We have the dumbest criminals here
As promised, an update on yesterday’s story about the young woman run over by two idiots fleeing paying for a Chinese buffet, about $22.
First off, what’s really important here: The waitress, who was in front of the car and intentionally run over — as in thrown up on the hood, then off, then run over, has been upgraded from ICU to trauma care. The doctors are still not sure of the extend of her injuries, and she is not out of the woods, but it looks like she has a chance.
Now, for the good part: You know, if you are going to commit felony vehicular assult, possibly murder, you should not have a personalized tag. Took the local PD no time to track the suspect to her home and arrest her. She is 19, and at best is looking at a year in prison, at worst … decades. One moment of dazzling stupidity and her life is over. They still have not caught the passenger, but they will.
On another note: Lets give a big round of applause for Katherine Harris. The whole seperation of church and state is a lie thing seems to have killed what is left of her campaign. Even W won’t support her. Proof it is not only Democrats who show such skill at committing political suicide. Wonder if they paid her to run.
Some criminals are evil
Dammit all to hell. People often ask me why so many journalists are cynical – even mysanthropic – well there is a fantastic reason for this. So often — though we also see the opposite side of humanity too — we are dealing day in and day out with the dregs of humanity.
I know I often make light of some of our stupid criminals here. In fact, it’s a huge reason I created this blog. As a journalist, when I write, I am trained to be objective about my subject, regardless of my own feelings on the matter. However, it is a common public falacy that reporters, editors and the like don’t have feelings or strong opinions. To the contrary, we tend to be the most opinionated people on the planet — we are just trained to be objective in our work and save personal views for the editorial page.
Back to the point, as funny as our stupid criminals are — and there is no shortage of them, here or anywhere else — that stupidity sometimes gets other people hurt or killed. This past weekend, two women tried to skip out on a cheap dinner tab at a local Chinese buffet. When the waitress walked out to the parking lot, they ran her down in their car. As of now, I don’t know if the young woman who is always so nice to her customers is even still alive — they took her to the hospital by Lifesaver Helicopter.
So, for these two less-than-worthless human beings, the price of a couple of plates of sweet-and-sour chicken was worth killing someone for. Just to kick the stupidity level up a notch, there were plenty of witnesses and the two suspects were driving a car with personalized tags. I will let you know tomorrow if the police have caught them yet.
OK, venting over. Still, it’s no wonder so many of the people who work in the media become cynics.
In some positive news, I just read in National Geographic — still one of the finest operations in my business — where a company building a shopping center in Florida paid more that $100,000 to have a 120-year-old oak tree relocated. Maybe there is hope for the human race yet. If you ever want to see true dedication to preserving natural resources, even in a densly populated nation, go to Japan some time. What they do to protect their forrests is truely amazing – $100,000 per tree per year in some forrests.
On another note, from Art Life Collective, my brother Blair, aka Disco Super Chocolate, has added Web radio to the list of projects. Custom t-shirts are still the focus, but this is just another creative outlet for us.
Jules has the update on our forum:
“Our man with the plan, ALC President Blair Hadley a.k.a. DJ Disco Super Chocolate, streaming the freshest of tunes to the internet airwaves ’cause he’s just that f*ing cool.
Featuring a wide variety of music that will make you sing, move, remember, sigh, gasp and *sometimes* wish you were deaf.
Where else but Radio ALC can one listen to New York Dolls, Massive Attack, Paul Simon and the theme song from The Love Boat all in one day? No where.
He’s so multi-talented it will make you sick.
Radio ALC can be found streaming though WINAMP on your SHOUTcast radio dial.
Search: WALC
If you are using itunes or another mp3 program, you can listen to the stream by pacing the url, “www.blairsworld.mine.nu:8000” in the field where you select radio stations. For example, on itunes, it is under the “advanced” tab at the top. Click “advanced” then “open stream” then paste the above referenced web address into the field.
This ain’t no Cafepress corporate marketplace, baby.
Welcome to the Underground.“
So check it out, though I do have to admit, it is a bit disconcerting when “Power in the Blood” by A3 fades into the theme from “Dallas”
Peace
Creative abuse
Not much on either the art or the board sports today. Mother nature has been against me — any free time from my work at the paper it has been raining. I am still working out how to ride my new Freebord … I can link carves and slides, mostly without having to bail. But, according to all the guys at the Freebord site, it takes practice, lots of it, especially for people like me who have wakeboarded, surfed and skateboarded, but don’t regularly snowboard — not much of that in the Deep South. Should be back on the day shift soon, so I will have afternoons free to practice. It seems to be entirely a matter of balancing and learning when to weight and unweight your uphill edge. Getting there.
