...and we're back

so yeah, the blog was down for about three days, as was the AWIA news page. both are back up now, and expected to stay that way.

when i first purchased animalswithinanimals.com, nearly a decade ago, there was a lot less competition in the domain registry market, and i ended up using network solutions. but years passed, price wars were waged, and by 2011 i could no longer justify paying netsol's rates ($34.99/yr, going down to $15/yr if you renew for 5-10 years). one of my facebook friends suggested 1and1 ($4.99 for the first year and $8.99/yr after), so i decided to make the switch.

for some foolish reason i decided to do this while that wired (uk) article is on the stands, even though my domain wasn't set to expire until march. so naturally this resulted in a DNS error taking down the blogs (while the rest of the site stayed up), and since DNS can take up to 48 hours to propogate, i waited impatiently for two days, expecting the issue to resolve itself. all the while, wired readers were presumably punching in the url in the article only to find a dead page (though at least google had it cached).

on the evening of the third day, i felt enough time had passed to justify contacting 1and1 customer support. although their website brags that you can email them for free using your account control panel, i could find no such feature and in the end resorted to calling their free help line. after listening to several minutes of heavily distorted on-hold music—harsh noise remixes of led zeppelin, the cult, and the who, it would seem—i was eventually told that i would need to contact my web host. despite my suspicion that this was crap, i did so anyway, and sure enough, my web host was able to fix it immediately.

so now we're back, not that my regulars would even have noticed considering how infrequently i post these days. ¶

stAllio! featured in WIRED (UK)

i dropped a couple hints on facebook yesterday, but i might as well stop being coy about it: there's a short feature about me in the latest (feb 2011) issue of wired magazine (UK edition):

they contacted me a couple months back about doing a feature on my advanced databending with wordpad. it turns out they had mentioned me on their website in august, but this is my first mention in the print edition.

the feature is on a two-page spread next to an article about a lumberjack, so they sent me a photo of the lumberjack and had me glitch it in wordpad. i also sent some fairly in-depth answers to their questions... which of course were then condensed into ~300 words, but that's the magazine business for you.

i haven't actually read the piece, since i don't have a copy of the magazine yet, and they haven't posted the article online, though they may in the coming days. (they have posted the spead, as you can see above, but it's too zoomed out to be legible.) my buddy hellocatfood will be sending me a couple copies soon, so i may eventually post the article here if the wired folks never do. ¶

things that bug me about V: the series

tuesday night, ABC aired the second-season premiere of V: the series. like bionic woman, another ABC show from a couple years back, V is a reboot of a campy sf show from decades past... and as with bionic woman, i really wanted to like this show, but its lousy execution makes this difficult.

(coincidentally, at the same time ABC was airing the V premiere, syfy was airing the final episodes of caprica, a show with nearly pitch-perfect execution. it might be interesting to compare these shows in more depth, but that's for another time.)

don't get me wrong: V isn't uniformly terrible—it's had just enough clever twists to keep me watching in the hopes that it will improve. but its flaws are so deeply embedded into the heart of the show that this will probably never happen. let's go over some of them:

the counterterrorism/resistance plot was introduced too early. this one is representative of how problematic the show is from root up. we live in a post-9/11 world, and this is a show about the earth being occupied by alien invaders, so it's natural that the producers would want to explore themes of what it means to be a terrorist, when armed resistance is justified, and so on. (themes that were excellently handled in season 3 of battlestar galactica, i should note.) in fact, i'd be disappointed if V didn't get into those subjects. but there's a right way and a wrong way.

in the original '80s miniseries, the resistance movement forms naturally as the earth's inhabitants start noticing that the alien "visitors" aren't what they claim to be. this was played pretty heavily as a nazi metaphor, down to the visitors wearing red jumpsuits and having a logo that looked suspiciously like a swastika. the producers of new V smartly swap this for a terrorist insurgency metaphor, but in their haste they stupidly introduced this plotline in the pilot episode. in order to make this work in the story, this means that the resistance movement is fully formed even before the aliens arrive on earth! worst of all, we're told that the resistance was initially formed by alien sleeper double agents years earlier. so not only is the insurgency introduced too early, but the human race doesn't even get to start its own resistance movement. apparently the aliens are superior to us in that way, too.

the characters are boring and two-dimensional. even the characters who should be interesting are dull as rocks. an FBI counterterror agent who ends up becoming a terrorist sleeper agent? should be interesting, right? wrong: she's the dullest character on the show. a priest who struggles with his faith as he finds himself being drawn into morally compromising situations? snoozeville! an alien assassin who falls in love with a human and ends up with the resistance? yawn. these characters sound cool on paper, but onscreen they're, well, flat. and don't even get me started on the nondescript terrorist guy.

the sets on the alien ships are laughably bad. has there ever been a show with CG that was so obviously CG? perhaps i should've put "sets" in quotes because i've seen more convincing green screen on late night with conan o'brien. the ship's interiors utterly fail at looking like realistic 3d spaces and instead look like something out of a video game.

everyone calls the aliens "V's". ostensibly the aliens are called "visitors" but everyone—and i mean everyone, even the visitors themselves—calls them V's, every time. who the hell talks like that? in the real world, people would alternate between terms: sometimes saying visitor, occasionally saying V, or occasionally using slang insults or slurs. but there is no slur against the visitors; not even a "those alien scumbags". have none of the writers ever seen alien nation?

the garbage about visitors not having human emotion. this is by far the most laughably absurd aspect of the show: the visitors are concerned about becoming tainted by "human emotions", which they claim not to have. as if emotion were some sort of infection that can spread virally (across species, no less). indeed, those visitors who are shown to be "good" are the ones who've been contaminated by emotion, and the ones who are "evil" have not. there is no gray area.

one reason i'd been anticipating this show was that i was hoping for a more sophisticated take on the visitors. i wanted something akin to the battlestar galactica revamp, where the cylons were depicted as flawed, complex people who struggled with difficult moral issues and sometimes chose the wrong path—in other words, they were very human, despite technically being machines. but not the visitors: they're evil conquerors, and the only ones who have any sort of moral conflict are the ones who've somehow developed emotions after spending too much time with humans. this is human exceptionalism; the worst kind of hocum ("only the human heart will save you!").

