Death of blogger Gary Welsh officially ruled suicide

Goodness knows I did not love prolific local blogger and attorney Gary Welsh. Over the many years he wrote about local and national politics, he penned things that were complete libelous falsehoods, and he should have been sued many times over. Fortunately for himself, he was shrewd enough to aim his worst defamatory lies at the two groups of people who were unlikely to take him to court – national public figures who didn’t care about a puny midwest blogger, and local folks who didn’t have two dimes to rub together and could never afford to drag him into a courtroom. When it came to people who could actually take him on legally, he tended to pull his punches and say things that were sly implications rather than forthright. For the local folks upon whom he unleashed the dogs of war, god help them. He destroyed several people’s livelihoods and at least one person took his life after being subjected to an endless tirade of vicious, unfounded Welsh penmanship.

There are lots of folks who are saying nice things about Welsh now that he’s passed on; I’ve read lots of laudatory words with raised eyebrows. Some people will apparently say nice things about anyone, which gives me great pause. I think that’s part of of the banality of evil; people’s willingness to look past truly terrible behavior “to always find the good” in someone is ultimately a sort of applause.

The nicest thing I could say about him is that he was prolific. The man wrote a lot. The nature of what Welsh wrote, well… I gave up reading his work years ago, about the same time I gave up writing about anything political. Reading his work seemed like smoking; you got a nice hit off it for a bit because of the level of vitriol involved, but you could tell it was a cancer that was tearing your soul to pieces. In a larger sense, focusing on the minutia of politics seems the same way and I began to avoid doing that as well. Sometimes I think that was a good idea and sometimes I worry that I’m not doing more to make my city a better place to live. But the price of trying to do that in the face of the kind of tactics that people like Gary Welsh employed is too high.

In balance, the damage that Welsh did as a political blogger far outweighed the good. The hit jobs he did on Bart Peterson did indeed help Greg Ballard into 8 years in office, and that was a catastrophe it will take the city decades to fix. That alone is a massive weight on the cosmic scale, and add in the small and large ways he set off bombs in individual people’s lives… I do hope there’s not a hell, because Gary would be in it, probably in charge of something horrible.

I was very surprised that Welsh would commit suicide. I sort of figured he was an unstoppable juggernaut constructed from a swirling storm of conspiracy theories and wild speculation; a perpetual motion machine fueled endlessly by malevolent cookies fed him by nihilist low-level civil employees.

And even reading the details of his death – something does seem pretty off there. If you are going to kill yourself, would you do it in a stairwell? Would you shoot yourself in the chest? Well, you or I wouldn’t; we’d do our best to have the least horror and impact on the people around us. But I would not put it past Welsh to stage-craft his suicide for maximum conspiracy theory gossip. The coroner has ruled his death a suicide. Who am I to argue, if no one else is doing so?

Source: Indiana Business Journal – “Death of blogger Welsh officially ruled suicide

The death of prominent Indianapolis political blogger Gary Welsh three weeks ago has officially been ruled a suicide, the Marion County Coroner’s Office said.

Welsh, who wrote the popular conservative blog Advance Indiana, died May 1 of a gunshot wound. He was 53. Indianapolis police said they investigated his death as a “tragic suicide.”

The coroner’s office said it issued a death certificate Thursday that listed suicide as the official cause of Welsh’s death. The official manner of death was listed as a single gunshot wound to the chest. The coroner’s office said the final rulings confirmed preliminary findings.

Welsh’s body was found in a stairwell at the Lockerbie Glove Factory Lofts, 430 N. Park Ave. Witnesses who called 911 to report the death said a gun was found next to the body.

Welsh was a practicing attorney who launched Advance Indiana more than a decade ago. He was known for hard-hitting blog posts that were critical of both Democrats and Republicans.

Paul Ogden, in his blog Ogden on Politics, said a gathering is planned “to remember and celebrate the life” of Welsh. The event is scheduled for 6:30-8 p.m. June 2 at the Northside Knights of Columbus, 2100 E. 71st St.

More on the event can be found here.

I wonder how many folks will attend that celebration? And what will they be celebrating?

Continue ReadingDeath of blogger Gary Welsh officially ruled suicide

I’m legally changing my first and middle names

I’m changing my first and middle names.

I am getting rid of Stephanie Ann. My first name is going to be Hawthorn. (no e- like the tree, not the author.) My middle name is chosen, but I’m keeping to myself for now.

This is something I’ve been actively planning for over two years, but I’ve been thinking about it for more than 20, because I’ve always disliked my name and did not feel like it fit me. I have always been more gender-neutral than my name is, and I am in a place where I can’t tolerate a name I don’t connect with anymore.

My wife Stephanie has known about this for several years and is supportive of me changing names. We have talked through all of my ideas together. I’ve let my immediate family know about this. Most of them are onboard with it. Some of them are going to have to get onboard.

