reinal do sanchez

several months ago i received a suspicious email asking me to send a free t-shirt. i googled the person who sent it, found other suspicious (and similar, yet very different) posts on various other sites (like this gullible sap, who thought it was legit), and ignored it:

MY NAME IS Reinal Do Sanchez R (MY PHOTO AT OFFICE).
I AM 25 YEARS OLD. I AM A FEMALE COSTUME DESIGNER (Ph.D.).
I AM PROFESSOR OF MODE & FASHION AT UNIVERSITY:

...

I JUST NEED THIS ITEM IN ORDER TO GET BETTER MY CLASSES
BECAUSE I AM DEVELOPING JOINED WITH ALL OF MY STUDENTS
A PEDAGOGICAL PROJECT BASED UPON MODE & FASHION
APPLIED ON T-SHIRTS WORLDWIDE TODAY ACCORDING TO
DESIGN, COLOR, TEXTURE AND NEW TRENDS.

THE T-SHIRT WILL BE USED FOR EDUCATIONAL PURPOSES ONLY.
MY STUDENTS ARE WAITING FOR YOUR COOPERATION.

i wasn't the first person to be suspicious. google also turns up this, from someone who even tracked down the photo that "reinal do sanchez" attached.

it's a scam. and surprisingly not the first person who has tried to scam me for t-shirts, either. i don't know how many shirts these people have, but i'm not a fool and when someone tells me they're doing "A PEDAGOGICAL PROJECT BASED UPON MODE & FASHION APPLIED ON T-SHIRTS" or that they want 20 t-shirts for their "store" in nigeria, i can tell i'm being scammed.

so tonight i got another email from reinal do sanchez.

My name is Reinaldo Javier Sanchez.
I am 25 years old. I am a girl Costume Designer (PhD).
I am professor of Youth Apparel at University:

http://www.unellez.edu.ve

I would like to know if you can send me (By Airmail)
one (1) T-Shirt (Size L) related to ANIMALSWITHINANIMALS

I just need this item in order to get better my classes
because I am developing -joined with my own students-
a project based on T-Shirts according to design, size,
texture, logo, color and fashion dressed by Teenagers.

The T-Shirt will be used for educational purposes only.
My students are waiting for your kind donation.

the address and url have been expunged, though they're easy to find if you look.

but anyway, why do her job description and study project seem to subtly change over time? and why is she sometimes a musicologist, and other times a professor of "mode"?

obviously, i know the answer to these questions. it's just a rhetorical device.

vacation notes

i've been pretty busy since i got back from vacation: at the office, catching up with work, and at home, catching up with tv and comics as well as working on other stuff i probably shouldn't mention yet. i haven't even fully unpacked my suitcase yet. and on top of that, we went to the video store tonight and rented 5 movies (4 of which i personally intend to watch).

but i drove up to the cleveland area last weekend to hang out with connie for the weekend, and to attend RRX. we had a lot of fun, and ate in a bunch of places: several mediocre all-night diners, and a bunch of other restaurants of varying quality. the big winners were mi pueblo taqueria and sahara, both on lorain avenue around W 120-125th st. (which are super close to each other; in fact, we discovered sahara because we were looking for mi pueblo and drove too far.) mi pueblo was very authentic mexican, with all the right stuff on the menu (though the chips were rather stale). their mole was delectable. sahara is a lebanese restaurant, and the food was quite tasty indeed, though the service was ridiculously slow, especially considering that the place was virtually empty. the loser of the restaurants was the chinese/japanese place around 160th & lorain avenue. it was notably worse than sakura, the sushi place in lakewood on detriot avenue that connie complains about so much (but that i think is okay, at least by midwest standards).

on friday afternoon we went to see star wars episode iii. overall, i really enjoyed it. it had some flaws, notably inserting things from the original trilogy that don't need to be there (the droid roles for example could be played by any two droids; there was no point in bringing back c3p0 or r2d2, though that's a problem with the whole trilogy). but it was very dark, and for the most part it delivered.

friday night was the first night of RRX. things were pretty laid back. thursday club played for awhile, and they were good. hetmana was supposed to play, but didn't show up on friday night at all. (she eventually showed up on saturday and played at 5am, which was a little too late for me & connie.) we hung out for a few hours and when things started winding down, we left. i want to say we went to some late-night diner. we probably did.

we spent saturday afternoon getting the last of our costumes and props ready. we also went to trader joe's to buy desserts to contribute to the vegetarian potluck dinner that was supposed to start at RRX at 6pm. well, the dinner didn't really start until after 7 and there were only a few food items available. so the potluck wasn't that great, but i ate some noodles, which along with my special cookies was enough to tide me over until connie & i could go to yet another mediocre late-night diner after we left.

for various reasons, this event de-emphasized the "musical performance" aspect compared to past recycled rainbows. this did help to tighten up the schedule somewhat (it only ran 2 or so hours late by the end), and new alternative activities were added, with more theatrical-type performances and a couple workshops. as a result, there were only 4 bona fide musical "performances" during the night, with occasional between-activity djing by bobby vomit & humdrum. AWIA was the first, and i think it went pretty well. i already posted the mp3 so you can judge for yourself. bobby & humdrum brought their gear, and virago collaborated with my on my gear. there were the typical occasional problems, and a new one: my mixer cut out suddenly, so for a minute or two connie & i were totally silent. eventually i slapped the side of my rig and it started working again, and the performance continued. by the end we had a small crowd accumulated in the basement, and at one point they even clapped & stomped along to a beat that i had playing... a first for animals within animals.