(lest you bring up a comparison to dr. spock and the vulcans on star trek, it should be noted that the vulcans aren't incapable of feeling: they actually have deep emotions that they train themselves to suppress. this is a far cry from the visitors, who have supposedly never even been exposed to emotion before coming into contact with humans.)

stupidest of all, the writers don't even think through the logical ramifications of what this would mean. love and affection are clearly shown to be human emotions that the visitors don't innately possess. yet ana, the leader, has a keen enough understanding of the human heart that she manipulates her daughter into starting a relationship with a human boy who's important to the invasion plan. even if ana had studied enough to be aware of this thing called love, how could she understand it well enough to manipulate people to the extent that she does?

and while i'm at it, visitor reproduction makes no sense. at one point, ana decides that she needs an army of soldiers for her invasion plans (why she didn't think of that before reaching earth isn't discussed) so she lays many thousands of soldier eggs. this suggests that visitor sexual reproduction is similar to insects on earth, and ana is the queen. if so, then ana would presumably have many thousands if not millions of direct offspring. yet on the show, other than the soldier eggs, ana is depicted as having only one offspring: a daughter. and though we meet ana's mother in the season 2 premiere, these three are the only visitors who are depicted as being related to each other in any way.

then there's the issue of male fertilization and gestation. if the soldier eggs required fertilization, this is never shown nor discussed onscreen. ana simply lays the eggs in what amounts to a huge pond, and they start to grow. yet ryan, one of the "good" visitors, somehow manages to impregnate a human woman, and the fetus gestates inside her womb. the fact that they shouldn't be able to procreate is portrayed as a big deal on the show, but when you think about it, it becomes even more ludicrous. even ignoring the fact that we're talking about a cold-blooded reptile impregnating a warm-blooded mammal, an egg-laying reptile and a creature that bears live young can't reproduce. even assuming that the human "skins" worn by the visitors are sophisticated enough to have working genitalia, this just does not compute. unless the visitors are somehow capable of both egg-laying and bearing live young, which is ridiculous.

apparently the issue of visitor reproduction will be a theme of upcoming episodes, but i can't imagine how they can come up with a coherent explanation given these discrepancies.

so there you have it. a show with great potential, but so marred by lazy writing and sloppy thinking that it's probably unsalvageable. i'll keep watching, at least for now, but i'm torn between hoping that the show will somehow overcome its flaws and waiting for ABC to put everyone out of their misery by canceling it. ¶

worship the glitch

peter "sleazy" christopherson passed away the other day. he was a founding member of not one, not two, but three pivotal industrial bands (throbbing gristle, psychic tv, and coil) and a member of/collaborator with several others. his work was a major influence on me—coil was one of my favorite bands of all time, and his other projects were up there, too—so i knew i needed to do something to commemorate his passing.

"worship the glitch" was the title of an album by ELpH vs coil (ELpH was a glitch music side project), so it seemed only natural to carry that over into a glitch art context.

this piece is also available on society6. ¶

new stAllio! material!

earlier this year, i got an email from nerdcore rapper/producer th' mole, requesting a remix in my post-mashup style. so i downloaded a couple of his albums—including an advance copy of his brand-new-just-released album superman vs gremlins, and assembled this bad boy:

stAllio! ft. th' mole - a spell to kill dancefloors

th' mole is having a contest related to my remix, where you could win a copy of his new album. (my latest album, of course, is a free download.)

completists and audio collage fans will also want to get their hands on the new 50/50 compilation, curated by jon nelson of some assembly required. it's 50 tracks, each 50 seconds long, and features tracks by the bran flakes, silica-gel, orchid spangiafora, realistic, value village people, and many more! ...not to mention a track by stAllio! ¶

video: stAllio! live at gli.tc/h

a couple weeks back i attended gli.tc/h, a glitch art festival/conference in chicago. i performed saturday night, with improvised video accompaniment by rosa menkman and vade. here's some video of that performace, shot by evan meaney:

advanced wordpad editing explained

so a couple weeks back i mentioned that i was experimenting with a new databending technique that i call advanced wordpad editing. but wtf does that mean, and what is going on in these images?

as i've discussed extensively in the past, when you open a bitmap image in microsoft wordpad and then re-save, it creates a distinctive warping effect i call the wordpad effect. wordpad, thinking the data is inappropriately formatted rich text, tries to "fix" the formatting of the file, corrupting the data in a recognizable (but often surprising) way. but what exactly is going on? pietjepuk666 was the first to solve that puzzle, in the comments:

I've found that Wordpad does at least two things to a binary file; it replaces byte 07 (ascii: BEEP) with a space , and it replaces every lonely 0A or 0D (line feed and carriage return respectively) and also 0B (vertical tab) with the bytes "0A 0D". So the rate of glitching is probably dependent on how dark the picture is, since low bytes like these give dark pixels (i suppose).

this is pretty much right, except in my experience the replacement value is actually 0D 0A, not 0A 0D. (not that it makes much difference here.)

the change from 07 to 20 (space) isn't very noticeable to the eye. it just replaces an almost-totally-black pixel with a slightly-less-black pixel. but every time wordpad replaces a 0A, 0B, or 0D with 0D 0A, it adds one byte to the file. these added bytes are ultimately what causes the wordpad effect—this is why wordpadded images always warp to the right, why the trick breaks fragile formats such as JPG, why darker (but not pitch black) images bend more than lighter ones, and so on.

knowing exactly how the wordpad effect works enables you to take control of the process by specially pre-treating the files before feeding them to wordpad, so that they bend in the way we want to. this can be achieved by altering the file with a hex editor before opening it in wordpad.

the first step—as well as the initial proof of concept—is to strip out any existing 0A, 0B, or 0D bytes from the file. i replace them all with 09, which is close enough that you can't spot it by eye, but you could use 0C, 0E, or whatever. this ensures that the file won't bend anywhere where you don't want it to. (don't delete these bytes; that would cause the image to warp in the opposite direction... a sort of anti-wordpad effect, if you will.)

the next step is to "add" 0A, 0B, or 0D bytes to the file in specific areas (really replacing bytes one at a time, not inserting them—the actual adding will come later when opening it in wordpad) so that it will bend where you want it to. this may sound simple, but it actually involves a lot of math. you need to calculate the y pixel range where you want the file to warp, and convert those to percentages in order to determine the byte range where you want to work. and if you're working with a multichannel non-interleave file, you need to do this for each color channel—not to mention calculating where each channel begins and ends. plus, you need to add lots of bytes to get any significant warping—hundreds if not thousands.

another aspect you may have noticed about my advanced wordpad work is the way it doesn't just warp, but also unwarps. the color channels warp out of phase with each other, but then they coalesce back together. this never happens with the standard wordpad effect, so how is it accomplished?

since wordpad warping is caused by added bytes, the obvious way to undo the warping is by removing bytes. to get color channels back in phase, you need to remove (almost) exactly the same number of bytes as will be added to the file. yes, this means you need to track precisely how many 0A/0B/0D bytes are in the file, and delete exactly that many bytes. i typically do all this manually, one byte at a time, counting in my head as i go along. it's tedious, but it works. if you were a programmer, you could probably write scripts to help with this process.

once all this is done, finally the file is finally ready to be run through wordpad. if you did your math wrong, or miscounted, you may end up with something like this:

oops! i lost count there and my color channels didn't sync up right. (i was eventually able to fix this one.)

working this way raises a number of questions about matters such as whether a "glitch" can be controlled, and so forth. but the most obvious questions is probably what the hell is the point of using wordpad if you're also using a hex editor?
after all, you could just use the hex editor to insert bytes and forgo using wordpad at all.

so why still use wordpad? at first, i needed to do it that way to prove that i had unlocked the mysteries of wordpad, so to speak. i keep doing it that way because i like the romanticism of using such a thoroughly incorrect application, and because the term "advanced wordpad editing" has a nice ring to it—ironically overtechnical... as if there's anything advanced about microsoft wordpad. ¶

advanced wordpad editing

maybe you've already noticed, but my latest databending experiments build on everything i've learned about the wordpad effect in order to actually control how and where images bend:

check out the whole set here. i'll probably add more gradually as i make new ones.

