About religious cults and government. (Off-topic).

I don’t talk about myself here. After all, this blog is about art, not me. I decided to make an exception today.

I have two older brothers, one of whom I remain close to. In the seventies, they both belonged to a cult called “The Brotherhood of the Spirit” or “Rapunzel”, a commune located in Massachusetts. I unhappily watched them, a teenager at the time, as they handed over our recently-deceased grandmother’s hard-earned inheritance money to the “community” where their flamboyant leader, Michael Metelica, would allow them to eat rice and beans and live in shacks without plumbing  just so he (Michael) could buy million dollar recording equipment, Harleys, eat like a king and fly all over the world giving interviews–all with the toiling members’ money. My father, who handled their inheritance, knew the money was going to be “flushed down the toilet” as he said, and expressed sadness that there was nothing he could do to stop it. Indeed.

I hate cults. I hated them even then, when I was a kid. Although I didn’t know what a cult was at the time, I did know that my brothers seemed to be in some kind of loopy, irrational fog. And it was deeply upsetting to me.

Recently, my oldest brother, Mitchell, confided that when he left the cult, he had to go through extensive deprogramming and exit counseling to acclimate himself again to normal life, to clear the haze. I had mentioned to him that I became interested in cults because of him and David, and had been reading about Children of God and Scientology. “Children of God?” he quipped. “Never heard of ‘em. Give me their contact info–give me a cult and I’ll join it.” (Mitchell’s humor is sometimes with a bit of self-deprecation, but I did laugh.) I had never known he went through deprogramming; I only knew that, after my younger brother left, he reluctantly and slowly followed suit. He recounted a story I don’t consciously remember, but it sounds vaguely familiar. Michael had a band called “Rapunzel”, and he put endless amounts of money into both equipment and promotion for the band. Thousands, maybe millions, were spent on Michael’s whims and desires, while those like my brothers lived like paupers. We both–Mitchell and I– went to watch Michael’s band play in the Village in New York City. “Mitchell,” I announced bluntly, “they totally suck.” At the time, he said, he was horrified by my opinion. But during his reprogramming, he kept coming back to my comment and it gave him great comfort, he said. “My clear-eyed little sister saw what I denied to myself,” he told me recently. “Yeah, it was a little thing, but it encapsulated so many other things for me.” He told me that in the ensuing years, my contemptuous (and honest) dismissal of Michael gave him great pleasure. “It was like you were begging me, ‘come ‘on, we both have the same taste in music, good taste, we know our music, and how can you abandon all of that for what is so obviously terrible?’” He said it was almost as if I was pleading with him to see the band for what it was, a local little hack band led by some twit with a tophat and Civil War style waistcoat.

Because of my brothers’ experience in Brotherhood of the Spirit, I long ago developed an interest in cults and mind control. After all, my brothers are exceptionally bright. Mitchell’s IQ must be near, if not in, genius territory. So how do people get caught up in them? “Nobody wakes up and decides they’re going to join a cult,” I once read somewhere. “They join a religion, a cause, a community, a church. But never a cult.” So I have long made it my business to read all I can about cults.

To that end, I recently watched a YouTube video where an elite member of the academia lambasted the United States and lauded Europe–the latter had put governmental panels into place to monitor religious groups to ensure they were “protecting the Constitution”. Germany, in particular, had put pretty severe controls and monitoring in place to oversee Scientology. I am certainly no fan of Scientology’s, but neither do I want some governmental panel overseeing religious activities in the United States. I posted something to that effect in the YouTube thread, and the man who posted the video went ballistic on me, ranting about “death panels” (huh?) and that, if IBM pulled the same human rights abuses as Scientology, they’d be sent to prison. To follow is my response to this poster:

Hi Mark,

The example of IBM is an interesting one because it highlights the complexity of this debate. While it is a similar principal, it is definitely not apples to apples.  As far as I can remember, armies have never marched across Europe fighting over the labor practices of an electronics firm. But for the sake of religion, they have. If IBM was to pull a stunt like this, the ensuing media coverage would set the free market in motion and it would consequently be shut down as purchases of their products would virtually cease.  This is an example of how we can look at the same thing, and see many points of view.