the other musical performances were by henry james, who did some kind of improv with guitar, electronics, and delay that was pretty interesting, and 9-volt haunted house, who as usual did a nice set as usual. their name is very apropos: electronic, a little noisy, and a little creepy. as i mentioned earlier, hetmana also played at 5am, but we were leaving and missed it. contrary to what bobby vomit posted on his blawg, i believe there was only one actual cancellation--jock trap--and i believe henry james was added to the schedule in jock trap's place.

i missed a couple of the non-musical performances, especially at first (and i missed the first workshop, which was on bookbinding, because i was busy setting up for the AWIA performance). but i caught several, of varying quality. there was a short play, frank lloyd wright vs van der rohe, about art in architecture, form vs function, and so on, using the narrative device of "dungeons & dragons rules" to keep the argument going. i thought it was pretty good. but i wondered: was frank lloyd wright really as big a dick as he was portrayed in this play? because i really wanted to agree with him a lot of of the time, but he acted like such a bitch eyes that i had to root for van der rohe (who designed skyscrapers and the like).

leia alligator's puppet theatre also involved dungeons & dragons, a humorous unforeseen consequence of the event's theme being legends and myths. i like leia's puppet shows, but i always feel somewhat bad for her because the audiences there tend to be over-the-top rowdy and disruptive. now, i don't mind a bit of friendly heckling at a loud music show, for example, but when 20-30 people are yelling out stuff during an unamplified performance such as a puppet show, it gets frustrating and holds up the show.

the other performance i saw was this thing about bill & ted's excellent adventure. i really wanted to like the performance, because i was all about bill & ted for many years, and they still hold a special place in my heart. but the thing was simply weak. this guy dressed up like ted (very accurately, i should add), played the movie on a vcr, and had volunteers from the audience read lines from his favorite scenes. that was it: he didn't even cue up the vcr or anything. he just had the video playing and had printouts, each one 2-4 lines, of some of his favorite exchanges, and would call people up to read the lines aloud. this went on for 20-25 minutes. even as a fan of the movie, i thought it was incredibly boring and quickly wanted to escape.

overall, RRX was a fun time spent with good people, but it wasn't as much as i'd had at past RR events. bobby vomit and humdrum, who only came up to cleveland for saturday night, were disappointed. i wasn't as disappointed as they were, but then i was there for a lot longer...

sunday we slept in late, then ate dinner at mi pueblo. there was a big soccer game on, but we couldn't tell who was playing. as i mentioned above, the mole was delicious. then we went back to relax at the hotel for awhile before it was time to leave for press the button on WRUW.

press the button was tons of fun; leia alligator had some electronic kids' book that he hooked into my kaoss pad & played through its fx. i was on the mic all night, spouting freeform bulldada along with everyman, kyle, people who called in to the show, and other guests such as ryan from thursday club. bulldada is pretty fun when they other people are doing it too; i at least need someone to riff off of if i'm going to be talking a bunch of nonsense for long periods of time. i had a lot of fun calling for price checks and clean-ups all over the galaxy, and our food-related riffs, inspired by all the food and grocery shopping in leia's book, eventually turned into an elaborate routine: i'm so hungry i could eat at subway! i'm so hungry i want to stuff your small intestines into your large intestines and eat them! i'm so hungry i want to chew your face off and smother it in frank's famous bbq sauce! i'm so hungry i could eat a whole batch of ecstasy rolls, or a bunch of condoms full of cocaine! at one point i tried to drive it into the realm of non sequitur (i'm so hungry i want to punch you in the face!).

then, 10 mintues before the end of the show, my mixer went dead again. i smacked it around and got it to come back for a minute, then it died completely. fortunately, it didn't matter much because the show was pretty much over. after the show, 7 of us went to a diner that's usually mediocre but that actually had really good service this time.

monday we ate lebanese, lounged around the hotel, and took a walk around the neighborhood near the hotel, while connie took pictures. she hasn't acclimated to the midwest yet, and was fascinated by things like robins and chipmunks. it was pretty cute. and there's some house only a couple blocks from our hotel that has a big yard full of sculpture... it's right by the lakeside, so it's probably not a cheap neighborhood.

tueday we ate crappy sushi and shopped briefly at bent crayon before i took connie to the airport and drove home.

my mixer still seems to be broken. i have a relatively important show coming up on june 17. i need to either fix my mixer or replace it before then. i wanted to eventually replace it with a fancier model, but i'd rather not be forced into it, and now is not the ideal time either. but if barry or i can't fix it, i won't have much choice.

AWIA @RRX

i'm back from vacation. hopefully soon i'll have time to do at least a brief writeup. right now i don't. but i will post this new mp3. animals within animals returned to recycled rainbow X to perform for a live audience for the first time since summer 2003! but we showed that we can be as noisy and intense as ever. this mp3 is long and harsh: not for the faint-hearted or soft-eared.

new live mp3: animals within animals @ RRX
recorded may 28, 2005. featuring

• bobby vomit: turntables + fx
• humdrum: bent electronics + cassettes + fx
• stAllio!: cds + kp2 kaoss pad
• virago: cds + kp2 kaoss pad

63m16s, @192kbps = ~90MB

vaxation

i'm on vacation starting tomorrow for about a week. during that time i will only have sporadic internet access; i'll be able to check email occasionally, but i definitely won't have time for bloggin'.

so that's that. see ya next week.

smokin'

the indianapolis smoking ban has passed:

Put it out: Starting March 1, 2006, smoking would be banned in workplaces, Laundromats, lobbies, restrooms and other public areas. Restaurants and bars are covered by the ban unless they prohibit customers younger than 18, in which case they are exempted.