and don't forget, benders: gli.tc/h starts wednesday in chicago! i'll be there, and i'll have copies of my true data 12" for a special event-only price of $5 each. i hope to see you there! ¶

stAllio! @ gli.tc/h conference chicago, oct 2

i can finally announce that i will perform october 2 at the nightingale theatre in chicago as part of the gli.tc/h conference!

here's the lineup for the show:

Jeronimo Barbosa (Recife, Brazil)
Andrew Bucksbarg (Bloomington, Indiana)
Ben Baker-Smith (Chicago) w/ Evan Kühl (Madison, WI)
stAllio! (Indianapolis, IN)
Anton Marini & Aerostatic (New York, NY)

check out the gli.tc/h schedule for more info on gli.tc/h events! (the preliminary schedule is up now; hopefully more details will be filled in soon.)¶

google street view glitches revisited

google keeps its street view reasonably up-to-date by refreshing it periodically, sending around new trucks with new and different cameras. this means that the street view glitches i found back in 2007 have long since disappeared.

but new trucks means new opportunities for glitches, as i discovered while digitally wandering the streets of indianapolis.

these glitches seem to involve a stitching error between the cameras at eye level and those pointed at the ground. if something happens to be physically close enough to the camera at near-ground level, it can end up pretty distorted:

a similar effect can be seen higher up—between the eye-level cameras and the ones pointed toward the sky—though it's less likely there'll be anything up there:

this last one's a real chance moment—a leaf fell on the camera:

update: click through the images to go to flickr... i've added street view links for most of them so you can see the glitches in their "natural" environment.

also, here's one more fun one:

a huge smash is out now!

now is the moment you've been waiting for! the new stAllio! album a huge smash—the long-awaited full-length follow-up to mash smarter not harder—is now available for free download!

a huge smash is 11 tracks of glitchy post-mashup madness. it picks up directly where mash smarter left off, as i smash pop music into increasingly smaller pieces and then weld them back together in new and innovative ways.

this is a completely free download—it's not on itunes and there's no "pay what you want" feature. all i ask is that if you enjoy the album, please share it with your friends. post it on your facebooks, your twitters and reddits, or whatever it is kids do these days. i'm giving this to you for free, and all i'm asking is that you copy and paste the link a few times. that's a price you can't beat! ¶

the wordpad effect and pixel brightness

i got a new computer in the past few months and was looking for an excuse to confirm whether the wordpad effect still works in windows 7 (it does, if slowly). so i figured i'd do a quick experiment to test a hypothesis discussed in the comments of part 1 of my databending primer—that the amount of warping caused by the wordpad effect is dependent on the relative brightness (or darkness) of the source image.

for my source image, i used variations of the same image: text on a solid background. i tried both white text on black background and vice versa, with the text at 25%, 50%, 75%, and 100% opacity. the black text on a white background showed no warping at all, regardless of opacity. this was consistent with similar experiments i've tried in the past, but still a bit puzzling.

the images with white text on a black background did warp, and hinted at a pattern. [all originals were saved in photoshop raw format, non-interleaved. all images are hosted on flickr; click to go there.]

100% opacity:

75% opacity:

50% opacity:

25% opacity:

pure white (100%) on black warped, but just a little. reducing the text whiteness to 75% produced considerably more warping, and reducing to 25% produced more still. this would suggest a pattern of the text warping more the darker it gets, but that wouldn't explain the result for 50% opacity, which is less warped than 75% or 25%.

since the black-on-white experiment was a bust, i figured i'd try a couple more, this time with solid black text on a gray background.

75% white:

50% white:

25% white:

the results are roughly analogous to those from the white-on-black images: 75% white warps more than 50%, whereas 25% warps most of all.

clearly, it would seem that the source image brightness has an impact on warping, but it's not as simple as darkening an image to make it warp more. ¶

greatest orchestra hits

here it is: the premiere of the new video from a huge smash!

a huge smash will be released for free download on september 14 at badtaste4life.com. ¶

a huge smash is coming september 14

it's a moment years in the making: a huge smash, the full-length follow-up to mash smarter not harder, will be released for free download on september 14!

as i wrote in the original announcement:

a huge smash picks up where mash smarter left off, and from there the samples get shorter, the edits come quicker, and the sound gets distinctively glitchier. this will be the most ambitious stAllio! release ever, and the musical culmination of everything i've been working on for the past several years, as the seeds that i planted in mash smarter come into full bloom.

also, look out for the first (and perhaps only) video from a huge smash, coming in early september! ¶

re-affirming our constitutional principles

shorter gary welsh: the first amendment doesn't apply to muslims, because they are evil and want to destroy america. ¶

incapable of shame

the other day, andrew breitbart posted a highly edited, out-of-context video (discussed here yesterday) which he said proved that USDA official shirley sherrod was a racist, and that, by extension, so was her audience—the NAACP. the video spread like wildfire around right-wing sites and sherrod was soon forced to resign.

but then the full, unedited video came to light, and it vindicates sherrod. virtually everyone now concedes that the original clip was a vicious smear. through deceptive editing, it turned reality on its head, transforming sherrod's tale of redemption—of how she came to overcome racist impulses, 24 years ago, long before she worked for the USDA—into a tale of vindictive oppression against an innocent, helpless white man. even breitbart now admits sherrod was wronged, though he's still highly disingenuous about his role in the scandal and why he posted the video in the first place.

virtually everyone, that is... but not gary welsh. gary's credulous post on the subject remains on his site, with no updates or corrections. as recently as 5:22 last night, longer after he should've known better, he was leaving comments defending his assertions that sherrod and her audience were racists.

will gary welsh post a retraction?

personally, i'm certain he won't. and the reason why i know he won't is because gary has never once posted a retraction of any significance. yes, once or twice he's posted minor corrections, like when he gets the spelling of someone's name or their party affiliation wrong. but despite the many laughably false things that gary has posted over the years, he has never retracted a single one, and i doubt he ever will. i doubt he's even capable of it.

despite what he may claim, gary is completely incapable of admitting a mistake and utterly unable to handle even mild criticism. anyone who criticizes him is assumed to be a dishonest political operator, and ends up on his personal enemies list (which is getting pretty long). i don't know if the problem is that he can't realize when he's wrong, or if he's just too proud to admit it, but either way, the end result is the same: the lies just get bigger and bigger.

update: did i call it or what? far from being able to admit he was wrong, gary doubles down on the insanity.

