

i filed it -if peoplein gasoline alley will pursue it t
wer still doing it as assocition -- not sure if it will go forward
we have to see whether they want to invest to handle it appeal
you only got 10 days
thats up to peoe wo have th most to lose to see if they want to fight this

Indianapolis Mt¶

indiana says "more please" to dirty coal power

governor mitch daniels's hostility to environmental regulation is well-known, as are his attempts to eviscerate the state'e environmental oversight body, IDEM. (just the other day, he appointed a notorious coal lobbyist as the new IDEM head.) so it's not really that surprising that mitch has an op-ed in today's WSJ assaulting proposed cap-and-trade regulations.

an indy star story gives some pertinent background—more than 90% of indiana's power is generated by burning coal, which gives off more CO2 than any other form of energy—but in typical indy star style doesn't bother to point out that the governor is full of crap.

the governor's op-ed is so riddled with inaccuracies and faulty reasoning that the logical fallacies begin right in the subheading. of course, the op-ed's central premise, that cap-and-trade "would more than double electricity bills in Indiana", is based on a discredited republican talking point. (the real estimate is about a tenth of what republicans say it is, and includes extra costs such as upgrades, new insulation, and so on in addition to what you'd see on your elecricity bill.) when a false premise is the crux of your argument, you might as well toss in some fallacious thinking too, right?

every paragraph brings a new absurdity. i'll leave a point-by-point rebuttal to someone else, but here are few of mitch's greatest hits:

Quite simply, it looks like imperialism. This bill would impose enormous taxes and restrictions on free commerce by wealthy but faltering powers -- California, Massachusetts and New York -- seeking to exploit politically weaker colonies in order to prop up their own decaying economies.

as usual, mitch tries to deflect attention away from indiana's terrible economy onto the economies of other states. of course, what's really happening is that those who had the foresight to invest in alternative energies and curbing pollution are finally going to see those investments start to pay off, while those who wanted nothing to do with the environment will now find themselves at the back of the line.

We are told that although China, India and others show no signs of joining in this dismal process, we will eventually induce their participation by "setting an example." Watching the impending indigence of the Midwest, and the flow of jobs from our shores to theirs, our friends in Asia and the Third World are far more likely to choose any other path but ours.

hell, they'll probably come up with newer, even dirtier ways to burn coal, just to spite us! they'll be like, look at us, suckers, our energy is cheap! (cough cough.)

Politicians in Washington speak of a reawakened appreciation for manufacturing and American competitiveness. But under their policy, those who make real products will suffer. Already we observe the piranha swarm of green lobbyists wangling special exemptions, subsidies and side deals. The ordinary Hoosier was not invited to this party, and can expect at most only table scraps at the service entrance.

aww, poor mitch won't get a taste of all that green money coming down the pike. perhaps if, under his stead, indiana had made a true commitment to green energy and protecting the environment, rather than jumping into bed with polluters and deregulators, we would deserve some of that money.

No one in Indiana is arguing for the status quo: Hoosiers have been eager to pursue a new energy future. We rocketed from nowhere to national leadership in biofuels production in the last four years. We were the No. 1 state in the growth of wind power in 2008. And we have embarked on an aggressive energy-conservation program, indubitably the most cost-effective means of limiting CO2.

Most importantly, we are out to be the world leader in making clean coal [...]

my goodness. where to start? (1) indiana's biofuels are made out of corn, which is inefficient and has had a negative impact on the world's food supply. (2) "growth" is a lousy indicator, since going from zero to one represents an increase of about infinity percent. (3) "clean coal" is an oxymoron and we'd almost be better off investing in magical pony locators.

there are legitimate arguments to be made against cap-and-trade regulation. unfortunately, governor daniels chooses not to use them, and instead fills his op-ed with inaccuracies, fallacious reasoning, appeals to emotion, and his trademark condescending attitude. but the most absurd of all is his closing line, where he refers to "we humble colonials out here in the provinces". mitch daniels: humble? didn't anyone at the WSJ edit this thing? ¶

obama's true masters

if you were horrified and dismayed when obama bowed his head to king abdullah, then you'd better sit down before you look at this shocking photo:



yes, president obama showed his true colors when he bowed in obeisance to this small black child. the president of the united states should bow before no one—certainly not some young boy!

perhaps now the media will wake up and start reporting the truth about obama's socialist plan to institute sharia law, or whatever scary thing he plans to do.

hat tip deeky @ shakespeare's sister.¶

friday cat bending

there was no catbending last week because publishing problems caused the previous week's catbending to be delayed until monday, and two catbending posts in a week seemed like overbending. now we're back on schedule (fingers crossed):

photshop raw


wordpad effect, non-interleaved file reinterpreted as interleaved


wordpad effect, 8-bit bmp


wordpad effect, interleaved tif¶

naked and angry

naked & angry is a sister site to threadless.com (where i've been posting t-shirt designs). it works similar to threadless: users upload repeating patterns, other users vote, and winning submissions are printed on cool stuff like wallets, neckties, umbrellas, bags, and more. (and these are fancy, high-quality products, not like the crap you'd get someplace like cafepress.)

i've submitted my circuitboard pattern and it's up for voting now at http://www.nakedandangry.com/pattern/12867/circuits.

because the site's owned by the same people who run threadless, if you have a threadless user id and password, they'll work at naked & angry. so please take a minute and vote for my pattern. ¶

czech typewriter

here are some photos of that old czech i used for my [redacted] shirt design.

note the many diacritics, and the reversed positions of Y and Z compared to standard qwerty.

new shirt design: [redacted]

my latest t-shirt design is up for voting at threadless, part of their "less is more" design challenge:

for this design i used an antique pre-WWII czech typewriter that my parents got when they lived in the former czechoslovakia before i was born. then i redacted the text by hand with a marker and scanned it in high-res.

i have a good feeling about this one, but of course we won't really know until the scores are in.

i have another design—a new glitch design—that will go up soon. (i'm guessing it will go up tomorrow if not tonight.) but since my previous glitch design was my lowest-scoring submission to date, i don't have high hopes about that one. ¶

where not to apply for a job

original sophia's house of pancakes in greenwood; that's where:

During the interview, Philis began to ask the woman personal questions and then asked her if he could show her the restaurant, to which she obliged, thinking she might be offered a job, according to the affidavit.

The woman told Greenwood police that Philis unexpectedly grabbed both her elbows and then kissed her on the mouth. He then blocked her from leaving and guided her toward an office, the affidavit stated.

Philis told the woman he wanted to touch her and began kissing her on and around the neck, according to the affidavit. The woman told Philis to stop, but he then pushed her into a chair before the assault escalated, the affidavit said.

On March 31, the woman agreed to record a phone conversation with Philis. During the conversation, Philis took full responsibility and referred to the incident as a nightmare, according to the affidavit.