On another note, we don’t so much have a stupid criminal this week as an unsusal one: According to a police I&O, a woman was charged with felony domestic battery for slicing up her husband with a samauri sword. The stab wound to the back may hurt her self defense claim.
In a statewide dumb criminal case, some human defect was arrested for breaking into jail. According to wire reports, this guy scaled a security fence so inmates could hoist a bag full of part favors like MDMA and pot into the county jail. The whole thing was being watched by guards who, after a brief foot chase, caught the guy and charged him with everything from possession to bringing contraband to prisoners. He should be joining them soon. Again, what kind of idiot breaks into jail? Has it become so difficult for people to sell drugs on the street?
Art is art, dammit
Yeah, most of what we do at Art Life Collective is make designer t-shirts, but we also have a great forum where artists and people who have made ALC work can trade ideas and comment on each other artwork.
The Art Life Collective Forum is also a place where we can just vent … so I did. It seems some nebbish at Wired wrote an editorial claiming that people who use computers to create art are not artists, but “facilitators.” Someone on the forum directed us to the story. Given that I am a newspaper editor and graphic artist by trade, I felt compelled to respond. The full discussion is on the forum under the General Discussion, Art section, but here is my excerpt:
“You know, I read that article and … pop, the top of my head opened up and let out the beast in me that writes editorials for a living.
This guy is wrong on so many levels, it’s hard to decide where to start.
The most obvious place is that he is following a growing trend in this country – and around the world really – to draw a line in the sand and try to be exclusatory in some form or fashion. We see all these groups of people who say, if you are not exactly like us or do what we believe, then you are somehow inferior – silly hats only. This has become pervasive in just about every level and facet of society, from religion, to ethnicity to, and maybe most disturbingly, art.
There is no real way to define what is art, since it is by its very nature, completely subjective to both the artist and the people viewing their work.
That being said, the article has a number of other fatal flaws. The first one is in making any real distinction between digital photography and graphic illustration and traditional film photography. Like the author, I have been a copy editor; in my case for a daily newspaper, and am now a managing editor for that same publication. That being said, I have had probably more than 100 of my photos, graphics and illustrations published and have won just about every major illustration and design award for newpapers in Alabama; several of them more than once. I also have taught photo journalism at the college level.
Not bragging here – from the looks of Jules’ work and some of the other contributions to ALC, many of you are far more talented and skilled in this regard than I am; I’m just establishing my credentials to dissect this particular argument.
From a technical standpoint, there is no real difference between digital photography and film photography, except that digital work does everything the other does, better, with more flexibility and much faster. You are exposing light through a lens and aperture for a specific duration of time onto a surface that reacts to light. That’s photography, period. It does not matter really how that surface processes the image.
Now, not all photography should be classified as art. Most of what we shoot at the paper would not be called art in the sense we are speaking of here – even with the element of composition necessary to produce a goop picture for the front page.
Digital art, whether it is in straight photography, or as I generally use it combining images from photos, modeling software, vector programs and the CS2 suite, is still art. It is not a matter of “facilitation,” but a matter of composition, visualization and – always – talent. Plus, the argument that there is no real skill involved just does not hold water. It takes tons of training, practice and hard work to learn how to use the software to produce good images.
I have judged a number of newpaper contests over the years, and I remember the garbage that was staining newsprint when all the digital technology first became mainstream in print media. People were trying all sorts of things – given, this was the learning curve – but most of them lacked both the skill and artistic talent to produce viable work. Because they at so many graphic options, many newspapers looked like the color was sneezed onto the front page.
Also, the idea that time spent in a dark room working and reworking images is any more labor intensive that producing images digitally is way off the mark. I highly suspect the guy who wrote this has never done much digital image editing or graphic design on a computer other than simply working a photo for reprint purposes. I do understand his love of working in a dark room – there is something karmic about it. I first got into photography shooting on a Pentax K1000 – the workhorse for many photojournalists, then a Minolta X700 and a Pentax autofocus SLR. I still have an Olympus AF SLR and a couple of medium format, including a Graflex. I take them out and fondle them from time to time, look at the pile of undeveloped film in my cabinet, and put them back in their case. And, yeah, I miss the serenity of the dark room.
But working images on a computer is just as time consuming and demanding, just more flexible and foregiveable – there are no undos once you break out the enlarger. The image I did of the tiny molecule computers or the mars rover or the fetus with the DNA took hours to get just right. There are six or seven versions of each image on my hard drive or archived on CDs that were done before I got one I was happy with.
Even when I am not shooting for a story, being able to know, without a doubt, that I have the image I need for some part of my art is an invaluable asset.
All arguments aside, though, the simple truth is that art is art. Segregating creative minds by what medium they choose to express themselves with is not only disturbing, it is retarded.