2nd update: can you believe gary is still going on about what a horrible racist shirley sherrod is? we're beyond satire at this point, folks. ¶

on refuting, refudiating, and repudiating racism

last week, delegates for the NAACP passed a resolution calling on the tea party to repudiate racism. the resolution doesn't accuse all tea partiers of racism, as some would have you believe; it simply points out the well-documented history of racists showing up at tea party events, and asks tea partiers to "make clear there is no place for racism & anti-Semitism, homophobia and other forms of bigotry in their movement."

now, when someone asks you to repudiate racism, the correct response is... to repudiate racism. it's pretty simple. tea party leaders could've simply issued a response like this:

we absolutely repudiate racism and other forms of bigotry, and if bigots do turn up at our events, know that they do not speak for us and we don't share their views.

easy, right? had the tea party done this, the story would've been gone in a day, plus the tea party would be insulated against any future accusations of racism—we repudiated racism months ago!

but this being the tea party, they instead went berserk. they accused the NAACP of hypocrisy. they claimed that the "real racists" were the NAACP, not them. and in a development that was probably inevitable, some responded to accusations of racism by becoming even more racist!

that's what happened to mark williams, spokesman for the tea party express. williams first responded by saying that the NAACP makes "more money off of race than any slave trader, ever" and belongs "in the trash heap [...] along with all the other vile, racist groups that emerged in our history."

then, apparently unsatisfied, williams penned possibly the most racist blog post ever, in which he mocked the NAACP for having the word "colored" in their name, then went on to adopt the persona of "tom's nephew", using plainly offensive language to repeat all sorts of horrible stereotypes about african-americans.

the post was so beyond-the-pale, over-the-top offensive that williams was soon forced to take it down, but the damage was already done. williams was demoted; his group was expelled from the tea party federation and denounced by other tea party groups.

so in the end, the NAACP resolution was a partial success: it resulted in the tea party denouncing one of its own leaders.

still, many wingnuts continue to ignore the williams debacle, pretending that there are no racists in the tea party movement and that the NAACP is full of hateful hypocrites. melyssa "miss ann" donaghy—who you'll be either pleased or bemused to learn recently resurrected her blog—tried to pretend that all the racists at tea party events are leftist "infiltrators" sent "to pose as racists". she also suggested that the NAACP were hypocrites because they didn't speak up when a black conservative got beat up this one time, stating that "I hope it is ok by the NAACP to be black and conservative in America!"

apparently to melyssa, the NAACP are hypocrites if they don't specifically and individually denounce every incidence of racism ever, even if they've never heard of it. of course, given the opportunity, they would gladly denounce racist violence against kenneth gladley or anyone else, just as benjamin jealous had no problem denouncing the new black panther party on this week's meet the press. (also, note to melyssa: michael steele, RNC chair, is a longtime NAACP member.)

at least melyssa admits that racists have attended tea party events. gary welsh couldn't even bring himself to do that. first he tried to pin the resolution on michelle obama, simply because she was present at the meeting. (she was actually there to discuss childhood obesity.)

he also trotted out an out-of-context video that's been making the rounds of a black USDA official confessing to having stuggled with racism while performing her job, citing it as proof that the NAACP, not tea partiers, are the real racists. (the NAACP quickly condemned the official, but naturally that's not good enough for gary, who's just looking for an excuse call andre carson a liar.)

gary, and people like him, have a shockingly naive view of racism and bigotry. he has no trouble identifying bigotry when directed at People Like Him by People Not Like Him (though he seems to have completely stopped discussing homophobia—supposedly one of his blog's signature issues), yet he seemingly defines white racism as dressing up in a sheet and lynching folks. and since he and his fellow right-wingers aren't out burning crosses (well... most of them aren't), they therefore aren't racists and their actions are thus not racist. this is why gary doesn't understand when others call him out for racist attitudes in his blog. he assumes that he isn't a racist and is thus incapable of racist thought, so when others point out problematic content, he assumes they must be political opponents who are trying to discredit him. he never bothers to analyze what he's written and why it might be offensive—and perhaps he never will.

of course, everyone has racist or bigoted thoughts from time to time. the key to overcoming bigotry is to recognize these thoughts for what they are and act accordingly.

update: unsurprisingly, the USDA official's story becomes a lot less damning when viewed in context.

2nd update: NAACP has issued a new statement:

With regard to the initial media coverage of the resignation of USDA official Shirley Sherrod, we have come to the conclusion we were snookered by Fox News and Tea Party Activist Andrew Breitbart into believing she had harmed white farmers because of racial bias.


Having reviewed the full tape, spoken to Ms. Sherrod, and most importantly heard the testimony of the white farmers mentioned in this story, we now believe the organization that edited the documents did so with the intention of deceiving millions of Americans.

The fact is Ms. Sherrod did help the white farmers mentioned in her speech. They personally credit her with helping to save their family farm.

Moreover, this incident and the lesson it prompted occurred more that 20 years before she went to work for USDA.

Finally, she was sharing this account as part of a story of transformation and redemption. In the full video, Ms.Sherrod says she realized that the dislocation of farmers is about "haves and have nots." "It's not just about black people, it's about poor people," says Sherrod in the speech. "We have to get to the point where race exists but it doesn't matter." ¶

fight violence with violence, or indianapolis blame expo

shorter abdul hakim-shabazz: you know who i blame for last night's expo shootings? al sharpton! stuff like this proves that black kids deserve to get the crap beaten out of them sometimes. in fact, i'd like to beat some up myself. ¶

hot streak!!!!!!!!!!!

from the journal-constitution:

Indiana among hardest hit by job losses, report says

Indiana has had one of the steepest declines in employment since the recession began, according to new rankings from an economic policy group.

The share of the state's population that's employed dropped more than in all but five other states between November 2007 and May 2010, according to the Brookings Institution's Hamilton Project.

The share of Hoosiers employed dropped from 63.5 percent in November 2007 to 57.2 percent in May 2010.

Indiana's 6.3 percentage point drop was even bigger than the 5.6 percentage point decline in Michigan, which has had the highest unemployment rate among states for most of the recession but which also got hit earlier than other states.

good thing we have a financial genius like mitch daniels in the governor's office! ¶

because it's easier to be unfair

shorter indiana supreme court: yes, the fact that absentee voters don't need to show ID is unfair, and essentially defeats the whole point of the voter ID law, but that's okay because checking absentee voters' IDs would be difficult.

[see masson's blog and indiana law blog for more] ¶

perfecting the paranoid style

shorter advance indiana: i believe every anti-obama conspiracy theory. obama hates jews and wants to destroy israel! he's a secret muslim! he wasn't born in this country! he has coked-up gay sex with shady characters! you name it, i believe it... and i have links to crank right-wing web sites that prove it all! ¶

a new design, and some old ones

my latest glitch illustration is now up for voting at threadless—it's a glitch rainbow! if that sounds cool then you'll probably like it; if not then maybe you won't:

in related news, i just set up an account at society6.com. society6 is a site where artists can upload their portfolios, collaborate with each other (and with vendors), and sell gallery-quality prints, t-shirts, and laptop or iphone skins. i have a couple shirts for sale as well as art prints of some of my best illustrations from the past year. enjoy! ¶

we're #28! (according to charity navigator)

charity navigator, a site that researches the finances of various charities, has just released its 2010 metro market study. i wanted to be sure i posted about the study, because its findings contradict the beliefs of a certain right-wing blogger who routinely criticizes local charities despite having no comprehension of how the nonprofit sector works.

in the study of the nation's 30 largest metro areas, indy ranked 28th (up from #29 last year). we ranked below average in every category except administrative expenses, working capital ratio, total expenses, and total net assets. even worse, indy ranked dead last in the categories of fundraising expenses, program expenses, and program expense growth.

our relatively high ranking for administrative expenses (#10) is the opposite of what you might expect if you've been relying on the opinion of said blogger, who regularly claims that indy's charities are bastions of corruption and waste. overall, our charities are actually quite good in this regard. another category i want to point out is indy's low ranking in terms of CEO compensation. yes, despite what some would have you believe, many local charities actually pay their executives too little, and suffer for it. the indy star explains:

In the increasingly complex work of fundraising, the ability to solicit a lot of cash at a minimum cost is paramount. That requires savvy leaders with business and social skills, perhaps honed in the private sector. And it requires someone who won't hesitate to scrap time-consuming, money-wasting donation methods, such as phone solicitations.