The same day, Philis admitted to police that the woman told him no during the incident but "he did not think she was serious," the affidavit stated.

her mouth said "no", but her body said, "i need a job!"

perhaps even more shocking than the sexual assault is the owner's reaction:

"I've known him for years," John Filis, owner of the restaurant, said today. "I think it's all lies. He's innocent."

so dude admitted to the police that he did this without the woman's consent, but the owner thinks "it's all lies." i've never been to this pancake house, largely because it's in greenwood, but i assure you i will never step foot in the place now.

p.s. since this story is in the indy star, it would be wise to avoid scrolling down and reading the comments, for reasons that should be obvious. ¶

how i met my wife

now that the truth is out, i figured i might as well post this before someone else unearths it and posts it elsewhere. this is the online personal ad i placed a couple years back when i was looking for a wife:

Trolling for a wife
Hirsute SWM seeks F for LTR and possible marriage. Do you love blogging and Barack Obama? Be mine and we'll spend long nights listening to Negativland and ridiculing conservatives on the Internet. Must hate America. Serious responses only.¶

oh noes! i've been outed!

it's true. i have been exposed. journalist-patriot-blogger gary welsh has unmasked me and exposed my true identity to the world.

first, he brilliantly discovered my real name, after i tried so hard for so long to keep it a secret. i'm not sure exactly how he managed that feat—perhaps he looked at my threadless account, which i linked to last week, or maybe he read my name tag at that 2006 blogger meet-up.

then, he went on my flickr profile, which is so secret that i have a link to it in my sidebar, and dug up an old unflattering self-portrait i posted in 2007.

and the unkindest cut of all, he has publicly revealed my evil plot, or my "screed" as he calls it, which as he accurately describes "is essentially to attack anyone with pro-American, conservative views who is not in love with Barack Obama while warmly embracing the hate America crowd at every turn."

how will i ever show my face on the blogosphere again?

update: here's the really funny part (from gary's comments):

Downtown Indy said...

The really funny part is he's baffled by your brilliant discovery (his phrase). One that any amateur sleuth with access to google can discover in 30 seconds. Along with email, phone, address and the knowledge that Network Solutions thinks he owns one other domain name.¶

still waiting for the birth certificate...

shorter gary welsh: mark my words: barack obama may be extremely popular now, but someday, the american people will find out that he's a non-citizen, an on-the-DL coke-sniffing cocksucker, and a socialist with plans to destroy america. when that glorious day comes, the republicans will make a comeback. ¶

belated friday cat bending

i tried to post this a few minutes after midnight friday morning, but was unable to publish. anyway, not much blogging here this week to speak of, but what the hell, here's some cat bending:

this week's images feature the wordpad effect as applied to 8-bit indexed-color BMP files (created using photoshop). ¶

escape from it all (new shirt design)

check out my latest shirt design for threadless:

this is a reworking of my "escape" design, which was my highest-scoring submission to date. people seemed to like the concept, but i got some complaints that it was too small and square. i think this version is a major improvement in several areas. ¶

friday cat bending

this week's cat bending demonstrates the photoshop 6 truncation glitch, discovered by daniel temkin. more lilybending here. ¶

fighting for the right to mistreat animals

as cynical as i've become over the years, i'm still occasionally surprised by political developments. so while i'm not surprised at resistance to a proposed indiana bill restricting puppy mills, i am surprised at who it's coming from, and why:

Indiana Department of Agriculture officials have been working behind the scenes to defeat legislation that would crack down on abusive dog breeders by trying to discredit one of the bill's leading supporters.

Their target: the Humane Society of the United States.

Although the department has taken no official position on the legislation, it acknowledges it has highlighted the Humane Society's history of opposition to confined farming practices, common in Indiana, especially in huge hog operations where animals are raised in close quarters.

A document the agency distributed to lawmakers alleges the Humane Society's goal was the "abolition of all animal agriculture," a notion the group rejected Wednesday. Critics of the bill worry that it could lead to new restrictions on livestock.

so there's a bill to protect dogs from mistreatment, and these people are talking about livestock?

ignoring the question of whether these types of restrictions should be applied to livestock—some of them probably should, as operations such as CAFOs are bad both for the animals as well as for the environment—how does this make sense? dogs are raised as pets, not livestock, so how and why would laws pertaining to dogs be applied to cattle or hogs? the logic is strained.

but most disappointing is that a state government agency is secretly lobbying to defeat this bill. perhaps i shouldn't be surprised, considering that the man in charge is mitch daniels, who's always happy to sell out the environment in favor of business interests, but still i am. how appropriate, then, that the story comes out the day after earth day, fresh on the heels of yesterday's revelation that indiana fallss at the bottom of nearly every conceivable environmental ranking.

not only does mitch daniels not care about the environment; now we know he doesn't even care about protecting puppies from abuse.

update: becky skillman chimes in:

On Thursday, Lt. Gov Becky Skillman's office, which oversees the Department of Agriculture, said Gov. Mitch Daniels' administration backed the bill.

"We are definitely in favor of regulation and the ability to prosecute some of these bad actors and puppy mills that are out there," said Jay Kenworthy, Skillman's press secretary. "There's no effort to kill the bill. We just wanted to see a few changes."

here are some of the changes that have been made:

No limit to the number of dogs an owner can breed. No state inspections of commercial breeding facilities. No restrictions on how often a dog can be bred.

in other words, skillman was in favor of the bill, as long as most of its teeth were removed first. ¶

nice work if you can get it

when i was in high school, many years ago (my 15th reunion is coming up), like many aspiring writers i kept notebooks where i'd jot poems, short stories, song lyrics, and what have you.

most of these were naturally terrible, and i'd be ashamed to show them now. one such awful story involved a photo shoot being interrupted by right-wing censors. the "twist" if you can call it that was that the model in the shoot (naturally inspired by a fellow student i was crushing on at the time) was in fact modestly dressed, but still the photo shoot was censored because the model was so pretty that it was believed her smile alone would be overly titillating.

the story was stupid and corny; the twist not particularly clever. and it wasn't so much meant as a clever satire (which is wasn't), but more as an excuse to fantasize about a pretty classmate. so imagine my surprise at how things have changed since i was in school.

these days, a teenage girl in a swimsuit can get prosecuted for child pornography simply for posing for a photo if she's "posed provocatively"—which i take to mean if she's cute.

under the current (insane) interpretation of the law, "child pornography" is so impossibly illegal that teenagers can't even own mildly erotic photographs of themselves. a teenage girl who takes a photo of herself in a bra or bikini risks being placed on the sex offender registry for life.

but there is one loophole. apparently, the only people who are allowed to own "child pornography" are teachers and school administrators:

atrios quoted this passage on his blog, but i think he ended the quote one paragraph too soon:

Marissa and her parents joined a group of about 50 others at the courthouse. Before showing the photos, Mr. Skumanick explained his offer to the crowd, answering one father's question affirmatively, that -- yes -- a girl in a bathing suit could be subjected to criminal charges because she was posed "provocatively."