Go ahead, light up: Excused from the ban: bowling alleys, private clubs, cigar bars, retail tobacco stores, designated hotel smoking rooms, and family-owned businesses in which all employees are related and the business is closed to the public.

the obvious argument about smoking bans is that they aren't--or shouldn't be--truly necessary. if the general public is really that upset about public smoking, then those people will (or logically should) naturally try to frequent places that are non-smoking. we have a few non-smoking bars, and it already seems like most of the best restaurants (the smaller, neighborhood-type ethnic restaurants, etc) are already non-smoking. that way the nonsmokers have places they can go to hang out and avoid smokers; the smokers have places they can go to smoke; everyone in theory should be happy. but of course, the nonsmoking lobby doesn't seem to want people to be allowed to smoke anywhere. that "i should be able to go anywhere i want and not deal with any smokers" attitude that a lot of them seem to have really bugs me.

but a ban in restaurants doesn't bother me too much. as i said, most of the best restaurants are already non-smoking, so i'm not sure how much i'd really notice the difference.

but banning smoking in bars doesn't make any sense to me. drinking makes you smoke! smoking and drinking go hand in hand; if you're a smoker, it's virtually impossible to drink any significant amount of alcohol without smoking. you just can't do it. so on that level at least, passing a smoking ban in bars makes about as much sense as passing a law barring drunken people from fucking each other. it's not like bars are otherwise clean and wholesome: everyone knows that they are essentially dirty, sinful places, so the argument that bar patrons require clean air rings false. (and laws that ban smoking outdoors strike me as ludicrous... if people can't smoke outside, where there is a naturally-occurring air current known as "wind" to keep smoke out of people's faces, then where the hell can people smoke?)

this law exempts normal bars that don't allow patrons under the age of 18. so "true" bars can keep on smokin', and restaurant bars etc go smoke-free. on one level it sounds like the perfect compromise: the smokers can still smoke in their bars, and the nonsmokers have hundreds of restaurant bars where they can indulge their alcholism in a smoke-free environment. but a lot of restaurant owners are pissed over this, convinced they will lose business (and i have yet to see any actual evidence that they won't... anecdotal tales about people standing outside bars in california are insufficient).

another complaint i've heard relates to underage musicians. frankly, there are very few all-age performance venues for musicians in indy. there are a few all-ages places, but generally, if you want to perform in front of an audience in indy, you probably need to play in a bar. currently, the bars can make exceptions for underage performers: they shouldn't hang out in the bar, but they can wait outside and come in when it's time to set up and play. under the new law, bars that permit smoking cannot allow people under 18 to enter at all, no exceptions. so effectively musicians under 18 years old will not be able to perform in bars that allow smoking.

this is definitely a valid criticism. having a set-in-stone no-under-18 rule does seem a little excessive, for that and other reasons. but let's be honest: this is really a problem with the music scene (and the city's support for the music scene), not with the smoking ban per se. if we had a bunch of decent all-ages venues available, it wouldn't really matter. the new law will tangibly hurt underage performers, but those performers still lack a place to play where kids their own age can attend. and honestly, now many musicians that young are really worth hearing?

how to deal

seemingly at the last minute, yesterday 14 senators announced that they had made a deal on the "nuclear option" in the senate. three appointments (including brown and owen, possibly two of the worst nominees) will go through to the floor of the senate for up-or-down vote. some other appointments will not go through. democrats agreed only to filibuster nominations "in extreme circumstances" and republicans have agreed, at least for the moment, not to set off the nuclear option.

some democrats/liberals/progressives are understandably upset about the compromise. but the right wing is going totally insane with rage! they would not have been satisfied with anything less than the nuclear option. their mantra that "every nominee deserves an up-or-down vote" was complete bullshit, an argument full of lies and demonstrably false statements. but they didn't want to settle for anything less... and now that the party has indeed settled for something less, they are pissed off!

this dailykos thread has all the pertinent info: a pdf of the deal, and links to right-wingers who are totally freaking out. and if you go to the dkos front page, you'll find other "deal" threads such as this, this, that, and t'other.

freedom of speech...just watch what you say

these days, it seems like you can judge how true bill maher's statements are by how many people demand that his show be taken off the year.

a couple years ago, shortly after 9/11, maher lost his cushy job on abc's politically incorrect (which abc had snatched away from comedy central) for making a comment that was too true for some people to handle. when someone made a comment that the 9/11 hijackers were "cowards", maher put them in their place by saying "We have been the cowards lobbing cruise missiles from 2,000 miles away. That's cowardly. Staying in the airplane when it hits the building, say what you want about it, it's not cowardly."

some americans (generally right-wingers) did not like bill pointing out that their war machine is bullshit, and the show was quickly canceled.

now, three years later, people are again calling for bill maher to be pulled off the air, so clearly he must've said something a little too "correct" for right-wingers to handle.

Rep. Spencer Bachus, R-Ala., takes issue with remarks on HBO's Real Time with Bill Maher, first aired May 13, in which Maher points out the Army missed its recruiting goal by 42 percent in April.

"More people joined the Michael Jackson fan club," Maher said. "We've done picked all the low-lying Lynndie England fruit, and now we need warm bodies."

Army Reserve Pfc. England was accused of abusing prisoners at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.