Attracting such leaders takes money that some Indianapolis charities have been unwilling to pay.

"Indianapolis has consistently ranked low in CEO compensation," Minuitti said. "These organizations are really multimillion-dollar operations, and that requires a certain level of compensation to attract and retain top talent."

in short, you can't hire just anyone, pay them peanuts, and expect them to do quality work. if you want talented executives, you have to pay them what they're worth—a concept that you'd think right-wingers would understand.

other factors dragging down our rating include the fact that we have a lot of human services charities—which "tend to be hit hard" during recessions—and a reliance on inefficient means of fundraising such as telemarketing, direct mail, and expensive fundraiser events.

of course, the charity navigator study has its flaws. first and foremost, it's lacking in context and can be difficult for the layperson to understand. also, the site's analysis centers on finances, which isn't necessarily the best measure of how a charity is doing—in some fields, it would be better to focus on results. it doesn't matter how efficient your fundraising is if you're not getting good results, and likewise, a bit of inefficiency is fine if you're doing great work. ¶

holding their feet to the fire

shorter gary welsh, this morning: indianapolis star political reporters are just stenographers, uncritically repeating what the city's elite tell them to without researching anything on their own. disgraceful!

shorter gary welsh, last night: police sources tell me that the kid who got beaten up by police deserved to get his ass kicked, but the officer who got fired for kicking his ass didn't deserve to get fired. ¶

allegedly in need of a beatdown

shorter abdul hakim-shabazz, black republican: police are justified in beating the crap out of kids if they suspect one of the kids may have committed a crime. ¶

everybody draw moe howard day

today is everybody draw moe howard day! here's my contribution:

draw your own and add a link in the comments! ¶

the problem with machine-generated directions

for some reason, i don't trust these directions google gave me. ¶

a quick question

how crazy do you have to be to freak out over the fact that this year's miss USA is muslim?

keep in mind that this woman is not only willing to appear on tv in a bikini or a bustier and fishnets, but is also pro-birth control... so she's not exactly an advocate for sharia law.

update: truly, it requires a mind skilled at doublethink to simultaneously believe this woman is both an islamist threat to our freedom and a pole-dancing stripper slut.¶

get ready for a huge smash!

as previously announced on the stAllio! facebook page, a huge smash—the full-length follow-up to mash smarter not harder—will be released in summer or fall of 2010.

for a while, i toyed with the idea of shopping this release out to one of the "big-name" audio collage labels (as if there were more than one!). but for a number of reasons—first and foremost that the thing is already way behind schedule—i will be releasing it for free download from bad taste.

when i first started developing this new post-mashup style of music, i was so excited about it that i couldn't wait to share it with the world. so i rushed out the first four tracks (and a remix by drbmd) as an EP: mash smarter not harder. the point of that EP was simply to introduce certain musical ideas that i intended to explore more fully over the coming years, much as you might take a pre-calculus class before moving on to studying calculus. hence the title of the first track, "introducing the new style".

the original plan was to rapidly follow up mash smarter either with a full-length or with a series of EP releases. i expected that to happen in 2009, but i ended up getting sidetracked and spent much of '09 working on visual art, design, and illustration. now, two full years later, the time is finally approaching...

a huge smash picks up where mash smarter left off, and from there the samples get shorter, the edits come quicker, and the sound gets distinctively glitchier. this will be the most ambitious stAllio! release ever, and musical culmination of everything i've been working on for the past several years, as the seeds that i planted in mash smarter come into full bloom.

all that, for free download, later this year. stay tuned. ¶

is this the worst idea that democrats have ever had?

i applaud congressional democrats' initiative for wanting to "reform" the immigration "problem" this year, especially in light of the anti-immigrant bill that was just passed in arizona. but my god, if this is their idea of reform...

Democratic leaders have proposed requiring every worker in the nation to carry a national identification card with biometric information, such as a fingerprint, within the next six years, according to a draft of the measure.

The proposal is one of the biggest differences between the newest immigration reform proposal and legislation crafted by late Sen. Edward Kennedy (D-Mass.) and Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.).

The national ID program would be titled the Believe System, an acronym for Biometric Enrollment, Locally stored Information and Electronic Verification of Employment.

It would require all workers across the nation to carry a card with a digital encryption key that would have to match work authorization databases.

"The cardholder's identity will be verified by matching the biometric identifier stored within the microprocessing chip on the card to the identifier provided by the cardholder that shall be read by the scanner used by the employer," states the Democratic legislative proposal.

they literally want to fingerprint every worker in america. this is like some insane caricature of a proposal, the stuff of conspiracy theories. i almost can't believe it's real. are they trying to drive voters away? ¶

cause & effect redux

i always knew indygo—indianapolis's public transit system—was bad. there are too few buses, the route map is a mess, buses come infrequently, and fares are relatively expensive. but i didn't know until a couple weeks ago that indygo is one of the worst in the country. (a recent analysis found our bus fleet tied for last place with eugene, oregon... a town 1/5 our size!)

so how do you become worse than the worst? it sounds like a zen koan, but we're going to find out the answer!

IndyGo is counting itself as the next victim of the state's property tax caps and dwindling funding.

On Tuesday, Indianapolis' municipal bus agency said it is considering cutting service and jobs to make up for a $3 million shortfall this year.

Those cuts could include eliminating some bus routes and curtailing door-to-door paratransit service for people with disabilities.

yes, the system that has too few routes already may be forced to cut more routes! this is thanks in large part to property tax caps, which were instituted a couple years back after proto-teabagger stormed the streets demanding them, despite the objections of those of us who knew the cuts would wreck local government budgets throughout the state.

but the caps aren't the only cause of indygo's woes. fundamentally, the city has never truly embraced indygo or given it the funding it needs. comparable cities tend to devote much more to transit, often with dedicated taxes. (st louis's transit budget is almost six times ours.) the system has been neglected for years; its failure goes back several administrations.

mayor ballard hopes to improve the city's transit system. i sincerely hope he can. (he surely can't make it much worse.) but i don't have much hope, considering the kinds of solutions he's come up with so far. after all, ballard was a leading proponent of the property tax caps that have gutted his budget. and his proposal to fix the city's water and sewers has extra crap tagged on that means rates won't be as low as they could be; in exchange he gets a one-time cash infusion that he can pretend he didn't raise taxes for. (never mind that it would have the city sell off the city's water system outright; even the governor's controversial "major moves" deal would give the state our toll road back after 75 years.)

the last time i rode an indianapolis bus was when i was too young to drive. this is because the system is such a pain to use—there are few places i could even reach by bus without going downtown first, and most buses only come once an hour at best. but i've ridden public transit in other cities, so i know it doesn't have to be like this. ¶

but it's so easy to get an ID!

whenever anyone complains that indiana's voter ID law is too strict, proponents get bent out of shape. "everything else in our society requires ID, so why not voting?" they say. "besides, it's not that hard to get ID."

meet brent jones, profiled in tully's latest column (which ran in sunday's paper but was embargoed online until today). when brent was a baby, his troubled mother would often leave him with a local child care center, sometimes for days at a time. eventually, she disappeared entirely. the people who ran the child care effectively adopted brent, but no paperwork. 17 years later, brent was preparing to graduate high school, but had no birth certificate, no legal record of his identity. as such, he was unable to get a license, a college scholarship, or full-time work. and of course, unable to vote in indiana.