Mr. Skumanick told them he could have simply charged the kids. Instead, he gave them two weeks to decide: take the class or face charges.

He then told the parents and teens to line up if they wanted to view the photos, which were printed out onto index cards. As the 17-year-old who took semi-nude self-portraits waited in line, she realized that Mr. Skumanick and other investigators had viewed the pictures. When the adults began to crowd around Mr. Skumanick, the 17-year-old worried they could see her photo and recalls she said, "I think the worst punishment is knowing that all you old guys saw me naked. I just think you guys are all just perverts."

Mr. Skumanick dismisses the criticism, saying that no one could see photos of teens who weren't their own children.

no one, that is, except for skumanick himself, who no doubt has a copy of every racy photo his students have ever sexted to each other, and has surely seen them all multiple times.

now, i don't know if skumanick is the kind of guy who'd go home and touch himself while looking at all those photos of underage girls with their shirts off. i'd like to think that he's not. but i do know that if i were that type of guy, a job like skumanick's would be my dream job.

update: as john m points out in the comments, skumanick is actually the district attorney, so it appears that the best way to get your hands on lewd photos of underage girls is actually to work in the DA's office. though i'm sure school administrators do still get to see plenty of that stuff. ¶

friday lolcat blogging

it was wrong but i fixed it.

lowered expectations

yesterday: "Organizers expect about 8,000 people to protest excessive government spending tomorrow at the Indiana Statehouse."

this morning: "Organizers say they expect several thousand people to attend this afternoon's event in Indianapolis."

this afternoon: "Police estimated about 2,500 people attended the rally, though organizers claimed their numbers were as large as 9,000." ¶

the once and future flak

shorter every post ever by mike o'brien: hello! my name is mike and i'm a right-wing lobbyist and paid republican flak. on every issue, i agree 100% with governor daniels and disagree 100% with obama and the stupid democrats.

bonus shorter executive producer brady gibson: we want WRTV's capitol watchblog to be the first place on the web you visit for political news and debtate. that's why we now have three right-wing bloggers on our payroll compared to one left-winger. ¶

afraid to lead

mayor greg ballard's administration seems to have hit a low point today. not only did the indy star devote its entire behind closed doors column to his lack of leadership on the CIB bailout (printing a most unflattering photo alongside it), but the lead editorial was on the same topic.

but the unkindest cut of all must be that even ballard's top apologist, abdul hakim shabazz, is now criticizing him. this is quite likely the first time abdul has ever said so much as one word critical of the mayor, so this must be a watershed moment.

the question liberal blogs have been asking for months is now on everyone's lips: where the eff is mayor ballard? he loves to talk about leadership, but when is he actually going to show some?

the star editorial suggests one explanation:

Insiders in the Ballard administration say the mayor has been reluctant to push forward his own solutions out of concern that any assertiveness on his part might anger legislative leaders.

so the mayor is afraid to show some leadership because it might upset some legislators? is there a passage in ballard's book about this that i can quote ironically? because i can't be bothered to spend money on a copy of the thing. ¶

glitch aesthetic goes mainstream?

this, my friends, is the latest kanye west video:

KANYE WEST "Welcome To Heartbreak" Directed by Nabil from nabil elderkin on Vimeo.

i don't know whether to be stoked that this shiz is on mtv now, or disappointed that the director is just another hollywood video director and not an underground glitch artist. (kanye should have hired this guy or this guy instead.) ¶

the idea man

shorter mitch daniels: i don't like the senate's plan for spending indiana's share of the stimulus money. we should instead spend that money on [mumbles inaudibly].

furthermore, i think building a casino in downtown indy to fund the CIB is a terrible idea. there are much better options, such as [mumbles inaudibly].¶

friday cat bending

it's been a while since i did any cat bending, and now i have a new cat, so here's some fun with the wordpad effect.¶

a voter by any other name

over in texas, they're debating a voter ID law. here in indiana, where we've had voter ID for a few years, we know that such laws are highly problematic. (the #1 problem, naturally, is that they're completely unnecessary, a solution in search of a problem.) yesterday, the texas house heard testimony about one problem that i haven't seen discussed elsewhere: not only do some people have names that may sound "weird" to american ears, but some names can't even be directly translated to the latin alphabet:

The exchange occurred late Tuesday as the House Elections Committee heard testimony from Ramey Ko, a representative of the Organization of Chinese Americans.

Ko told the committee that people of Chinese, Japanese and Korean descent often have problems voting and other forms of identification because they may have a legal transliterated name and then a common English name that is used on their driver's license on school registrations.

so what do you do if you have a difficult-to-spell name? back in the old days, the folks at ellis island would've just changed your name to "joe smith" and that'd be that. apparently, texas rep betty brown would like to go back to those days:

"Rather than everyone here having to learn Chinese — I understand it's a rather difficult language — do you think that it would behoove you and your citizens to adopt a name that we could deal with more readily here?" Brown said.

Brown later told Ko: "Can't you see that this is something that would make it a lot easier for you and the people who are poll workers if you could adopt a name just for identification purposes that's easier for Americans to deal with?"

pretty simple, really. if your name is in some crazy moon language and you want to vote here in america, just change your name to something american. steve is a good name. or frank, that's a good one. women can pick names like mary or lisa.

rep brown insists her suggestion wasn't racially motivated. she was only trying to address an identification problem. but let's face it: asians aren't the only people with weird names. so if we're going to make people change their names like we used to, we should do it across the board: eastern europeans, aboriginal descent, even blacks. i mean, what kind of a name is kanye west, for example? or, for that matter, barack obama?

just think of it: president steve obama! now that's a name change you can believe in! ¶

my gallery show opens this thursday

my first-ever solo gallery show—which i've alluded to in prior posts—opens this thursday (april 2) at 111 arts gallery in downtown muncie.

the show will feature nine databent prints and several poster-sized collages. all art will be priced affordably (nothing higher than $50–$60), because even in these hard times it's nice to have some cool art on your walls.

come on by and say hi! or if you can't make it thursday, my stuff will be up all month.

we has a new kitteh

meet our new kitten. she's a six-month-old blue tabby. we're calling her lily.

we just adopted her last night and she's still a bit shy, but she's also adorable.

still more IMPD embarrassments

seems like hardly a month can go by without at least one IMPD officer getting busted for doing something shady if not outright illegal. first there's this guy:

A Marion County correction officer was in court Friday facing newly filed charges of child molesting, incest and sexual misconduct with a minor.