"I think it borders on treason," Bachus said. "In treason, one definition is to undermine the effort or national security of our country."

so bill maher, who is a tv comedian made a smart, informed comment, pointing out that recruitment is in shambles and that our military needs qualified people, not the kinds of "bad apples" that have been responsible for torturing people in places like abu ghraib, afghanistan, guantanamo, or anyplace else we keep prisoners in the "war on terror" (because wherever we put 'em, we end up torturin' 'em). it's hard to argue with that.

and then rep. bachus, a congressman who's named after the roman god of getting drunk and acting stupid, takes a page from ann coulter's book (literally; he could practically be reading aloud from her book treason) and demands for maher to be pulled off the air. which is more than a little ironic, considering that maher and coulter are supposedly close friends.

i'm sure that if/when bill goes back to cheerleading for bush's "war on terra", the calls for his cancelation will subside.

the bollywood bends

it's the hot new sensation! everyone is bending the bollywood vanilla coke ad!

syntax provides us with these four new bends. some pretty cool effects here. sez syntax: "everything was done using cool edit pro 2, using random copying, pasting, and effecting of single frames (interpreted as 16-bit mono 44100 sample rate)."

update: these are the actual bent files. they look different on different systems, or when using different applications. syntax has posted some side-by-side comparisons here

mp3s ofs thes weeks

since i won't be around next sunday/monday to post an mp3, this week i'm giving you two mp3s! just pace them out and don't overdose!

this week's mp3s are "arcology" and "wrong of way", from perpetual emotion machine, two of the last tracks i ever composed with a tracker program. enjoy!

and now for something tangential

this has nothing really to do with the image-bending experiment, except that the same source material was used... but faithful reader/awia member rizzia has either bent or rebent the bollywood coke ad into this

i believe he used wordpad to bend it. not bad.

results of the image-bending experiment

remember that image-bending experiment i posted last week? application-sensitive image-bending was the post title. well the results are up. thanks to everyone who sent in your results, and extra big thanks to those who sent in screenshots.

the results document is pretty long (by web standards, anyway) and just repeats all ten of the images that were involved in the experiment, so in the interest of reducing blog clutter, i thought it would be better to post it to a separate file rather than the blog. also, as a separate file it's easier to link to:

http://www.animalswithinanimals.com/stallio/bendresults.html

rather than that yyyy_mm_dd_archive.html#bigbunchanumericalcrap format necessary for linking directly to blog posts. you're welcome to post comments here, though. or feel free to email me any comments or screenshots.

detritus blog!

as of today, i am officially a contributor to the detritus blog. i just finished my first post, about how companies such as lucasarts engage fans and fan-generated art (fan fiction, fan films, etc).

detritus.net is an old-school site "about making new creative works out of old ones, whether it be fine art or pop culture." in addition to hosting the rumori mailing list, detritus also hosts the websites of illegal art and great "plunderphonic" artists such as the evolution control committee, people like us, and wobbly. so it's legit.

the blog is still in beta stage, and there hasn't been a ton of discussion there (my post was the first in a couple months), but as the blog evolves hopefully it'll turn into something pretty special. it's a great site that has probably been floundering a bit, as founder steev hise has been traveling extensively and just doesn't have the time to do it all himself. he wants to transform the site into something more community-based and -oriented, and the blog is perhaps the first major step there (as well as adding new contributing bloggers like me).

my posts there probably won't have as much snark as some of my posts here (or at least as not as much obscenity!), but if you're interested in intellectual property issues and "making new creative works out of old ones", check it out... i likely won't post about that stuff as often here on my blog in the future, but that doesn't mean i'll be blogging about those less in general (it'll probably be more, just over at the detritus blog instead).

start the riot

there was rioting all over the middle east this weekend... massive riots with people dead and more people injured. things pretty much suck in afghanistan... remember them, that place we "freed" a couple years ago and promptly forgot about when it was time to bomb iraq?

well certain people in the right wing, even a few in the us govt, want to blame all those riots on newsweek, for mentioning in one sentence in a recent story that interrogators in guantanamo bay had desecrated copies of the koran, even attempting to throw korans into a toilet.

now, even the US state dept has said this is probably not true, and that "rioting was related more to the ongoing political reconciliation process in Afghanistan than anything else." but that sure won't stop the smear, as the right wing starts tripping over itself in an attempt to demonize newsweek for daring to publish what is most likely a true fact simply because it's an inconvenient one.

the very idea seems absurd on its face: tens of thousands of people in multiple countries are violently rioting... because of one sentence printed by newsweek? as though newsweek is popular reading in the middle east.

it all seems so ridiculous that you would think nobody would accept such a silly proposition without demanding some kind of evidence, but if you thought that then you probably haven't been paying attention to how the corporate media works these days. right-wing pundits, bloggers, and even major media media outlets bought the lie without hesitation, and now the meme is out there that newsweek now has blood on its hands.

newsweek a non-retraction retraction, where they apologize for the possibility of a mistake, though no actual mistake appears to have been made. allegations about koran-flushing have been all over the place for many months. all newsweek did was repeat an already-public allegation. if any "error" was made at all, it was simply that newsweek's source can no longer verify exactly where he read about all that koran-flushing.

update: talkleft has lots more past citations of koran-flushing. tons of 'em.

and sploid points out that the protests actually started three weeks ago when US forces accidentally killed 7 afghans and wounded 8. the newsweek nonstory, at worst, simply fueled protests that were already raging.

new mp3 and stuff

this week's mp3 of the week is "stuff (dizzy mix 96)" and it's a stereo extravaganza from my earliest days of computer music production, way back in 1996.

out of africa

the country has been abuzz about dave chappelle's disappearance, and the recent rumors that he had checked himself into a mental institution in south africa.

according to time magazine, which claims to have caught up with him, he is in south africa, but he's not in any kind of institution.

the article is long (that is, if you know how to get in)... i won't quote the whole thing, but here is a good chunk of it:

Chappelle's hasty hiatus was an unexpected turn in a success story that TIME started following last November. I introduced myself to the notoriously press-shy Chappelle through a shared connection (my wife's brother-in-law is a childhood friend of his), and as the conversations unfolded, Chappelle decided to give TIME extensive access to the production of his new season. He even stopped by TIME's offices in New York City several times, always coming off as approachable, engaging and irreverent. (At one encounter, he tweaked TIME's editors by saying he was reporting a story for Newsweek.) But in conversations before he skated for South Africa, the tension was showing. "Later today I gotta call the head of the network [Comedy Central chief Doug Herzog], and I gotta face the music," Chappelle said on April 19. "I gotta tell this dude either I'm doing it or not. Or if I do it, this is how I gotta do it. But what if he says no?