BTW, I apologize for all the typos and misspellings in this. Editing reams of copy all day, laying out pages and trouble shooting a switch from Quark to InDesign and OS 9 to OS 10 for the entire paper has burned at least half my brain smooth.
Plus, it’s late, so I am now climbing, slowly, off my soap box.”
So there it is, in all its grumpy glory. Still, it pisses me off when people try to play the I’m-an-artist-and-you’re-not game.
Not much on the Incident and Offense report, it’s been kind of quiet, still, we had one suspect charged with bouncing like 200 checks. How in the hell do you actually do that in a town this size?
Traded the crown jewels for my art
Boo, yah.
QE the second bought one of my designer shirts from Art Life Collective, don’t believe me?
http://artlifecollective.com/bb/index.php?topic=24.0
That is some more of Jules work. Again, the girl earns some props.
Still, if the Queen of England is going to buy my products, she should have gone a couple of sizes smaller to show off her bust more. Just a little tip from the what not to wear collection.
Incident and offense report of the day: Actually, got two today. Local police stopped a car driving around a residential section of town this morning with three underage young women, all pretty tanked. Oh, and they were also all naked – go figure. The three were initially charged with underage drinking and one DUI. However, at the station, it was later discovered that one of the women also had a stash of nose candy on her. Now, if she was not wearing any clothes at the time of her arrest, where did she initially hide it from the police? Best guess is that piece of evidence is was handled by officers wearing surgical gloves.
OK, now for stupid criminal No. 2: We have a couple of men here who have spent most of their adult lives in one of our city jails. This takes work, since it essentially means a continuing stream of minor crimes. One such tool was out of jail, but had a pile of warrants for failure to appear and other petty stuff. An officer sees him walking down the street – all local police know the guy on site by now – and hollers out: “Hey, when you were a trusty, you did a great job washing our cruisers … would you take a few minutes and wash my car for me now?” Suspect was more than willing to accommodate the request. He actually walked over to the car, washed it, then was arrested on the spot. It’s nice when the criminals come to the police.
Mining the Art Life Collective forum for art tips
I have been absolutely living at the orifice for the past couple of days, so sorry for the lag in posts. Journalists work doctors’ hours but without the really cool paycheck. Though the special section I did on Avondale Mills closing – I handled the layout – really turned out great. We had a huge response from our readers. This will give the thousands of workers a memento of what the company – the oldest textile mill in the country until it closed July 25 – something to remember it by. It will also serve as a reminder that there was a time when companies in this country treated their employees in a way that would be unheard of today. When workers at some of these Souther mills say the “good old days” were better, after reading their stories, I must agree, they are right.
Now, as far as art goes, Jules on the Art Life Collective forum, www.artlifecollective.com/bb, continues to be a huge wealth of resources for artists, especially when it comes to making custom t-shirts. I have culled some of her better selections here:
Useful Tool ~ Check it out.
http://www.digitalmediaminute.com/color/
Another nice one.
http://www.colorblender.com/
Pantone Matching.
I also use something called ColorPic.exe – I have no idea where I downloaded it from. Google it if interested.
It allows you to color sample anything on your computer – so I can grab the hex/dec values from a website/PDF/jpeg/icon…
I like sampling the same color on the same document when viewing in different programs to see how drastic the change can be.
Again, props to Jules for finding these resources.
Best Incidence and offense report of the day: A local resident decided he no longer wanted to be paying a furniture company – and probably some of his other creditors, though the furniture company has so far been the only one to file a police report – what he owed them. Soooo … he faxed them a badly forged death certificate for himself. Aside from the piss-poor forgery, this was stupide on so many levels. We have a population here of about 17,000, so it’s not like someone would not have seen him. He will probably be facing both fraud and forgery charges, for starters. We may have some of the dumbest criminals on the planet here. We don’t have much crime, but what we do have usually involves a really special kind of stupid.
Some helpful tips from a fellow artist
Folks,
After cramming together a really cool special section these past few days, plus nailing together the news end of most of Saturday’s paper, I am totally fried. My brain is mostly burned smooth at this point of the game.
Still, have a stupid criminal for us: Generally, when you are going to forge a bunch of checks, its bad if they are stolen from the mother of one of your district judges. That actually happened here. The conviction was never really in question.
Also, a few art tips from Jules, one of the gurus at Art Life Collective, www.artlifecollective.com. Aside from the fact that she shot the model photos for the site for Blair, she is both a talented artist and photographer — way beyond me in some respects. Here are a few of her tips for fellow graphic designers, including resources for building designer t-shirts and other art projects.
This was on our new forum for our t-shirt designers and artists, www.artlifecollective.com/bb
“I am always looking for new ways to make my designing life easier.