Richard B. Alsup, 39, faces a dozen counts involving accusations of improper sexual conduct with a female relative younger than 16, lasting as long as two years. Alsup, who also was a reserve officer with the Indianapolis Metropolitan Police Department, told a judge he is on administrative leave from the Sheriff's Department.

The Indianapolis Star generally does not identify victims of alleged sexual assaults.

Alsup told police he had been having nightmares about having sex with the girl, according to a probable cause affidavit. He told an investigator "he didn't want to believe he could do those things to (the girl), but that he could not say those things didn't happen," the affidavit says.

it's a nightmare all right, but surely much worse for the girl he's allegedly molested.

then today there's this story:

The commander of the Indianapolis Metropolitan Police Department's North District is being stripped of his position in the wake of an investigation into moonlighting by off-duty officers, public safety officials said Friday.

Maj. David Allender -- one of 51 officers who worked part-time security jobs for a metal-recycling firm linked to allegations that its workers knowingly purchased stolen metal -- will be busted to his merit rank of captain and reassigned to new duties within a week, public safety officials said in an e-mail to The Indianapolis Star.

[...]

"Having gathered new information about the deployment of precious police resources in the context of competing demands for officer time by private employers," Newman wrote in the e-mail, "we were no longer confident that only (the public's) interests were being served at all times."

Newman said the department expects to soon name Allender's replacement.

Deputy Chief John Conley stressed that Allender's demotion "was not related to any scrap-metal investigation and has no criminal violations or implications."

Rather, Conley wrote, the change came because of "time management and management of resources that should have been designated full-time to the public."

allender's name had come up previously in earlier stories about the omnisource bust. and while he's not being charged for being an accessory to scrap metal theft—at least at this time—the IMPD apparently did find that his moonlighting at omnisource had corrupted him to the point that he scheduled his fellow moonlighters according to what was best at omnisource, not what was best for the city or for the police department.

when will the police scandals end? ¶

shorter post-revolt wrap-up

shorter gary welsh: despite what you may have heard, my speech totally rocked yesterday, and anyone who tells you different is a dishonest sellout.

shorter paul k ogden: i don't understand why reporters and liberal bloggers keep mocking my event, just because it lacked focus and a lot of the people there were fringe types and crackpots. they should thanks me—nay, exalt and praise me!

shorter melyssa donaghy: they laugh at us because they're scared!

bonus shorter indiana barrister comments:

shorter gary welsh: i don't care if abdul mocks me, because his radio show sucks.

shorter abdul hakim shabazz: oh yeah? well gary has bad taste in clothes.

shorter paul k ogden: i admit there were a lot of crazies in attendance, but surely everyone can agree that gary welsh is awesome.

shorter gary welsh: actually, my taste in clothes is impeccable. also, abdul is fat.¶

if they held a protest and nobody knew what it was about, would it make a sound?

so that right-wing protest, "revolt at the state house", was this morning. it warranted a whopping three-paragraph AP story. here's the story in its entirety (and yes, i'm going against my "no quoting the AP" policy):

An eclectic group of nearly 200 people gathered at the Indiana Statehouse today to show lawmakers that they are generally "fed up" with government.

Some at the rally held signs urging lawmakers to retire or be voted out of office. Others wanted to repeal property taxes or stop what they considered eminent domain abuse. Other signs supported a state immigration law and a revolt against socialism.

Speakers at the "Revolt at the Statehouse" event included taxpayer group leaders and community activists. Organizers said the focus of the rally was the frustration average citizens feel with government at all levels.

well, that sounds like a ragtag bunch. of course, saying the event's "focus" was "the frustration average citizens feel with government at all levels" is a nice way of saying what jim shella said: the event lacked focus.

shella's report is amusing: he plays it for laughs, finding a few fringe types and letting them embarrass themselves on camera. gary welsh, as is his nature, takes shella's criticism personally.

abdul, on the other hand, has no qualms about mocking gary by name, saying that when gary "screams" into a microphone, "he sounds like Godzilla on helium." abdul also writes that "At times it was hard to follow where it all was going. For the next rally, I'd try to stay a little more focused and have a more tangible universal theme that is easy for people to grasp."

compare shella and abdul's complaints with what i wrote a month ago:

i don't see this protest attracting a lot of protesters nor much media attention. the whole thing is too vague and ephemeral for tv reporters, who won't have a clue how to cover the thing. and in today's economy, i don't see the typical taxpayer getting too riled up about "the executive and legislative revolving door"—these days, people are more worried about just finding jobs and making ends meet. if this were a focused protest centered around, say, the mess at the CIB, i could see it being a moderate success. but a kitchen-sink protest of complaining about "corporate welfare" is doomed to failure.

of course, as melyssa loves to remind me, nobody reads this blog, so who cares what i have to say? ¶

the nerve of some people is better than others

shorter abdul hakim-shabazz: how dare the city's poor complain about being treated like second-class citizens?!? the city rightfully treats them like crap because they are crap. now shut up, you stupid poor people! ¶

zot

here's my latest databent illustration. like the arsonist, this is a computer illustration that uses glitched JPEGs for the textures.

both works, as well as many other pieces, will be part of my upcoming gallery show at 111 arts gallery in muncie. opening reception for the show will be april 2.

a study of presidential rankings

shorter gary welsh: obama is a worse president than bush, because making an inappropriate joke about the special olympics is clearly worse than dragging the country into an unjust war or indefinitely detaining innocent people. ¶

hey big spender

mayor greg ballard likes to portray himself—and by extension his administration—as being extremely frugal, as almost pathologically obsessed with cutting the budget. i've mocked him many times (and likely will many more) for his statements on the campaign trail that he would cut $70 million of "fluff" from the budget. and it's only going to get worse, as property tax caps will cause revenues to shrink substantially in coming years. not to mention that whole recession thing.

so it's puzzling to say the least that this guy has been chosen as our new airport CEO:

Airport Chief Executive John D. Clark III earned a reputation in Jacksonville, Fla., for being an anti-union spendthrift, cutting jobs while treating himself lavishly as he traveled the world.

He made separate business trips to Paris, London, Shanghai, Buenos Aires, Sao Paulo and Cairo -- four continents, all paid for by the airport and all within one year.