"People don't understand how ridiculous this is," Brent said. "It's crazy. No matter how much you try to explain, people say, 'There has to be a way.' No. I've tried everything."

As frustrating as Brent's case is, Marion County juvenile court Judge Marilyn Moores said it isn't unique. She comes across a handful of such cases each year. As with Brent, the story often begins with a birth parent handing a child off to a friend without taking the legal steps required.

"All of the systems of government have to become more sensitive to this issue," she said. "You can't tell these children they don't exist as far as our system is concerned. You can't penalize the child for the sins of the parent."

[...]

Brent was allowed to enroll at the schools because students who are unable to prove their identity aren't turned away. Nonetheless, the system did fail him. Many school workers knew his story, but nobody made the effort to help resolve his lack of legal documentation.

getting ID might not be so hard for those of us priveleged enough to come from stable homes, who were fortunate enough not to have our paper records destroyed by fire or tornado. but not everyone is so fortunate. it's easy to pretend that people like brent don't exist, or that they don't matter, but these people are real. they exist, and they are marginalized by bureaucracy.

in the end, brent's story has a happy ending. tully and the star's research department scoured public databased and made a lot of phone calls, and eventually were able to locate brent's mother, who was fortunately still alive and doing well. but again, this is sheer luck. brent had the good fortune to meet a newspaper columnist who happened to be writing a series of columns about manual high school, where brent had happened to transfer recently. surely, not everyone who lacks a birth certificate will meet a matt tully, and even if they did, tully and the star surely don't have time to locate them all.

there are others out there like brent: legally ghosts, with no tangible identity. these are people who've been treated like numbers, and their numbers got skipped. ¶

more award-winning journalism from abdul

abdul hakim shabazz apparently won a journalism award last week... and immediately used the opportunity to take a cheap shot at his critics (then escalating a few days later after one of his critics fired back). if you burst out laughing at the idea of abdul's site being the "best journalism website" in indiana, then you're probably familiar with abdul's work: it's vapid, petty, and what passes for news analysis is usually poorly thought out if not downright disingenuous.

for example, let's take his latest post, about indiana ending its pursuit of "race to the top" funds.

you're probably heard of "he said, she said" journalism, where journalists print quotes from both sides of a dispute and make no attempt to ascertain which side is correct (if either). abdul practices a simpler form—you could call it "he said" journalism—in which he gets quotes from one person and repeats them as unmitigated truth.

behold: here is his post in its entirety:

Indiana Superintendent of Public Instruction Dr. Tony Bennett told me this morning that the state is ending its pursuit for "Race to the Top" funds. "Race to the Top" is a federal program that provides up to $4 billion for states that implement reforms in their education system.

Bennett says there was not enough support from the Indiana Teachers Unions for the state to take a second shot at the funds. Lack of union support was the one of the original reasons Indiana lost out on the first round of "Race to the Top" funds.

Bennett told me this morning he made an offer to the Unions to meet him next Tuesday to work out a deal, however they turned him down.

Had Indiana been a "Race to the Top" participant, it would have received hundreds of millions of dollars for education. Bennett says, for him, Race to the Top was more about reforming schools than money.

However, I can't help but think of the irony in all this that the teachers unions whine and complain about more money for schools and as soon as they get an opportunity to get more money they turn it down. Hmmm, it must be that whole accountability thing again.

man, union people sure are a bunch of assholes! i sure am glad abdul made no attempt to get their side of the story, aren't you?

in contrast, here's a taste of how the indianapolis star covered this story last week:

Superintendent of Public Instruction Tony Bennett said he is passionately making a case for reforms he considers crucial to improve the well-being of the state's children.

The presidents of the Indiana State Teachers Association and the Indiana Federation of Teachers say Bennett is trying to steamroll teachers in the process and is using unfair tactics. Both have increased their own rhetoric against and criticism of the state.

The debate has come to a head over whether the unions will sign on to the state's second attempt to win stimulus funds.

Bennett has advocated tying job reviews for teachers to their students' test scores, and he has advanced policies that would allow teachers to be paid or dismissed based on job performance rather than years of experience.

wait, so the two sides had a disagreement over some kind of issue? well surely the unions are just being unreasonable...

Bennett held several meetings with union leaders but declined to allow them to see the proposal for the federal grant, saying that other states might steal the more innovative ideas. Both unions were then asked to write letters of support -- for a proposal they had not seen.

emphasis mine. the real story is that the unions were unwilling to sign onto bennett's plan sight unseen. so, rather than share his "innovative" ideas with the unions, bennett decided to not apply for the grant at all.

as doug pointed out last week, perhaps this dispute could've been resolved had the two sides been more willing to work together rather than fire off angry press releases. in the end, both sides lost this one. but surely nobody comes off looking more foolish than abdul, who published an embarrassingly one-sided post that was lacking some crucial details.

the question is: did abdul not know this information, or did he simply choose not to share it with his audience? either one is a glaring journalistic failure, but the former would be merely incompetent, whereas the latter would be downright mendacious. both possibilities are troubling—i'm just not sure which is worse. ¶

handicap rec 001 - act like you understand 12"

i just got my copies of this 12", the debut release from france's handicap records:

Handicap Rec 001 - Act Like You Understand
A1 - Doormouse - Final Eye of the European Breakcore Burnout
A2 - Handbag/Abba - Ruffest Gunark
A3 - stAllio! - Rockin the Pop Charts
A4 - Roundop Ready vs Rektal Distortion - Vanitas Vanitatum, Omnia Vanitas
B1 - Killjoy - Muffhawk Smack Down
B2 - Handbag/Abba - Overnight Celebrity
B3 - Valav - Xhailn

contact me if you're interested in a copy... i'm thinking around $7 each sounds about right.

¶

housin'

as some of you have already heard, virago & i just bought a new house in the "south broad ripple" area. (close enough to broad ripple to call it sobro, but far enough south as to require the use of scare quotes.) we'd been living in apartments for the past couple years, so it's great to be back in a place that we own, that we can decorate and modify at will. not to mention, it's larger than our apartments and the mortgage is less than we were paying in rent.

the previous owners were rehabbers who bought the place for cheap and fixed it up. the outside is unassuming, but the interior is beautiful—if a bit amateurishly done. (the cable installer had to laugh at the unprofessional exterior cable hookup, and our frankenstein's monster of a furnace, with its labyrinthine ductwork and hobbled-together appearance, elicited a similar reaction from the HVAC guy.)

possibly the best part is the basement, which means we no longer need to live among piles of clutter—the clutter all goes in the basement, where we don't have to look at it! this also allows us to get better furniture. for example, virago wanted to get a better storage solution for our vinyl record collections, so we picked up some of these bad boys:

it's like having a record store right in my own house! ¶

cause and effect

cause: indiana property taxes are capped, taking away a crucial source of revenue for local governments.

effect: painful local service cuts. the most recent example is the marion county public library:

The Indianapolis-Marion County Public Library could close as many as six branches this year.