I’ll be starting the legal name change process soon, and it will take a month or so before that is all in place, and I’ll start changing things like credit cards and bank accounts and then my online presence.

I realize this is a big change for someone who has had the same name for 47 years, and that remembering it and calling me that name and thinking about me differently is a pretty big challenge.

That weird feeling you may have about my new name feeling strange to you – that’s the feeling I’ve always had about my old name – it doesn’t feel right. It’s a period of adjustment, but I have confidence you all are smart and capable people and can rise to the occasion.

I know people will have ideas, opinions or commentary about this. Please share your thoughts with me directly in a phone call or face-to-face conversation, rather than gossiping or commenting on social media.

The decision tree of names I’ve thought through and discarded is 786 lines long. I’ve gone through literally hundreds of names in the past few years trying them on and seeing how they fit. Naming yourself is hard. But I’ve found a name I actually love – it’s unique, gender neutral, has an outdoors/natural quality to it. Hawthorn is unusual as a first name, so there aren’t hundreds of little kids running around with the same name, nor do I have cousins or family members with that name, which are also bonuses.

Continue ReadingI’m legally changing my first and middle names

2015 List of “Best of” Lists

Source: The Year in Fungi – The New Yorker

Five mycological highlights from 2015, including banana killers, rainmakers, and the zombie cure.

Source: Top 25 News Photos of 2015 – The Atlantic

The past year has been a series of tumultuous news stories, from the massive migration crisis and the war and terror those migrants are fleeing, to historic images of faraway Pluto, a U.S. Supreme Court ruling supporting same-sex marriage, and widespread protests about continued inequality.

Source: The Year in Drone Video: Real Estate, Architecture, and Cities – In the Air – Curbed

Source: Ten LGBTQ News Stories the Mainstream Media Ignored in 2015

Truthout recaps some of the LGBTQ stories the mainstream media missed, ignored or just plain got wrong in 2015.

Source: The Most Intriguing LGBT Characters of 2015 | GLAAD

A handful of characters caught the eye of viewers and critics alike this year by telling unique and exciting stories, here are some of the (mostly) new LGBT characters in 2015 that stood out from the crowd.

Source: The Lives They Lived – The New York Times

Remembering some of the artists, innovators and thinkers we lost in the past year.

Source: The 10 Best Feminist Quotes of 2015

Source: The best book cover designs for 2015

Check out more great covers at the NY Times, Buzzfeed, and The Casual Optimist. Compare with last year’s picks.

Source: The Year That Was and Wasn’t – The Morning News

We asked writers and thinkers to tell us: What were the most important events of 2015—and what were the least?

Source: Highlights from 2015 | Gender Spectrum

Source: The best (or worst) news media corrections of 2015

A compilation of the best, or worse, or most convoluted, or contrived, or outrageous, or downright silly media corrections.

Source: Best Pure CSS Pens of 2015

Best Pure CSS Pens of 2015

Source: The 10 Best TV Shows of 2015 | Village Voice

Source: Top 15 classes of 2015 | Northern Illinois University

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‘This Goes All the Way to the Queen’: The Puzzle Book that Drove England to Madness | Hazlitt

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An amulet, a treasure hunt, and a legion of readers mobilized by the false patterns our brains create to make sense of the world around us. 

[…]

When you look at a rock formation or a car grille or the moon and see a face, that’s a form of apophenia—pareidolia, the construction of coherent visual or auditory stimuli from noise. The Rorschach test: apophenia. Horoscope adherents who see correlations between their star charts and their lives or personalities are engaging in apophenia too. When several unrelated things go wrong in a single morning, it’s apophenia that tells you that you must be dogged by a curse. Most attempts to anticipate what will make newborns stop crying are tinged by apophenia. And if you know anyone who’s convinced herself she has food sensitivities she doesn’t have, based on a supposed pattern in how she feels after eating, feel free to tell her she suffers from apophenia (though you shouldn’t expect it to go over too well).

Source: ‘This Goes All the Way to the Queen’: The Puzzle Book that Drove England to Madness | Hazlitt

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“Arabian Street Artists” Bomb Homeland: Why We Hacked an Award-Winning Series | Heba Amin

The series has garnered the reputation of being the most bigoted show on television for its inaccurate, undifferentiated and highly biased depiction of Arabs, Pakistanis, and Afghans, as well as its gross misrepresentations of the cities of Beirut, Islamabad- and the so-called Muslim world in general. For four seasons, and entering its fifth, “Homeland” has maintained the dichotomy of the photogenic, mainly white, mostly American protector versus the evil and backwards Muslim threat. The Washington Post reacts to the racist horror of their season four promotional poster by describing it as “white Red Riding Hood lost in a forest of faceless Muslim wolves”. In this forest, Red Riding Hood is permitted to display many shades of grey – bribery, drone strikes, torture, and covert assassination- to achieve her targets. She points her weapon of choice at the monochrome bad guys, who do all the things that the good guys do, but with nefarious intent.