He once authorized $10,000 for a limousine in Paris for an airport board member and a lawyer, and ended up apologizing for it.

in addition to his lavish spending habits, clark also has a reputation for being hostile to unions and treating employees unfairly. he's also known for his battles with the jacksonville city council and neighborhood residents.

to be clear, clark wasn't chosen by ballard, but by airport authority head randall tobias. tobias himself is no stranger to scandal, having resigned from a federal post in 2007 after the revelation that he'd been paying for high-priced "massages" from prostitutes. perhaps the controversy surrounding clark seems like small potatoes to tobias, who has been shamed at a national level. but ballard loves to talk about leadership (and he'll talk anywhere they'll listen), and part of being in charge is taking the heat for those under you.

what we know about clark suggests he's everything that the ballard administration insists it isn't: wasteful, extravagant, arrogant, hostile toward the public, and a foe of transparency. so why is he being hired?

there is one bit of good news regarding his hiring, though: the people of jacksonville are ecstatic that he's leaving. ¶

journalists need their beauty sleep

shorter post-tribune ed board: there's a bill in the state house to extend indiana's voting hours to 8pm. while this would allow more people with day jobs to vote, overall it would be a horrible mistake, because then journalists like us would have to stay up two hours earlier on election night! ¶

motion to hold our horses on this liberal stuff

shorter senator evan bayh: i know my party controls the white house and both houses of congress, but that's no reason for us to move forward on our economic or environmental agenda. ¶

one county executive to rule them all

shorter star ed board: how dare the democrats in the state house defy us by not passing township consolidation?!? the only possible explanation is that they are evil, despicable people!

shorter gary welsh: i've been saying that all along! ¶

rage, rage against the saving of the daylight

shorter norman cox:

the fact that people are still arguing about daylight saving time pisses me off. i don't care if it doesn't save energy; i just want to be like everyone else! DST is the law now so DISCUSSION IS OVER.

update:
alternate shorter norman cox: if everyone else jumped off a bridge, you're damn right i'd jump too! now get out of my way and let me jump, whiners! ¶

update: tonight at big car

just a quick note about tonight's event at big car gallery:

turns out there won't be a stage at the top of the stairs after all, so i will instead be playing at short set in the main gallery (suite 215 i believe) sometime between 7 and 9 pm. the event is free, with lots of intriguing music, art, and video, so come check it out:

Listen: A Music and Video Experiment
Featuring video art and experimental music throughout the Murphy Art Center -- including Alchemy in Suite 3, Suite 4 next door and multiple spaces upstairs near Big Car.

Friday, March 6, 2009 at 7 p.m.- Midnight.

Big Car's First Friday show for March will feature a bevy of local, regional, national and international video and sound artists. All of the music will accompany video art projections. The night will include a show of Herron video artists in Suite 214 next door to Big Car (see artist statements below), a program of experimental videos from other local artists in Suite 3 and 4 on street level (J. Andrew Salyer, Laura Salyer, Jim Walker, Flounder Lee) and a Microcinema screening (FATELESS, Color + Modulation, SLIDE, Hub Culture Retrospectives: Antarctica, Independent Exposure: Asthmatic Kitty Records Edition 2008, The Collected Films of Ryan Jeffery) also in Suite 214.

The night's musical offerings in Suite 215 (Big Car's regular space) and in other nearby spaces include performances by Butler University's Ensemble 48 (playing a soundtrack to the silent film "Man with the Movie Camera"), Marck Ferrari, Ben Ishmael Revival, Shiny Black Shirt, Sea Krowns, Ensemble 48, Actuel, Playboy Psychonauts, Stallio, Sky Thing and Tonos Triad.

Also in the street level space that night, Big Car also hosts the installation "Unified Fields" that features the interactive music and art of duo Mana2 (Jordan Munson, Michael Drews). This installation is a collaborative composition combining elements from the works Unified Fields (Munson) and Deconstructions (Drews). Themes and gestures from each work interact both with each other and sonic and video material emanating from several interactive stations positioned in the room. These stations will involve both motion and color tracking technologies. During the event, live musical textures will be weaved into the sonic environment being generated.

The event is sponsored by Microcinema and is a partnership with the Toby at the IMA.¶

this friday at big car gallery

i will be performing at an interesting-sounding event this friday at big car in fountain square:

Listen: A Music and Video Experiment
Featuring video art and experimental music throughout the Murphy Art Center -- including Alchemy in Suite 3, Suite 4 next door and multiple spaces upstairs near Big Car.

Friday, March 6, 2009 at 7 p.m.- Midnight.

Big Car's First Friday show for March will feature a bevy of local, regional, national and international video and sound artists. All of the music will accompany video art projections. The night will include a show of Herron video artists in Suite 214 next door to Big Car (see artist statements below), a program of experimental videos from other local artists in Suite 3 and 4 on street level (J. Andrew Salyer, Laura Salyer, Jim Walker, Flounder Lee) and a Microcinema screening (FATELESS, Color + Modulation, SLIDE, Hub Culture Retrospectives: Antarctica, Independent Exposure: Asthmatic Kitty Records Edition 2008, The Collected Films of Ryan Jeffery) also in Suite 214.

The night's musical offerings in Suite 215 (Big Car's regular space) and in other nearby spaces include performances by Butler University's Ensemble 48 (playing a soundtrack to the silent film "Man with the Movie Camera"), Marck Ferrari, Ben Ishmael Revival, Shiny Black Shirt, Sea Krowns, Ensemble 48, Actuel, Playboy Psychonauts, Stallio, Sky Thing and Tonos Triad.

Also in the street level space that night, Big Car also hosts the installation "Unified Fields" that features the interactive music and art of duo Mana2 (Jordan Munson, Michael Drews). This installation is a collaborative composition combining elements from the works Unified Fields (Munson) and Deconstructions (Drews). Themes and gestures from each work interact both with each other and sonic and video material emanating from several interactive stations positioned in the room. These stations will involve both motion and color tracking technologies. During the event, live musical textures will be weaved into the sonic environment being generated.

The event is sponsored by Microcinema and is a partnership with the Toby at the IMA.

it should be a lot of fun—and it's free! i'm currently scheduled to play around 8:30-9:30 near the top of the stairs.

more information at bigcar.org. ¶

sunset over tax city

i finished this last night: another collage landscape similar to the one i posted last week. this one is also for the april show at 111 arts gallery and tattoo studio in muncie.

the right-wingers are revolting!

one of the drawbacks of doing most of my blog-reading using a feed reader is that i seldom read blog comments anymore, unless those comments have a feed of their own. in particular, this means i rarely read comments on blogger blogs (other than my own). and since blogger is the platform of choice for most of the local right-wing bloggers, that means i rarely read the comments on those blogs... and the comments are often where the wackiest stuff goes on.

because of this, i hadn't realized just how bad things had gotten on the local right-wing blogs. they are cracking up over the inept leadership of mayor ballard and the republican-controlled city council. i knew that gary welsh had turned on mayor ballard not long after the election, and i knew that paul ogden—a former commenter who now has his own blog—was also critical of the ballard administration. but i didn't know that melyssa donaghy—once one of the mayor's most vocal supporters—had finally turned on him as well. (i knew it would happen, and predicted it here more than once, but didn't know when. though i had noticed she wasn't coming around here and defending the mayor in the comments anymore.)