You bring up death panels, a topic which highlights a recent ideological debate we are having in this country.  As a debate it’s a very appropriate one; however, it’s not just about death panels but who we are and what things we value. When one looks at the different news media outlets, you’d swear it was two issues being discussed here…it’s almost as if we’re two different countries.  If you salivate at the thought of catching another segment of Oddball, and simply must have another slice of Rachel Maddow, then you see only one side of the health care issue. If your heart skips a bit whenever Sean Hannity introduces his “great great great great great American Panel,” then you only see one side of the health care issue. (If you watch Glen Beck, after about thirty minutes you want to put a bullet in your brain because there’s absolutely no reason to want to continue living.) What we have is a debate that is sizing up the direction of the country with health care as merely a sideshow.

The health care debate is applicable because we are talking about religious freedom, as well as the role of government in it. There’s an advocacy for adopting the European style control of religious freedom. It’s always a bit amusing to watch some folks’ fascination with anything European. From the birth of this country until today, for some reason that continent is held up as a standard we should emulate. This is a continent that has repeatedly, and for thousands of years, tried to destroy itself over sectarian, religious and power grabs. It is only natural that post WWII, when total destruction really was at arm’s reach, that Europe decided to try to neuter individual freedoms in the name of protecting itself from self-destruction. They have embarked upon a vigilant and conscious effort to rid themselves of nationalism and religious beliefs and impose economic boundaries. Why anyone would want to model a society after a continent that brings Barry Macquire’s Eve of Destruction to mind is beyond me. Whenever a society decides to neuter out all excesses that it deems destructive, it will invariably, too, crush those impulses that are good. You’re in essence handing unlimited power to bureaucrats without individual power–the species is not wired with that kind of wisdom.

An example of this from the field of religion: Germany is being lauded for cracking down on Scientology. The founder of Protestantism, Martin Luther, is from Germany;  he rebelled against the Catholic church by posting the tenets of his beliefs on the doors of Germans in the sixteenth century. Now, there’s nothing inherently evil about Protestantism, but in its time, it was considered heresy and a hanging offense. Further, I am not sure the Unitarian Church would have gotten off the ground in this country if we had practiced government overseeing of religious beliefs. The Unitarian church is certainly a hodgepodge of beliefs that run counter to traditional Christianity. We see this debate in our country today. Those of the liberal persuasion are hell-bent on unleashing the social engineering dogs upon the land. All with good and sincere motives, at least on paper. They wish to create the perfect society where nobody does any harm to anybody. I live in Vermont, ground zero for this mindset.  Here, people lay on the ground at night, staring at the stars, and dream of turning Vermont–then the US–into Canada and Europe.  It’s against the law here to throw a cigarette out the window; it’s also against the law drive your own car in your driveway without your driver’s license on you. This is just one example of government intervention running slightly amok.  But many in the Vermont government would love to outlaw fatty foods altogether and cigarette smoking in one’s own home, all in the name of protecting us from ourselves.

Similarly, destroying Scientology by any intervention must certainly sound like a great idea to a lot of people, just like equal pay for equal work sounds wonderful until you try to write a law for it. You will open up a Pandora’s Box with government invention by telling people what they can believe in and what they cannot believe in.

Another one of my favorite examples of this Pandora’s Box, or what is otherwise known as  the “Be Careful What You Wish For” principle, can be illustrated by abortion. My comments here are not to come down on either side of this issue (I am pro-choice, but that is irrelevant), but to merely provide an example.  The premise is that at least in the first six months, the fetus is simply a bag of cells and one can do whatever one wants to do with it. That is the law. However,  I simply cannot wait until genetic engineering takes off and we can practice a twenty-first century form of Eugenics. I can’t wait until they figure out how to make the more perfect human by biogenic engineering. What are we going to do when our neighbor across the street–with more money than we have—can afford to engineer an IQ fifty points higher in their children than ours? Or how about a more perfect body—more beautiful or athletically inclined? The law will have to step in and start to define exactly when life begins or you’re going to have total societal chaos.