Here are a few of the links I have stumbled over during my net travels.
Please post a few of your dirty little designer/technical secrets. Come on. Do it.
STC fontBrowser 2.0: Online tool for quickly running through the font on your system. Ability to preview text.
Brands of the World: Huge collection of vector logos for every major (and minor) brand of anything on the planet. If you have ever had to pull teeth in order to get a vector logo from a Clients art department, you will appreciate this site.
dafont.com: Freeware and Shareware fonts. Just my personal favorite.
istockphoto.com: Royalty-free images at a fraction of the cost.
random.org: Should I use the photo of the Training Seminar or the Business Meeting for this particular AD? For when you JUST don’t have the energy to make that sort of decision today… leave it all up to a flip of the virtual coin.”
Kudos Jules
Graphics the easy way
Not much time to write today, just simply that, in the midst of throwing together a 10 page, last-minute special section, that taking the easy way, as long as the software permits, is the best thing in commercial art. For example, we just upgraded from old Quark 4 and PS 6 to Adobe Creative Suite CS2. I was wanting some nice drop shadows with fades and feathering around some photo boxes – the section is supposed to look old timey, scrapbookish.
I started doing it like in the old days, creating the effects in Photo Shop and using them as frame templates in Quark, where they are not editable. Also had to do most of the headline text in PS to get the look I wanted. Still something of a noob with InDesign, but quickly discovered could do all my text overlays and get most of the effects I wanted in the pagination software without having to touch PS. Cut the time in half. Still, there was a little more I wanted to do, but on deadline, keeping it simple makes sense.
The surprising thing was the output results were far superior and outweigh by a fair margin any gains I would have seen with the extra Photoshop work. Postscript fonts always look better without being rasterized, no matter what effect you are looking for.
Photoshop is still my main design tool, but I am discovering that a hefty amount of my text work is better left to programs that are designed primarily to handle copy.
Oh, and as promised, Incident and Offence report of the day: This one comes from one of our editors and happened outside our coverage area where we live, somewhere in north Alabama. Avid driver of four wheel truck managed to get stuck off road on the side of a mountain known as a great place to put such vehicles to the test. Buddy shows up to pull him off the rocks. Somehow they managed to roll the truck several times. The truck owner’s wife was airlifted to Atlanta with massive head trauma. The truck owner, faced with a tough choice, decided not to go to his wife’s side and instead spent the night next to his banged up truck to keep someone from stealing it. That takes a special kind of retard.
Hmmm, first day on the new blog
First off, a little lite background. I am a managing editor for a small daily in Alabama and help doing PR gerbil work for www.artlifecollective.com (ALC for short). Aside from graphic design, hobbies include boardsports, being in the water under almost any circumstance and playing music that generally annoys people from small southern towns really loud.
Really though, the main purpose here is to create a place to discuss alot about my arwork and how it is done, why, and where it can be seen (most of my collection is stuff that started out for commercial purposes and mutated into something else later. Again, aside from newspaper editing and such, I do a lot of graphic work for the paper, so thats where the kernel of my ideas for other work springs from)
And, since I am a journalist by nature – one of those people who ask annoying personal questions at grossly inappropriate times – a good bit of what I plan to have here will be culled from other sites.
Also, just to dispell a few misconceptions, journalists, despite having been trained to write objectively, tend to be the most opinionated people on the planet. So, you will get some of mine here, especially the ones that get culled from the editorial page for being a bit too aggressive. I once referred to the U.N. as “a toothless old dog angerly gumming away at the ankles of wayward nations.” One of the best lines I ever wrote. Editor was unamued. So, you get the idea.
Don’t get me wrong, I absolutely love being a journalist, but there is always soo much more that goes on than we ever have the newsprint for, so I hope to also share some of our more interesting bits and pieces, especially choice excerpts from IandO reports. Those are especially fun since there appears to be no upper limit on stupid, especially with petty – and the not so petty criminals. Hopefully have one of those every day.
In spite of all the fun, the real purpose here is to discuss digital art techniques and resources, both my own, including a few projects I am working on, and from other people.
Anyone who is interested can check out some of my work here: http://artlifecollective.com/shop/index.php?main_page=detail&cat_id=39
I am particularly proud of the fetus witht the DNA. The stuff on the site is available to purchase on a shirt, but if anyone would like to use it for illustrative purposes – free as long as you give me credit – just let me knowon this site.
Also, props to anyone who can figure out what my user name refers to.
zats all for today.
Peace,
G
IO for today: Police reported a thief with particularly low ambitions. He managed to shoplift about $50 worth of junk for a dollar store, then ran to the parking lot and stole a Geo Metro. Got away, but, given what he took, who cares?