[…]

At the beginning of June 2015, we received a phone call from a friend who has been active in the Graffiti and Street art scene in Germany for the past 30 years and has researched graffiti in the Middle East extensively. He had been contacted by “Homeland’s” set production company who were looking for “Arabian street artists” to lend graffiti authenticity to a film set of a Syrian refugee camp on the Lebanese/Syrian border for their new season. Given the series’ reputation we were not easily convinced, until we considered what a moment of intervention could relay about our own and many others’ political discontent with the series. It was our moment to make our point by subverting the message using the show itself.

Source: “Arabian Street Artists” Bomb Homeland: Why We Hacked an Award-Winning Series | Heba Amin

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2015-10-13 Recently Read

Down the Rabbit Hole
The rise, and rise, of literary annotation

Press Rewind
by Brendan Fitzgerald
What one journalist learned by vicariously sitting in on David Carr’s master class—with only his teacher’s reputation, extant syllabus, and students’ recollections to guide the way.

Press Play
David Carr’s journalism syllabus – “Making and distributing content in the present future we are living through.”

Margaret Atwood: we are double-plus unfree

How the Tiny Graywolf Press Became a Big Player in Book Publishing

The Trick to Acting Heroically

Why We Say ‘Car Accident,’ and Why We Need to Stop

More Titillated Than Thou: How the Amish conquered the evangelical romance market

Why you should never make your bed

YouTube ‘Dancing Baby’ Copyright Ruling Sets Fair Use Guideline

The Duke, The Landscape Architect And The World’s Most Ambitious Attempt To Bring The Cosmos To Earth

The Best Google Web Font Combinations

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Dream Journal Illustrated: Construction Cat and Warehouse Mice

I’m starting a new service where I illustrate people’s dreams from last night.

From my friend:

Crazy dream about construction, beer and a cat. Woke up sneezing and now I have a bloody nose. In the dream these children were playing with mice they found. A hole in the wall went to a warehouse next door.

Construction Warehouse Dream

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Dream Journal Illustrated: British Library’s Gutenberg Press

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I’m starting a new service where I illustrate people’s dreams from last night.

From my friend:

The British Library let me run off a bunch of flyers on their Gutenberg printing press.
I don’t think they have a Gutenberg press.
And whatever I playing with wasn’t a Gutenberg.
but.
Yes, I dream in moveable type.

Cat at the British Library

Continue ReadingDream Journal Illustrated: British Library’s Gutenberg Press

Dream Journal Illustrated: Astronaut at Japanese Mall, with Bear

I’m starting a new service where I illustrate people’s dreams from last night.

From my friend:

Last night’s dream: I was an astronaut and was in Japan (which looked like a futuristic Glendale Mall). I bought a training manual and a sandwich, but hadn’t learned yen-to-dollars yet, so I paid $60 USD for the two. I still had my big poof of hair and had concerns about fitting it under my helmet. There was also something about a bear, and, towards the end, a conversation with a friend in New Orleans about his newborn. I can’t even begin to analyze that mess.

Japanese Mall, Astronaut, Bear

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This is why I no longer read anything from DC Comics

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This is a scene from the brand-new video game Batman Arkham Knight, in which Batgirl (Barbara Gordon), after she has been injured and is in a wheelchair, is held captive under the control of the Joker, and is made to kill herself in front of Batman. The scene is “Fake” in that she’s “not really dead” but the scenario is played out to torment Batman in the game so he will become enraged.

And Batman’s reaction – “Scarecrow was punishing me.”

Because this is all about Batman, of course. Never mind that they just used an iconic character from my childhood as grief bait for Batman to get his revenge.

If you are not aware of what “the Killing Joke” is – it’s a controversial, sadistic storyline written for DC Comics by Alan Moore in 1988 where the Joker tortures and rapes Barbara Gordon (Batgirl), then leaves her paralyzed in order to give Batman and Commissioner Gordon anguish. This story entered her “canon,” and Barbara became the wheelchair-bound computer geek Oracle for years and years after, and other women took over the character of Batgirl. Only recently have they “retconned” the storyline to make Barbara Gordon into Batgirl again – except that they left “The Killing Joke” in her storyline and just fixed her paralysis.

Batgirl in Arkham Knight

Women have been angry (with good reason) with the KJ storyline ever since because it takes one of the strongest female superheroes and turns her into a damsel in distress for Batman to rescue. And it’s still part of her storyline today, complete with all the torture scenes intact (although they tone down the rape scene pretty drastically so it’s not as clear anymore that it happened.)

This and the Amazons being killed off in Wonder Woman are two of the worst ideas that DC Comics has ever had, and they continue to double down on those stories instead of recognizing how offensive they are.

So as much as I still love Wonder Woman and Batgirl, to me the idea of them is removed from anything happening at DC Comics today, and I read Marvel Comics instead.

Continue ReadingThis is why I no longer read anything from DC Comics