The human mind won’t stop where you want it to. The beauty of life is encapsulated by the human spirit being unleashed, allowed to love and create untethered. The best governments devised by man are those that will allow the human spirit to be unchained with warts and all. This is not always pretty, just like democracy itself isn’t always pretty, just as the human spirit is rife with imperfections.  Those governments designed by those who theoretically feel that they know what is right and wrong never stop to understand the psychology of the human mind. It is why pure socialism crashed against the Cliffs of Dover. We will not work for other people unless we primarily work for ourselves,  but boy does socialism look great on paper. (Ironically, the communes so prevalent in the seventies were based on the socialist philosophy and they all crashed and burned. It boggles the mind that there are still so many people who long for socialism but refuse to learn from history–history that includes those so-called idylls called communes, the little communities where the leaders lived like kings and the people squat into the earth to indelicately relieve themselves). So many theories work really well until you’re forced to inject people into their middles–and that’s when they start to fall apart, because they are not built around the individual. if individuals are not strengthened by the acts of government,  society will certainly accomplish less than it might have.

Intellectual think tanks love to look at life from the point of the collective good, the same think tanks that treated Mussolini in the twenties as they treat Obama today. I maintain that the strongest, healthiest, richest societies are built from the individual up and not from the government down.  That said, this is the crux of my point: the elimination of cults could not be anything but a good thing. They enslave minds. But we are ignoring the right of the human being to make a mistake. Take it up with God or Darwin, this is how we are wired.  A fundamental human right is that we are to live our lives, revel in our successes and learn from our mistakes. And no, it’s not always pretty. But there is a reason why America attained the status in the world it enjoys even now. It is the best country in the history of the world because it unleashed the spirit of creation–a mindset that runs counter to creating panels who make decisions about what you should or should not believe in, something not in keeping with the principles that make a life worth living. In a complex world, still everything eventually breaks down to simplicity. A mistake often made is the belief that, the higher the IQ, the more brilliant the ideas–when many times this is patently untrue. The principles that guide the best governments and the best lives lived are fundamentally simple: love, empathy, respect, etc. This is why, when it comes down to the art of wisdom, it does not reside in those with the highest of IQs, but those with the best fundamental understanding of life itself. That’s why a simple rice farmer in Thailand may indeed be wiser than Stephen Hawking.

How to fight a the abuses of Scientology or Children of God? You’re doing it right now. As are other brave souls in the media. When you add the power of the internet, soon, only those living in a cave with eyes covered and ears jammed with cotton would weigh–even for a nanosecond–the possibility of joining the likes of, say, Scientology. Take a bow, you’re a big part of that.  That’s how you fight cults..by shining light on them…not with the heavy, imperfect hand of government.

I see from your video that you have a V for Vendetta mask prominently displayed, and I know that’s the mask that Anonymous uses in their protests. In that movie they riot against a conservative fascist government–a government telling people what to think. They masked themselves in London and eventually the House of Lords blows up. Forming a government panel to tell to people what they should and should not believe in would be making the very same mistake.

Why I unfollowed you on Twitter.

I am no Twitter expert by any means.  In fact, I freely admit to having neophyte status. “Tweeting” for only a little over a week, and tweeting often, I already have a good strong sense of the kind of things I want (and don’t want) to see floating by on my TweetDeck. Therefore, the following list is extremely personal, and is by no means meant as any kind of advice for anyone else. These are just my own personal perceptions. Some things may resonate with you, others may not. Your mileage may vary.