Then I gotta muster up all the balls I got just to say, 'Well, then, I'm walking away.'" Chappelle's words didn't sound that serious at the time—he is a comedian, after all. Just over a week later, he left the country. Our conversations, however, continued by phone after he reached Durban:
TIME Are you on drugs?

CHAPPELLE I haven't smoked marijuana in months. My drugs these days are nicotine and coffee.

TIME Are you in a mental facility?

CHAPPELLE No, no, I'm not in a mental facility. I'm actually staying with some friends [at the home of a man named Salim], although I did consult a doctor when I was here.

TIME A psychiatrist?

CHAPPELLE It was a 40-minute session. I guess he was a psychiatrist.

We just chewed it up, and that was the extent of it.

TIME Why did you take a break?

CHAPPELLE My personal feeling is I didn't like the direction of the show. I was trying to explain it to people, and no one was feeling me. There's a lot of resistance to my opinions, so I decided, Let me remove myself from this situation. You hear so many voices jockeying for position in your mind that you want to make sure that you hear your own voice. So I figured, Let me just cut myself off from everybody, take a minute and pull a Flintstone—stop a speeding car by using my bare feet as the brakes.

says Herzog, it was ultimately up to the show's namesake: "He absolutely has complete creative freedom.

There's no one from the network sitting on his head. Dave is in charge of his own world." Chappelle's writing partner, Neal Brennan, agrees. He tells TIME that Chappelle had "literally absolute, complete, creative freedom" and plenty of time to work. To some extent, his colleagues profess bafflement about Chappelle's reaction to what seemed to be garden-variety creative differences. "There were 1,000 ways to deal with this," says Brennan. "By the numbers, this was the worst way to have done it. He couldn't think straight. It was fight or flight—and he chose flight."

And then there are those voices in his mind that Chappelle speaks of.

While no one in his circle will talk publicly of it, some describe him as exhibiting increasingly paranoid and erratic behavior. At one point, Brennan says, "I told him, 'You're not well.' He didn't answer." Brennan won't speculate on Chappelle's health but argues that something about his pal of 14 years is different: "Has he made changes in his life? He's 140 degrees different than he was a year ago."

According to Chappelle, it's the people around him who have changed.

His wife Elaine and two children live on a farm in Ohio. Except for a cutting-edge hip-hop concert he sponsored last September in Brooklyn, N.Y.—among the acts were the reunited Fugees—he says he doesn't go out much: "I didn't buy a farm in Ohio to support my party habits. I drive a Toyota. My lifestyle hasn't changed at all."

As Chappelle sees it, his flight to South Africa was an extreme version of his efforts to keep his feet on the ground. He met in Durban late last week with TIME's Johannesburg bureau chief Simon Robinson, although he declined to meet at the place where he was staying, choosing instead the uShaka Marine World on Durban's shore.

As Chappelle walked along the beach, he painted a picture of someone struggling to come to terms with his position and power as well as with the people around him and the way they were reacting to that $50 million deal. Without naming specific people--"Out of respect, I'd rather say those things directly to the people involved than through the press"—he seems to blame some of his inner circle and himself (but not his family) for the stresses created by last year's contract. "If you don't have the right people around you, and you're moving at a million miles an hour, you can lose yourself," he says.

"Everyone around me says, 'You're a genius!'; 'You're great!'; 'That's your voice!' But I'm not sure that they're right." Among those close colleagues, Chappelle's growing distrust has apparently set off no small amount of anxiety. His publicist, Matt Labov, called TIME as this story was being edited, demanding to know if Chappelle had said anything inflammatory about his agent or manager.

Chappelle accepts some blame as well for the stalled third season.

"I'm admittedly a human being," he says. "I'm a difficult kind of dude." His first walkout during shooting "had a little psychological element to it. I have trust issues, things like that. I saw some stuff in myself that I just didn't dig. It's like when I brought a girl home to my mom, and it looked as if my mom really didn't like this girl. And she told me, 'I like her just fine. I just don't like you around her.' That's how I feel in this situation. There were some things about myself that I didn't like. People got to take inventory from time to time."

But as the late rapper biggie smalls once observed, mo' money, mo' problems. In August 2004, after Chappelle's big deal was announced, people started calling him a genius a lot more. They started laughing at the wrong jokes for the wrong reasons at the wrong times. And to his mind, the show became more like working at Wal-Mart, although for a much higher salary. But he kept on with it. Says Chappelle: "Fifty million dollars is a lot of money. And what I'm learning is I am surprised at what I would do for $50 million. I am surprised at what people around me would do for me to have $50 million." Although news of the deal was heavily reported, the conflicted Chappelle didn't actually put his name on the pact until last March. Says Chappelle: "I was thinking for the longest—I'm not even gonna sign this s___."