melyssa and paul are planning a protest at the statehouse for next month, calling it "revolt at the statehouse". apparently they hope to recapture some of the attention they got for the property tax protests of 2007. but while those protests were narrowly focused on an issue that had upset a lot of people, their new protest is vague and hard to grasp, spilling over a number of right-wing grievances:

The rally will focus chiefly on issues relating to corporate welfare, Indiana style "pay to play" politics, property tax reform, and the need for transparency and ethics reform. Particular topics are likely to include: "The Colts, Pacers & the Capital Improvement Board, "Pay to Play Politics, Indiana Style: Campaign Contributions & Government Contracts," "The Executive and Legislative Revolving Door," "Corporate Welfare – How Politicians Have Used Our Tax Money to Make the Rich Richer."

if you even know what all that means, you're probably one of the event's organizers. i don't see this protest attracting a lot of protesters nor much media attention. the whole thing is too vague and ephemeral for tv reporters, who won't have a clue how to cover the thing. and in today's economy, i don't see the typical taxpayer getting too riled up about "the executive and legislative revolving door"—these days, people are more worried about just finding jobs and making ends meet. if this were a focused protest centered around, say, the mess at the CIB, i could see it being a moderate success. but a kitchen-sink protest of complaining about "corporate welfare" is doomed to failure.

the press release for the protest is posted on paul ogden's blog, and while i was there reading it, i noticed a link in the blogroll to an anti-ogen blog. now, i must give ogden kudos for blogrolling his own haters. that takes confidence. the "ogden truth squad" is a ballard apologist blog devoted to attacking ogden (and by extension, gary, melyssa, and others). in other words, it's a pure drama blog: right-wingers attacking other right-wingers in defense of republican politicians. the drama itself is not as exciting as you might have hoped, but the fact that such a blog even exists is evidence of how much things have changed in recent months. not that long ago, greg ballard was a hero to all these people. now, he's hated by many, and the source of much bickering among his former followers. ¶

moonlighters

the indystar.com feeds seem to be busted today—clicking the links leads to a database error instead of a story—but if you can get around that, you might have read the story "IMPD supporters caution don't rush to judgment in OmniSource scrap metal case".

omnisource deals in metal recycling. monday, the company was raided for buying stolen scrap. it's no secret that thieves all over the city have been stealing any metal they can get their hands on and selling it for scrap. apparently they've been selling it to omnisource.

the surprise is that omnisource has hired 51 off-duty IMPD cops to work security. this is only the latest in a slew of stories that make IMPD look bad—corrupt, inept, or both—and the "supporters" story is a plea that we shouldn't rush to the judgment that those 51 cops were in on the scam. none of those cops have been charged with anything, supporters say. there's even a quote from the local FOP president stating that he's "confident" that none of those cops were involved in law-breaking.

common sense suggests that at least one of those fifty-one police officers running around the place should have noticed that some shady stuff was going on. so the idea that none of these cops were in on it fails the sniff test.

but it gets worse. i first read these details in today's star editorial:

The list of off-duty IMPD officers that OmniSource employed includes Detective Jason Prendergast, the department's lead investigator of scrap metal thefts. His employment by a company working in a field directly related to his on-duty responsibilities is an obvious conflict of interest.

Two years ago, Prendergast and Maj. David Allender, a district commander also employed by OmniSource, led an investigation into one of the company's top competitors in the city.

the top guy in charge of scrap metal thefts was moonlighting as a security guard at a company that was buying stolen scrap metal. why would prendergast even want to work security there? even giving him the benefit of the doubt and assuming he didn't know about the crimes there, how could he have thought it was a good idea? and even worse, why would his bosses agree to let him do it?

the investigation into omnisource has been going on for a year. top brass (including, we must assume, mayor ballard's office) have known about the investigation all this time. yet prendergast and others were allowed to continue moonlighting there. clearly something screwy has been going on.

mayor ballard, who eagerly seized control of the police department last year, steadfastly refused to comment on the story during a video chat yesterday with the star ed board. the ed board valiantly tried to get him to comment, but he refused. today's editorial takes him to task for being invisible on this issue, as he is on so many others. ballard's defenders will surely try to blame former mayor peterson and sheriff anderson, as they do whenever ballard is in trouble. (no doubt abdul is already working on his post blaming the prior administration.) but ballard is mayor now, and it would be nice for him to show some leadership on this issue (and a number of others). the man likes to talk about leadership. he wrote a book about it, and even teaches leadership classes to IMPD officers. but when it comes to actually stepping up and exhibiting leadership, he's nowhere to be found.

as tully wrote in today's column, ballard has no political instinct. he says he hates lame photo ops, but he doesn't seem to understand that one of the main ways politicians lead is by getting in front of a tv camera and showing people you're in control. and since ballard made it a point to take personal control over the IMPD, that only makes it more important that he get up there and say, "we're investigating, we hope none of our officers were involved in wrongdoing, but if they were they'll be punished." his unwillingness to do so is troubling.

we haven't heard the last of this story. this is shaping up to be yet another black eye for a police department that has had a lot of bruises lately. ¶

too little too late

i noticed that IHOP is trying to duplicate denny's' success by offering people a free short stack of pancakes today. it might even work—to a degree, but it surely won't be as successful as the denny's promotion for a few reasons:

1. they're offering less. denny's gave away free grand slams, which include eggs, sausage, and bacon. IHOP is merely giving away the pancakes.
2. they're getting less ad exposure. denny's advertised their offer during the super bowl to be sure everyone knew about it.
3. this won't be true for every market, but... i don't know where there is an open IHOP anymore! the one in castleton has been shuttered for months, and the one in downtown indy was recently demolished in order to build a CVS even though there's a walgreen's right across the street! (looks like there's one in avon, one near lawrence, and one near greenwood if you're really itching for a short stack.)

my wife loves free food—just yesterday we got free coffees at einstien brothers, and tomorrow we're going to denny's because we have coupons—but i'm not driving to avon just for a free short stack. ¶

the city reacts to ballard's bold vision of livability

a day has now passed since mayor ballard gave his state of the city speech (on a saturday morning, when the fewest number of people possible would be paying attention). so how are people responding?

"The biggest complaint I have as a resident is that livable isn't a goal," said Adam Kirsch, executive director of the Marion County Democratic Party. "It is the bare minimum the city should expect.

"The speech didn't provide a bold vision. It was just filled with a litany of minor accomplishments during his first year."

Republican City-County Council member Michael McQuillen disagreed, saying, "Livability is a big issue that will put Indianapolis a step above other big cities in this nation."

imagine... a city that's livable! it sounds far-fetched, i know—like something out of a grant morrisson comic book—but just try to picture it: a city where you can actually live! if ballard can somehow pull it off, then that would really put indianapolis a step above other big cities!