-Nothing personal. I never saw you engaging another person–even one another person–in a personal way; instead, I saw a steady stream of one-sided tweets, whether they were promotional marketing Tweets or quotations from famous people. Even one “yes, thank you, David!” would have kept me from unfollowing you. If I want to read Eckhart Tolle, I’ll buy his book, thank you. Ditto for Bartlett’s Famous Book of Quotations.

-You tweet on steroids. In other words, silence, then fifteen to twenty tweets in a row, a seven inch string of cloned avatars….bang bang bang….all promoting your product or service. Then, silence again. No personal interaction, no personal discussion,  just a stock market ticker of what you’re selling—twenty in a row.

-Your very first DM message to me was spam, or Billy Mays has nothing on you. I know it’s impossible to thank everyone who follows you personally, or acknowledge someone who refollowed you. But please, don’t send me a message about how you can help me with home loans or building the perfect kitchen after one of us follow the other. I’d rather have nothing. If your first interaction with me is impersonal or sales-y, I can’t click that “unfollow” button fast enough.

-It’s not easy being green, green, green. Hey, I’m a good American citizen. I recycle, and I buy non-incandescent bulbs and I have spent a lot of money to insulate my drafty 200-year old home. However, I do not belong to the Church of “Green” and have no intention of riding a bike to the store, buying local produce at obscene prices or foregoing my refrigerator (with all its nasty, evil freon) in favor of an Ed Norton-style icebox. The Green “Movement” has become a  new religion, and the zealotry is incessant, and, not to put too fine a point on it, is getting kinda creepy. If every Tweet is 140 letters of guilt for not using fabric bags at my supermarket, or how I can make my business more green (and therefore acceptable), I’m outta here.

-You are vigilant at keeping up with Ashton Kutcher’s follower count, or tweet incessantly about the fact that Oprah now has one of her many minions tweeting in her name. I simply don’t care. In fact, if I was a rich woman, I’d give twenty bucks to everyone who unfollowed Mr. Kutcher. For the celebrities who actually engage their fans personally on Twitter, this does not apply. Snarky remarks about the supposed ugliness of Susan Boyle’s eyebrows, courtesy of Tina Fey, would be universally lambasted had it been written by a non-celebrity. I’d much rather tweet with a plumber who’s passionate about his work and shows a modicum of interest in mine.  In fact, I am not impressed by the number of your followers. What impresses me is your personal engagement and interest. (Oh, by the way, I heard that some newcomer Scottish singer is slated to replace that Sarah Palin lookalike on SNL. I’ll keep you posted.)

-Your hashtags take up your whole tweet, and are all equally incomprehensible.

-Twitter Ice. You consistently ignore a compliment, question or response to one of your own questions or pleas for assistance.

-Sean Hannity and Rachel Maddow were separated at birth. Left or right, you have *very* strong, idealogue political opinions that may occasionally morph into angry rants. I am not apolitical, it’s just that I want Twitter to be a healthy mix of resource and information sharing, people helping one another, and healthy, respectful promoting.  Ditto for extremely religious oriented tweets. Not anti-religion, I just think politics and religion in such a generic social setting cannot possibly have a happy outcome. This extreme polarization is no surprise given today’s political climate. It’s gotten so severe that whenever I hear a moderate thinker speak, I actually give them a grateful sigh of thanks. But I wouldn’t tweet it. (BTW, want to know what a moderate thinker is? It’s someone whose opinion you usually cannot safely predict most of the time.)

Certainly there is no definitive “right” or “wrong” with how to use Twitter, even though there may be some universally accepted forms of politesse. To me, Twitter is a wonderful way to get to know supremely talented and interesting people throughout the world, and, for an artist or business owner, an uprecedented way to get one’s name out there with head-spinning rapidity.  As a wealth of streaming, up-to-the-minute information, news and resources, Twitter cannot be touched. But like everything else, there is a wheat/chaff separation process, and the above happens to be mine.

Want to follow me on Twitter? Click this link.