Closing those branches and laying off workers would turn a budget deficit into a slight surplus, according to a report presented on Thursday to a committee of the library board.

[...]

The cuts would also cost 55 library workers their jobs, and remaining employees would see their work weeks cut to 37.5 hours.

Reduced property tax revenues, caused by changes in state tax law, will lead to $3.2 million in cuts. About 80 percent of the library's budget comes from property taxes.

glancing at a map of the proposed closures shows that they're nearly all in the inner city, in lower-income areas with a lot of minority residents:


View Marion County Library Closings in a larger map

the people in these areas are the ones who need libraries the most. many people depend on public libraries for internet access. closing these branches will make it even harder for these people to find jobs. ¶

abdul's most despicable ever?

right-wing blogger/radio host abdul hakim shabazz has a history of saying heartless and hateful things about the city's homeless, from his notorious comment (coincidentally from two years ago today) that "Someone whould get a giant broom and sweep them all away!" to his suggestion last month that the city should forceably commit the city's homeless to mental institutions against their consent.

i didn't think abdul could get any worse than that, but his post from this morning is so appalling that i'd think it an april fool's joke if i didn't know better.

the "shorter" version of his post is that the city should've somehow gotten rid of all the city's homeless and panhandlers before the ncaa final four. "I don’t care if they use spray or a hose," he writes, "but these guys need to go and go now."

abdul laments that he was recently asked for money more than once, and that "while walking over to meet my friends I had to deal with people sitting on the sidewalk, leaning against buildings and some even asleep on the street." then, astonishingly, he claims that he's not talking about the homeless, because "Ask any expert and they will tell you that homelessness and panhandling are two different things."

even ignoring the fact (which i've pointed out repeatedly) that studies show that the majority of panhandlers are indeed homeless, abdul apparently thinks that people who sleep on the street are panhandlers, but not homeless! imagine if all you had to do to panhandle sucessfully was take a nap next to your collection plate, maybe with a sign that says "sleepy, please give." the mind boggles at the very concept!

in the course of his dehumanization, abdul calls these people "dirty laundry", "trash", "nuisances", and "eye sores". and those are just the names he's willing to call them on his blog. i can only imagine the horrible things he says in private.

truly, i ask you, is there a more misguided, misinformed, and misanthropic blogger in all of indianapolis? ¶

if it's anti-andre carson, this must be AI

advance indiana's gary welsh was away from the blogging scene for weeks while he struggled with a near-fatal bout of pneumonia. fortunately, he's back now... and making the same old mistakes.

gary has earned of a reputation as a carson-hater. he's demonstrated time and again that he'll eagerly print just about anything critical of the carson clan, with little regard for whether it's true. so when someone on the right-wing american thinker blog posted an entry claiming that andre carson had made up the story about tea partiers yelling racial slurs at him last week, it was destined to show up at advance indiana.

this "thoughtful" analysis consisted of watching at least four youtube videos and reading at least two or three blog posts. but surprisingly, this turned out to be an insufficient amount of research, leading to some major factual errors that gary unthinkingly repeats.

when rep carson was being heckled, he was walking next to his fellow black congressman john lewis, a hero of the civil rights movement. but because initial reports on the incident didn't include a full quote from lewis, this is taken to mean that lewis never confirmed that it happened. inconveniently, lewis made this statement to the hill:

Asked if racial epithets were yelled at him, Lewis responded, "Yes, but it's OK. I've heard this before in the '60s. A lot of this is just downright hate."

likewise, reps james clyburn and emanuel cleaver were involved in a second incident, where cleaver was allegedly spat at by a protester. initial reports only had quotes from cleaver, not clyburn. therefore, according to gary, "Lewis and Clyburn never made no claims of the N-word being uttered." however, it turns out that clyburn did make yes claims... to the wrong blog! stupid clyburn!

But Clyburn was downright incredulous, saying he had not witnessed such treatment since he was leading civil rights protests in South Carolina in the 1960s.

"It was absolutely shocking to me," Clyburn said, in response to a question from the Huffington Post. "Last Monday, this past Monday, I stayed home to meet on the campus of Claflin University where fifty years ago as of last Monday... I led the first demonstrations in South Carolina, the sit ins... And quite frankly I heard some things today I have not heard since that day. I heard people saying things that I have not heard since March 15, 1960 when I was marching to try and get off the back of the bus."

in short, all four men—two of whom were civil rights leaders in the '60s—are judged to be liars. why? because in 2010, folks just don't use racial slurs like that anymore! no, seriously, that is the conclusion of the american thinker piece, which gary approvingly quotes. indeed, the very thought that someone might yell the n-word at a congressman "is so at odds with the reality of America circa 2010 that it undermines the credibility of any media person who reported it with a straight face"!

poor gary. he's only recently returned to blogging, and he's already reporting clearly false information. this was bad enough that i actually tried leaving a comment on his blog, though we'll have to see if my comment ever makes it out of moderation. (he also has a reputation for being unable to tolerate criticism.)

update: i knew it was a waste of time leaving at comment at AI, and sure enough, my comment hasn't been approved. but the comment thread is still worth a read, thanks to gary's comments about representative carson being "raised to hate white peope" and melyssa's rejoinder that "I do believe Andre Carson is as racist as they come." ¶

health care passes house

i got a little despondent a couple months ago when it looked like health care reform was going to fail again. at the time, it was clear that democrats had the power to pass reform; they just seemed to lack the will to do it, which was seriously depressing.

but eventually, they got their acts together, and now health care reform is on its way to becoming law. the house has passed the senate bill, and the senate looks certain to pass a reconciliation bill fixing some of the flaws in the senate bill. the final reform package isn't perfect, but there's a lot of good stuff in there.

like millions of americans, this isn't some abstract policy debate for me. my wife has a pre-existing condition. as such, we've always known that if disaster struck and she found herself unemployed for more than a few weeks, she would lose her health insurance and would be unable to buy more. now, we can sleep a little easier. (we have to make it four more years before those provisions kick in, but that's still a major improvement.)

with the passage of health care reform, congressional democrats may have saved themselves from annihilation. yes, they'll probably lose a few seats come november, but things will likely work out much better than they would've otherwise. people will come to forget the acrimony of this debate, but they'll remember the results: democrats passed major legislation that ensures people who need it will get health care.

it may be raining outside, but the future looks a little brighter. ¶

teabaggers yell racial slurs at andre carson

welcome to post-racial america!

Tea partiers and other anti-health care activists are known to get rowdy, but today's protest on Capitol Hill--the day before the House is set to vote on historic health care legislation--went beyond the usual chanting and controversial signs, and veered into ugly bigotry and intimidation.