Chappelle's misgivings about his success kept growing. Increasingly, when he walked down the street or slipped offstage at comedy clubs, people would approach him—black and white and Hispanic and Asian and other—and say things like, "I love your show, I don't care what anybody says. Don't let them change you." The phrase echoed in his head: Don't let them change you. Chappelle used to work Washington Square Park with a stand-up named Charlie Barnett, a brilliant jokester and crack addict who died of AIDS. Barnett, who co-starred in the movie D.C. Cab in 1983 and later fell on hard times and slept in the streets, used to tell Chappelle, "If you fight change, you'll end up f_____ up like me." Chappelle realized he was caught in a paradox: he had always embraced change. Now he was resisting change.

And resisting it was having its effects.

The third season hit a big speed bump in November 2004. He was taping a sketch about magic pixies that embody stereotypes about the races.

The black pixie—played by Chappelle—wears blackface and tries to convince blacks to act in stereotypical ways. Chappelle thought the sketch was funny, the kind of thing his friends would laugh at. But at the taping, one spectator, a white man, laughed particularly loud and long. His laughter struck Chappelle as wrong, and he wondered if the new season of his show had gone from sending up stereotypes to merely reinforcing them. "When he laughed, it made me uncomfortable," says Chappelle. "As a matter of fact, that was the last thing I shot before I told myself I gotta take f______ time out after this. Because my head almost exploded."

Herzog says he has told advertisers and staff that he believes there will be no Chappelle's Show in 2005: "I don't know what the guy's thinking. This is a guy who walked off his own show and kind of left everybody bewildered." But he also leaves the door open—wide open—for the comic's possible return. "Do we still want to be in business with Dave Chappelle? Of course. Dave's an enormous, enormous talent. We're in the comedy business, and Dave's a comedy genius." As for Chappelle, last week he sounded raring to go but not sure he had a place to go to.

TIME Do you plan to start up the show when you return to the U.S.?

CHAPPELLE Hopefully, yeah. Since I've been gone, I haven't really talked to anybody. I've only talked to my family. So when I get back, [I hope] everything will be up and running, or we'll make other arrangements. I don't know what the lay of the land is.

things that hip and hop

samurai champloo

from the people who brought you cowboy bebop, one of the hippest, stylish anime on american tv, samurai champloo merges hip-hop culture with badass samurai swordfighting. it's ostensibly set in the japanese edo era (when japan was transitioning from feudal to modern ways), but stylistically it's total hip-hop, from mugin's breakin'esque fighting technique down to the editing, which is full of scratching and video "remix"-type transitions.

adult swim just premiered this series tonight (you can still catch the premiere at 2:30edt or again on thurs night)... it's pretty cool. i might as well join the adult swim street team considering how much i like their action lineup these days (though i've yet to see any advertising for paranoia agent or s-cry-ed, which start at the end of may, and metropolis, which is on right now, isn't really holding my attention).

so yeah, the premiere episode really grabbed me. it has all the style and slick design and iconic characters that bebop had, but totally distinctive. i've sure never seen hip-hop and samurai swordplay blended in this fashion, and it really works quite well. at first i was just going to email drbmd about it, but shit, i've already endorsed a few other shows on here, so there it is.

i just wish adult swim's comedy lineup was as consistent... they canceled sealab 2021, which i don't mind because it had jumped the shark long ago. and robot chicken... i don't care how good its ratings are; in between its occasional moments of brilliance, most of it's pretty lame. it's like they have all these toys and cameras set up, and 75% of the time they can't think of anything more creative to do with them is have the dolls fart or kick each other in the balls. american dad is good, but fox is running the new episodes two weeks before adult swim. and tom goes to the mayor has good guests and some good ideas, but its slow-paced ironic style can grow boring.

application-sensitive image-bending

update: go to my new image databending gallery, the new home for all my databent image work!

i touched upon this briefly in my previous post, as well as back in march, but i definitely think this demands further study.

if you don't want to read a bunch of technical databending crap, please scroll down because i have an experiment for you.

different image formats behave differently when they are "databent" (that is, when they are edited or manipulated in an "incorrect" environment), depending on the level of complexity of the image data and how it's stored. in my image editing experience (which is far more limited than i'd like), i can classify the image formats i've worked with into two general categories: simple formats, which are very resilient to bending (so long as you don't damage the header, which tends to be very short) and yield fairly predictable results, and volatile formats, which tend to be fairly fragile but produce peculiar results if you manage to bend them without completely breaking them.

BMP and TIF are simple formats, and their general structure quickly becomes obvious after a few bending experiments. files are structured with a short header and a data block, and that's about it. there might be a footer, but if so then altering it doesn't seem to corrupt the file. the data block for these formats is a basic stream of pixel data, which is read left-to-right, top-down. there is no equivalent to a "line break"; the size of the image is established in the header and the pixels simply load in, in order. each pixel is defined as an RGB (red-green-blue) color value, so the basic structure looks something like this:

[header]RGBRGBRGBRGBRGBRGBRGBRGBRGBRGBRGBRGBRGBRGBRGBRGBRGB...

if you were to move or delete the first byte of the data block (the first "R"), the entire image would "color shift" to green (because every pixel's G value would be interpreted as R, etc). this effect can be clearly seen in bends such as this one:

similarly, if you were to run some kind of algorhythmic processing on the data block (i'm thinking audio FX because i prefer to bend in an audio editing environment, but the same principles would apply to other environments), you would simply "corrupt" or alter the color values of the pixel data itself. for example, here is the bollywood vanilla coke ad, converted to BMP, with sound forge's "fuzz 1" distortion preset effect run on the pixel data:

(i haven't experimented much with using FX on simple formats, but others have... sorry, i don't have any links right this second)

PSD and JPG are both volatile formats. they don't behave anything like simple formats. it's very easy to alter the wrong byte of data and corrupt the whole file. pixel data is definitely not stored in a simple stream; it appears to be stored in two- or three-dimensional arrays (how many arrays are used varies depending on options used). the structure or even the location of these arrays is not transparent to the databender: after dozens of times editing PSD files in a wav editor, i have a good idea of which areas not to edit, but locating the exact boundaries of those areas is beyond me).

editing the data in these arrays corrupts the pixels in a structural sense rather than simply color and location. bizarre horizontal banding effects are common (as seen in the wallpaper i posted on sunday and the bulk of my image bends).

anyway, on to the inspiration for this post:

it has become increasingly apparent that when bending volatile image files, the end result varies substantially depending on the end application and OS used to open the bent file. i suspected it was true back in march, and now i'm dead certain.

the proof came today when i posted an actual bent jpg file. i bent the file using goldwave, then opened it in mspaint to verify that it would open. it did, so i posted it, only to realize that the same file looked different when i viewed it in firefox (using win2k). so i opened it again in paint and copied the image to a new file, to create a permanent version of how paint interpreted the image, and posted that as well. i also tried to capture a version of how it looked in firefox, but while taking the screenshot was easy i didn't have any good cropping tools, so i didn't end up posting it (i should've emailed myself the screenshot... stupid).

later browser testing revealed that the image wouldn't even open in internet explorer. and when i got home and checked on my computer at home (again using firefox, using xp sp1), the image looked different still!

this is a powerful reminder of one of the core concepts of databending: you never really working directly with data; you work with the data as interpreted by the editing environment you use to access that data. there is at least one built-in layer of abstraction present at all times. with image-bending, you could say that the "real" bending happens not when you edit the data, but when that data is reinterpreted back into its original format. the same exact file will bend differently when opened in different applications on the same computer/OS, and will also look different when viewed in the same application but on a different computer/OS.

this raises some fundamental questions: just how important is the "computer" part of the equation? will two machines running the same OS and application versions interpret a file in the same way? or do hardware variations, etc factor in? could it be that a bent volatile file will render differently on every computer you open it in? or does OS even factor in at all?

maybe i'm giving away too many of my "trade secrets" in this post (as if anyone other than syntax is reading by this point), but i desperately want your participation in the following experiment:

stop scrolling now. here's the experiment:

look at this image:

if you don't see an image at all (just a red X or whatever), that's fine. you probably won't see one if you're using internet explorer (though if you're using some other browser and can't see it, i'd like to know).

if you can see an image above, compare it to the following images:

if the image above looks like one of those images, please tell me which one it looks like, and what OS and browser you're using, including browser version (you can generally find this in any application's help menu under "about [application]").

if the image above looks different than any of these, please email me a screen capture of what it looks like. this is extremely important for the experiment to yield any useful results: it will only take at most a couple minutes and i would really appreciate your help. i will post your submitted image, your name/handle, and maybe even a shout-out or two if you like. if you are comfortable with cropping and want to crop it, great, but you sure don't have to. (if you don't know how to take a screenshot, see "tech help" below)

extra credit: if you really want to go above and beyond to help out the experiment and get major brownie points too, here's what else you can do: save the bent image (the one above) to your hard drive, and open it up in microsoft paint (or other image editors; i can't open it in photoshop, but maybe someone could on a mac, not to mention other application on other platforms). if it also looks different than any of these, select all, copy to the clipboard, and paste it to a new document (should be 333x485 pixels), then email me the document.

edits/updates: much thanks everyone for responding, and especially syntax, erroneousrex, ian page-echols, jack smiley, and ken goudswaard for sending in their screenshots (the fifth image is syntax's; the 6th, 7th, & 8th are rex, ian, and jack's mac os x submissions, respectively; and the 9th is ken's). i'll print a full list of everyone who responded (who i have names for) when i post all the results, probably in a few days.

tech help: if you know how to take a screenshot, you can stop reading now.

how to take a basic screen capture (windows): view the image and try to make sure you have the whole image visible. then press the print screen key on your keyboard (it might be abbreviated "prt scr" or similar). this will take a "screen shot" of whatever is visible on your monitor, and place it on your windows clipboard. then you simply need to go into an image editor, create a new document that's sufficiently large, and the "paste" the screenshot from the clipboard into a new document. save the file, email it to me, and i'll love you forever.

if you've never used an image editor (or don't think you have one): go to your start menu, choose the "accessories" menu, and then choose "paint". the microsoft paint application will open. in paint, go to the "image" menu and select "attributes". set the "units" to "pixels" and make sure the image size is at least as big as your screen (800x600, 1024x768, 1280x960, etc). now you're ready to paste in your screenshot. go to the "edit" menu and select "paste". then save it up and email it to me. JPG format is better than BMP, etc.

mac users: i'm not really qualified on this subject, but in mac os x, you can create a pdf screenshot by pressing Command+Shift+3. i will gladly accept these pdf files, though i would prefer something like jpg if you are a screenshot wiz.

we didn't start the fire

so there's this thread on the exbe board... it started off pretty innocuously as a simple thread about a recent noise-friendly "open mic" night at a cleveland venue called "the capsule". but it quickly went sour when a troll showed up and started posting stuff calling some of the unnamed performers (who he hadn't seen) "hacks" and "losers" and the like. (i got in on the flamewar a bit late, starting on page 3, as i didn't find out about it right away.

things got pretty ugly, as they tend to do during such arguments, and the inevitable calls for peace started coming in. one such post petitioned everyone to "drink a vanilla coke" and "hug a puppy"... i went searching for a funny vanilla coke picture to post, and found this one:

before i knew it, kyle (of etherial transmission, colorforms, and press the button) asked me to databend the picture! i didn't really have the software to do so properly, but i gave it the old college try and soon downloaded goldwave so i could bend better. here were my results (all edits are simple cut-and-paste edits):

BMP edited in word.