Ballard was asked after the speech if he thought he'd provided the vision his critics had found lacking.

"What I said today is not much different than what I've said the last eight to 10 months," he said.

in other words, no, not even ballard thinks he articulated a vision in this speech.

even the mayor's top apologist, abdul hakim shabazz, concedes that the mayor has no vision, but tries to spin it as a positive. "I think this city has enough of that 'vision' for a while," he writes. and for those of you who think abdul's opinion on ballard, who he has literally never criticized for any reason whatsoever, isn't worth the pixels it's printed on, abdul has this to say: you should listen to him because he was actually in the room during the speech. so there!

gary welsh has, in recent weeks, found something to write about other than his distrust of president obama: the troubles at the CIB. he was hoping for the mayor to say something of substance on the subject, and was naturally left empty-handed. paul ogden concurs, and promptly takes the opportunity for a shot at former mayor bart peterson.

amazingly, matt tully, who just the other day wrote a column begging the mayor to show some vision for god's sake, gave the speech a B. why? because ballard's delivery wasn't as embarrassing as at past speeches. apparently ballard's decision to skip meeting the president in order to practice his speech helped after all. perhaps tully's next column will explain why the speech was actually good despite not delivering on the stuff tully said he wanted. (to be fair, in today's tully's corner feature, tully takes ballard to task for skipping the obama meeting, so he's not completely soft on the mayor.)

at her latest blog, envision indy, jen wagner has been offering a detailed response to the speech, including fact checks, detailed rebuttals, and the full text of the speech. let's hope that envision indy sticks around longer than some of her previous blogs.¶

the high standards of livability

the indianapolis star, tired of giving mayor ballard a pass these past 14 months, has been begging him to articulate some sort of vision in this morning's state of the city address. after all, the mayor allegedly passed on the opportunity to meet president obama just so he could practice the speech.

i imagine they'll find the speech as underwhelming as i did.

so what's the mayor's vision for indianapolis? he wants to make us a "safe, livable city". hoo boy, don't throw out your back aiming so high! making the city livable is an awfully high standard to aspire to! (in contrast, former mayor peterson merely hoped to make indianapolis "world-class".)

now, i agree with the mayor's plans to add sidewalks and bike lanes. the city is sorely lacking in both (though the sidewalks would be more useful if we had a decent public transit system). but when sidewalks are the most exciting part of your plan, there's something wrong with your plan.

and of course, it wouldn't be a ballard speech if it didn't include at least a few minutes of griping about prior administrations. judging from his speech, you'd think bart peterson was the sole reason for the city's economic woes—not the nationwide recession or property tax caps that will only continue to slash the city's budget in the coming years.

if you were hoping for something resembling vision from the mayor, it's time to abandon that hope, because he ain't got it. ¶

photoshop city

in an earlier post i mentioned that for my visual art, i'm trying to get away from purely abstract work toward a style that's more representational, so i can hone my illustration skills. this applies somewhat to databending (i'll still do pure databending, especially when i discover new bending methods), but especially to collage work.

this is a piece called photoshop city that i made several weeks back—the first in a series of representational collages. if you can't tell from the photo, the skyscrapers are made of dialog boxes from photoshop 6. the background is acrylic paint. at 30"x20" it's too big to scan, so i'll have to settle for photos like this.

this piece and much more will be on display (and for sale) at my first-ever solo gallery show, coming this april to 111 arts gallery and tattoo studio in downtown muncie. i'm hoping to sell a few pieces at that show... if only because we're running out of wall space in our apartment for all my art.

indy star zen: redirect edition

i thought i was pretty much done with the indy star zen feature, but just when i'm getting out, they pull me back in:


i don't think i have the permissions to do that. ¶

back home again in indiana

hello there! a week has passed since last i blogged—a week of much vacationing—so here's what you missed.

monday it rained all day, which as you might have guessed wasn't the sort of weather we'd gone to palm springs for. so while we went out to eat, we didn't get to do everything we'd hoped. in the morning, we went to breakfast at pinocchio's in the desert, where we sipped bottomless glasses of champagne (technically sparking wine, but for $3.95 it was good enough). virago dined on lobster benedict and i jumped at the rare chance to enjoy a monte cristo. (monte cristos seem to have vanished off most menus by the early '80s.)

from there, we went to the palm springs art museum, figuring it was something indoors we could do while we waited for the rain to stop. naturally, the meseum is closed mondays, so off we went back toward the motel. we promptly got lost and ended up at the target in cathedral city. this was fortunate because we needed to buy some stuff there anyway. then it was back to the motel, hoping the sun would eventually come out.

it never did; the rain didn't stop until the evening, as we were on our way to a sushi dinner at kiyosaku. dinner was delicious but expensive. afterward we went to a local indian casino and played video poker for awhile.

tuesday (virago's birthday) we drove down to the san diego area, but first stopped at cabazon to see the dinosaur statues, which were featured in pee wee's big adventure:

as you can see in the photo, at some point ownership of the dinos passed to a group of creationists, who have put up signs proclaiming that evolution is a myth. we also spent a few minutes inside the wheel inn next door, where we bought some souvenirs.

that night we stayed at the famous hotel del coronado—quite a change from the motel 6 in palm springs. for dinner, we went to red lobster. (yes, there are red lobsters in indy, but we had a $45 gift card that paid for most of our meal.)

the next morning, we got up bright and early to enjoy some of the hotel's facilities before we had to go. first we had the fantastic breakfast buffet at the sheerwater, which has wonderful pastries, lovely quiche, delicious omelettes to order, and much more (even brie). it was even better than the breakfast we had at one south in downtown indy the morning after our wedding (though the waffles weren't as good).

then we went down to the beach to see the ocean and take some photos:

virago's hat purchased at target in cathedral city.


stAllio!'s hat purchased at the wheel inn.

alas, it was time to check out. we drove into downtown san diego to meet virago's dad at balboa park and visit the museum of man, where the exhibits were a striking contrast to what we'd seen in cabazon the previous day. on our way back to our car, we managed to get completely lost and walk around in a circle for 45 minutes. then we stopped by to see a couple of virago's relatives on our way out of town, before getting stuck in rush-hour traffic on the interstate. you haven't really been to southern california if you haven't gotten caught in heavy freeway traffic.

thursday was our last full day in the palm springs area, so we drove over to palm desert to see the living desert, a nature preserve and park where you can get amazingly close to all sorts of desert animals. we took tons of pictures there:

this wasn't in an exhibit—this was a wild rabbit who just happened to hop up within a few feet of us near the butterfly preserve.


you can walk right into the aviary where some of these birds live.