Civil rights hero Rep. John Lewis (D-GA) and fellow Congressional Black Caucus member Andre Carson (D-IN) related a particularly jarring encounter with a large crowd of protesters screaming "kill the bill"... and punctuating their chants with the word "nigger."

Standing next to Lewis, emerging from a Democratic caucus meeting with President Obama, Carson said people in the crowd yelled, "kill the bill and then the N-word" several times, while he and Lewis were exiting the Canon House office building.

"People have been just downright mean," Lewis added.

And that wasn't an isolated incident. Early this afternoon, standing outside a Democratic whip meeting in the Longworth House office building, I watched Rep. Barney Frank (D-MA) make his way out the door, en route to the neighboring Rayburn building. As he rounded the corner toward the exit, wading through a huge crowd of tea partiers and other health care protesters, an elderly white man screamed "Barney, you faggot"--a line that caused dozens of his confederates to erupt in laughter.

keep it classy, tea party! ¶

looking for news? keep on looking.

starting today, the indianapolis star is crippling its web site. the new policy: front-page stories will be embargoed from the web site for 48 hours, as will the columnists. that's right: if you go to indystar.com, you won't be shown the news that the star deems most important. (this week, it's yet another story about hazing at carmel high school and yet another tully column about manual high school. yay, high school!)

if you've been paying attention to the star in the past few years, you'll know that the print edition has been getting progressively crappier, with a shrinking trim size and shorter page count (the only thing that's gotten bigger is the font size). in contrast, the star has routinely been putting "extra" content online that wouldn't fit in between the ads on the print edition.

so why would anyone want to subscribe? apparently this is a question the management has been struggling with for a while, and the answer they came up with is that readers should be forced to subscribe (to the print edition!) if they want timely content.

in the age of blogs and the 24-hour news cycle, this is absurd. people want fast, easy access to the news. they want to be able to share news articles with their friends. and yes, they want to be able to leave offensive racist, sexist, and homophobic comments on stories about how minorities are ruining america, liberals are idiotic scum, and so forth. they can do those things easily with a web site. not so much with a printed newspaper that comes to their door only once a day.

someone in management decided that subscription revenue was more important than web traffic or online revenue. i can appreciate their conundrum—newspaper revenues are dropping and the parent company demands unreasonable profits. but i'll be shocked if this results in a significant increase in subscribers. i sure as hell won't be subscribing.

so the hunt is on: we need better online sources for local news! i'll admit; i've been lazy when it comes to finding other feeds to follow. not anymore! ¶

does this count as a tax increase?

are you unhappy that the propsed deal to sell the city's water and sewer utilities would allow citizens energy group to raise rates with no oversight from the city?

if so, you should talk to mayor ballard, because to him that's the whole point:

There are those who believe one reason Indianapolis is selling its water and sewer systems to Citizens Energy Group is so the utility can do something that elected officials have often lacked the courage to do: raise rates.

To those folks, Mayor Greg Ballard has a message: You're pretty much right -- and it's the right thing to do.

Ballard officially announced Wednesday the city is selling the utilities to Citizens for $1.9 billion.

What that means for ratepayers is that Citizens' board of directors -- and not local elected officials accountable to Indianapolis voters -- will make decisions on when to seek rate hikes from the state and by how much.

first off, it sure is odd that a mayor who campaigned on transparency and accountability would deliberately want to make the city's utilities less accountable... and do so in a closed-door deal, no less!

second, if the mayor thinks this will give him political cover when rates go up, he's sorely mistaken. voters will remember who was responsible for selling these utilities and stripping away the city's oversight. in 2007, candidate ballard would've called this a tax increase, and so will ballard's opponents come 2011.

ballard's argument is that politicians are too cowardly to raise rates as much as they need to be raised. of course, the brave thing to do would be to suck it up and raise rates yourself. then he could say, "i did what needed to be done; i did what past administrations were too afraid to do." instead, when rates go up, the mayor will just shrug his shoulders and say, "i didn't do it!"

but hey, at least we can fix some potholes, am i right? ¶

phase one complete

hoo boy... i predicted that the layout would get wonky but forgot that all relative links would break (including my stylesheet and all background images!) so the blog was nigh-illegible for an hour or so there.

migration is now complete, and the blog is up & running at the new URL: blog.animalswithinanimals.com. the layout will change again as i try to build a modified version of this design using the new blogger layouts. in the end (fingers crossed) everything should look much the same as it did, only the sidebar will likely be significantly rearranged.

update: all comments seem to have disappeared and some comment pages appear to have been broken during migration. don't take it personally. there's not much i can do about that; here's hoping blogger identifies and fixes the problem.

2nd update: comments appear to be back online. ¶

this blog may break

as you may have heard, blogger is eliminating support for ftp publishing. since stAllio!'s way is currently published via blogger ftp, that means i need to change my setup.

you may be thinking that this is perfect opportunity to switch to a different blog provider, and you'd have a point. however, over the years i've built multiple web sites for other people using blogger ftp, so i need to know the new blogger systems work for their benefit.

as such, stAllio!'s way will soon migrate to blogger hosting, most likely in the new few hours. as such, you may notice the following changes:

• the URLs for the blog and its feed will both change—a redirect will be posted but you'll want to change your bookmarks.
• the blog layout may get all wonky as i switch over the new blogger layouts. (this isn't required, but if i'm migrating anyway then what the hell, right?)
• i may get inspired and design all new blog graphics. (this will happen eventually, but as i have other ongoing projects, i'll probably wait a bit.)
• some links may break, though they should redirect to the new location.

i've already migrated the AWIA news blog (and updated its graphics), which was relatively painless, so i predict this will go smoothly. but, you know, do not adjust your set. we control the horizontal and the vertical, and all that. ¶

transparency in local government?

when mayor ballard talked about transparency in local government, he must've been referring to the powerpoints he'd use to present his closed-door dealings:

The city is close to selling its water and sewer utilities to Citizens Energy Group in a $1.9 billion deal that leaders say would minimize future rate increases and bring in hundreds of millions of dollars to improve roads, bridges and sidewalks.

Today, Indianapolis officials will give details of a nonbinding agreement between the city and Citizens, a public charitable trust that provides gas, steam and chilled water. Under the proposed terms, Citizens would pay Indianapolis nearly $2 billion for the two utilities, which now are owned by the city and run by private operators.

Citizens would acquire Indianapolis' water and sewer utilities and have full control over their operations. It also would become responsible for hundreds of millions of dollars in capital improvement projects to be completed in coming years.

City officials touted the benefits of the plan, but some are concerned about the arrangement, which would limit the city's oversight of two integral utilities.

Under the new setup, no local elected officials or their appointees would be responsible for approving or suggesting rate increases. Instead, it would be left up to Citizens' board of directors, who are not accountable to Indianapolis voters, to decide when to seek rate increases and how big they should be. Final say on rate increases would be in the hands of state utility regulators who are appointed by the governor.

so he wants to sell our water & sewers to a utility company, giving up any semblance of oversight, and in exchange we'll get to fill some potholes.

it should be noted that when democrats on the city-county council asked about rumors of a water deal, they were repeatedly told no deal was in the works. transparency! ¶