BMP edited in goldwave.


JPG edited in goldwave.


now this one is weird... the previous image is the actual JPG file that i edited. but this image is what that exact same file looked like in mspaint. opening the bent file in different applicatioons made it look different, apparently. that's weird. maybe they don't look different to you! or the first one looks different on your computer than it does on mine!

so the thread took up a bunch of my time today, but at least i made something kinda cool out of something ugly (the flamewar, not the original image).

i wouldn't recommend reading the thread unless you like flamewars and messageboard drama (or you want to read someone call me names like "dick", "prick", "asshole", and "hack-job", in which case you should start reading around the end of page 6).

so that's what i did today when i wasn't on my job: argued on the net and bent a few pictures. connie, i wanted to email you, but when people are talking about how much they hate you, it gets a bit distracting. sorry 'bout that.

tonight drbmd & i are getting together to watch a nin-ja movie! someday, i really need to write a nice long post about nin-ja movies and other crappy cut-and-paste cinema...

i missed one

courtesy of atrios and others:

Sex was always a source of conflict in the marriage. Though it wasn't emotionally satisfying for her, Davis says she soon learned that sex could "buy" peace with Hager after a long day of arguing, or insure his forgiveness after she spent too much money. "Sex was coinage; it was a commodity," she said. Sometimes Hager would blithely shift from vaginal to anal sex. Davis protested. "He would say, 'Oh, I didn't mean to have anal sex with you; I can't feel the difference,'" Davis recalls incredulously. "And I would say, 'Well then, you're in the wrong business.'"

sounds like a case study in domestic abuse, eh? something you'd read in a psychology journal? so who is she talking about, and what does that crack about being "in the wrong business" mean?

Dr. W. David Hager, a prominent obstetrician-gynecologist and Bush Administration appointee to the Advisory Committee for Reproductive Health Drugs in the Food and Drug Administration (FDA)
...
In both his medical practice and his advisory role at the FDA, his ardent evangelical piety anchors his staunch opposition to emergency contraception, abortion and premarital sex. Through his six books--which include such titles as Stress and the Woman's Body and As Jesus Cared for Women, self-help tomes that interweave syrupy Christian spirituality with paternalistic advice on women's health and relationships--he has established himself as a leading conservative Christian voice on women's health and sexuality.

let me emphasize that. the guy is an obgyn and he allegedly tells his wife that he can't differentiate between his wife's vagina and her anus.

By 1995, according to Davis's account, Hager's treatment of his wife had moved beyond morally reprehensible to potentially felonious. It was a uniquely stressful year for Davis. Her mother, dying of cancer, had moved in with the family and was in need of constant care. At the same time, Davis was suffering from a seemingly inexplicable exhaustion during the day. She began exhibiting a series of strange behaviors, like falling asleep in such curious places as the mall and her closet. Occasionally she would--as she describes it--"zone out" in midsentence in a conversation, and her legs would buckle. Eventually, Davis was diagnosed as having narcolepsy, a neurological disorder that affects the brain's ability to regulate normal sleep-wake cycles.

For Davis, the diagnosis spelled relief, and a physician placed her on several medications to attain "sleep hygiene," or a consistent sleep pattern. But Davis says it was after the diagnosis that the period of the most severe abuse began. For the next seven years Hager sodomized Davis without her consent while she slept roughly once a month until their divorce in 2002, she claims. "My sense is that he saw [my narcolepsy] as an opportunity," Davis surmises. Sometimes she fought Hager off and he would quit for a while, only to circle back later that same night; at other times, "the most expedient thing was to try and somehow get it [over with]. In order to keep any peace, I had to maintain the illusion of being available to him." At still other moments, she says, she attempted to avoid Hager's predatory advances in various ways--for example, by sleeping in other rooms in the house, or by struggling to stay awake until Hager was in a deep sleep himself. But, she says, nothing worked. One of Davis's lifelong confidantes remembers when Davis first told her about the abuse. "[Linda] was very angry and shaken," she recalled.

hager is also suspected of playing a major in getting the FDA not to approve the "plan B" emergency contraceptive for over-the-counter use. you don't need "plan B" if your "plan A" is Anal sex.

recovery

a good night's sleep will do wonders... i went to bed early last night (around 11:30! that's early!) and virtually slept through the night without problems. i think i woke up once or twice, but that's not unusual... and no waking up simply to cough!

i'm not back to 100% yet, but i'm clearly improved over yesterday or the day before. i've only coughed a few times this morning, and they were quick: a couple coughs, some phlegm, and it's over. not like the 30-second hacking fits i was prone to yesterday.

so i was "sick" just long enough to miss the INS show... not a big deal, really, since i've seen them play several times and wasn't particularly interested in the other bands on the bill. but still... i feel a little bit bad for not going out to support my friends, who even booked me for a show in cleveland a couple months back. i wanted to be there for them.

oh well... if they are selected to play MMS again this year, i'll definitely go see them then if possible. (the deadline for MMS submissions is tomorrow... i mailed mine tuesday. in theory, we should know in 3 weeks who's been selected, though it might take a bit longer than that.)