the park closes at 5 (it closes even easier during summer hours, when nobody wants to be out in middle of the desert), so we drove back to town and had dinner at the blue coyote grill. i ordered the ceviche, not realizing exactly what it is or that it's served cold. the portion of scallops was massive, but it was more sour than i'd realized it would be and so the meal wasn't as satisfying as i'd hoped. i blame my own ignorance for the misunderstanding, though the menu wasn't exactly clear, either. virago had the mahi-mahi, which was tastier, and was served with bland vegetables and a delicious potato chimi.

much to our surprise, a mysterious street festival was being held on the strip a block from the restaurant. we never did figure out the name or purpose of the street fair, but we took advantage of it, taking in the sights and buying a few souvenirs. if we'd known in advance, we might have skipped the restaurant entirely and just eaten street food from the vendors. oh well.

we ate well that week. the best meals we had were the aformentioned breakfast at the sheerwater, and a fabulous dinner at pepper's thai sunday night. pepper's was simply wonderful. i had the sole fillet (shoo shee—fried and served in red curry sauce); the fish was delightfully tender in the middle and crisp on the outside, and the sauce was delicious. virago had pineapple curry with duck and loved it, declaring the meal to be the best thai food she'd ever had. i wish we'd had the opportunity to eat there again before we had to leave.

we also had our share of fast food, from places we don't have in indy like del taco, el pollo loco, hot dog on a stick, and in n out. and on a few occasions, we enjoyed wonderful donuts from an asian-owned place called swiss donut, not too far from the motel. those donuts were much better than we can get in our neighborhood here on indy's northwest side.

friday we flew back to indy. both of our planes were late getting in. saturday we slept.

you can see all of our photos from the vacation here, or just the shots from the living desert here. ¶

greetings from palm springs!

we arrived safely in palm springs last night. the rental car folks gave us a free upgrade to a nissan 350Z, a sporty little two-seater that's possibly the nicest car i've ever driven (of course, i haven't driven that many cars in my day.)

our current motel—a motel 6—isn't quite as nice as the car. other than having a swimming pool and a bunch of tv channels, the motel has few frills. in fact, when we arrived our room didn't even have a bar on the toilet paper dispenser. (thankfully, the maids gave us one today.) but it's cheap and has wifi, so i can't complain too much.

today, virago's dad drove up from san diego to meet us. the three of us went out to breakfast, then over to the nearby town of joshua tree (where, despite what the song says, the streets do have names) and drove through joshua tree national park. check out our vacation photos here. the set will presumably be updated as we take & upload more photos. ¶

beautiful palm springs

that's where virago & i are going for our belated honeymoon! we leave this afternoon and will be gone for a week.

we're taking the laptop so we should still be reachable online, but i won't be hunched in front of the computer all my waking hours as i typically am. it's possible that i'll pop in here at the blog (or just upload some vacation photos to flickr), but don't count on it. ¶

be careful who you give the keys to your blog

popular blog boingboing has had a lot of guest bloggers lately. there's nothing wrong with that: if you pick the right people it can spice up your blog and take it in new, exciting directions. (note: this is my personal blog and mine alone. no guest bloggers here.) but you don't want to just let anyone be your guest blogger, because if you pick poorly, it could damage your blog's reputation. that's a lesson the boingboingers seem to be learning.

it turns out their current guest blogger, charles platt, is a global warming denier. overnight, charles wrote four posts in a row of climate change "skepticism". this caused an ashamed cory doctorow to follow up with his own four posts full of actual scientific information about climate change.

the result is that if, like me, you just woke up and checked your feed reader (or boingboing itself), you were overloaded with posts about global warming and climate change. and because of the descending chronological nature of blogging, my initial reaction was "why in the hell is cory going on about climate change today?"... that is, until i scrolled down far enough to start seeing charles's posts.

maybe next time the boingboingers will be more selective. ¶

lunch fail

we tried to go out for lunch today to get in on that offer of free grand slams at denny's, but to no avail. we hoped that going at 11:30 would be early enough to get us in, but there was a line out the door even then. we weren't about to fight for a parking space only to stand around in the show, so we shuffled on.

of course, the roads were a disgrace. (messy roads during the morning rush hour are forgivable, but by lunchtime there's no excuse for the roads to be as sloppy as they are now.)

we ended up settling on lunch at the local chinese buffet. food there isn't particularly good at the best of times, but lunch was worse than usual—half of what i ate was cold, or at least not hot. the one bright point of the meal was a dish labeled clispy chicken. i tried to get a photo, only to discover that my cellphone camera is fubar. fortunately virago had her phone with her.

anyway, congrats to denny's on what seems to be a successful promotion—no doubt many thousands turned up today for free grand slams. hopefully, for denny's's sake, some of those people will turn into repeat customers. ¶

new shirt design: the arsonist

i have a new t-shirt design up for voting at threadless:

this is a new style for me; i guess you could call it a databent illustration. but it's not an illustration that i made and then glitched; rather, it's an illustration created using bent JPEGs for the textures—the colors are really vibrant.

i think it came out quite well, but the threadless voters are fickle, so i'm curious to see how it'll score. i suspect it'll do better than my past submissions, but we won't really know until voting ends. (if it does poorly, i'll probably adapt it into a framed piece for a gallery showing i have in the works.)

so please check it out, and if you like it, register with threadless and vote! you can see the design in detail on flickr here. ¶

FSSA fails in its duty to help people register to vote

from the indy star:

When low-income Hoosiers turn to state social-services offices for help, they're supposed to get something more than financial assistance. They're also supposed to be able to register to vote.

But two national voting-rights groups say Indiana is failing that federally required responsibility, and, as they have done elsewhere, are threatening to sue the state.
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Project Vote and the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, or ACORN, say their November survey of nine Indiana Family and Social Services Administration offices in Lake and Marion counties found that none were providing voter registration forms to clients. Eight didn't even have the forms available, the groups said.

Nicole Kovite, a Project Vote official, said workers at the FSSA offices were unaware of the federal law that makes social-services offices -- along with Bureau of Motor Vehicle branches and some other public offices -- responsible for helping people register to vote.

a reasonable person would read this story and think, "hey, the FSSA should probably start obeying the law and help people register to vote!" so it should come as no surprise that gary welsh had a different reaction:

It's obvious what is going on here. These groups like ACORN operate as extensions of the Democratic Party. They are going to coordinate these efforts with the Obama administration to step up voter registration activities at welfare offices with the intent of adding more Democratic voters to the voting rolls. Democrats inherently are unable to separate the government's role in dispensing public benefits and partisan political activities. To them, the two go hand in hand.

sheesh! that guy became a caricature of himself months ago. if you've been wondering why i don't make fun of him as much as i used to, it's not because he's regained his sanity (far from it), but because half the time i don't even have the heart to read that drivel anymore. ¶