Art Nouveau Zodiac Series

Talking about Art Nouveau, I thought I’d share a relatively new art series based on the Signs of the  Zodiac.

I have long loved the idea of doing an art Zodiac series with an art nouveau and vintage flavor. It’s been in my head now for years to do my own interpretation of the Zodiac, remaining true to the symbolism behind each of the Signs, but with my own take on it. I wanted to bring the personality of each sign into each image yet keep a common flavor throughout. I studied each sign carefully so that the art would remain true to each sign as far as symbolism, color, planet and mood. Of course, some artistic license as far as interpretation came into play

Here, you can see the full Zodiac Art Nouveau Series in larger size. All the images are available for all our custom Color Bakery products.

Color Bakery is our main company, where we print both my art and the work of many other artists on beautiful, custom products–home decor accents, tiles, tile murals, art gifts and art wearables. I know a lot of people may not want the Zodiac Sign keyword on the artwork, so we’ve made it optional. Here are thumbnails of the full series:

Nigerian Scammers: even savvy people can get fooled.

I pride myself on being internet savvy. I pride myself on being business savvy. I am hardly naïve, and my New York City background makes me naturally suspicious. My husband, too, is no fool when it comes to things that just don’t pass “the smell test”.  But if it wasn’t for a little voice in my head, instinct that kicked in at the very last second, we most definitely would have become two very chagrined–and perhaps, poorer— people in a long line of scam victims generated from Nigerian scammers on the internet. At the very least, our bank and identity details would have been compromised and probably used to set up bogus accounts for illegal merchandise delivery.

Since Nigerian scammers are usually known for talking people into sending advance sums of money in the hopes of a significantly larger gain, his desire to buy tile murals didn’t seem to be unsavory. At no time was any money requested. The whole thing, from start to finish, felt perfectly legitimate and the process was exactly like any other international buyer wanting to purchase a tile mural from us.

Last year, about eight months ago, I received an email from a very articulate man from Nigeria. Now, of course, his native country naturally set off alarm bells. I will always, however, read whatever is sent to me carefully from any prospective customer before reaching a definite conclusion as to their legitimacy. It costs nothing to read or communicate with someone, and that is what I did. This gentleman was very different than any scammer I had come across in the past, and for many reasons. Let me tell you what those reasons are—exactly what made him different and, therefore, way more capable of engendering trust– so you, too, can be made aware of just how sophisticated these scammers are becoming, and act accordingly. Forewarned is forearmed.

He wanted to buy four ceramic tile murals. Four very large murals. They were to be installed in an outdoor tunnel, and they were to depict four much-loved Nigerian leaders. He was, he said, a representative of the Nigerian government, and had authority to purchase on their behalf for this “tunnel beautification project.” After having contacted me in Spring 2008 initially, and getting some information from me as to if I had the capability of doing this, he said the approval process was long and drawn out, (bureaucratic delays from governments are pretty typical) and it would probably be some time before I heard from him again. This in itself was unusual for a scammer, because the contacts from scammers are usually quick and urgent, and these people usually don’t let months go by before they contact you a second time. These multiple contacts over a months-long lapse builds subsconscious trust. This time, it most certainly did. That long delay, and all the questions about our service capabilities, disarmed me.

Now, scammers are always vague about what they want to buy. For example, they will tell you they want to buy “six coffee tables” or other very large items, and they will not tell you the kind of artwork they want printed on the items. You’re buying custom art products and you don’t care about the artwork? Red flag. Scammers, too, will be happily willing to pay retail price, even though they are buying in bulk. Red flag. They (scammers) will not bitch about price, or get you to come down, or beg you to “do better.” Red flag.  They will rush the transaction, telling you how urgent a quick delivery is. Red flag. They will not be familiar with you, your company, your services or products. In fact, it will be clear they haven’t even read your website. Red flag. Your contact will offer quick, as opposed to long, drawn out discussions about the transaction. Red flag. None of these typical red flags appeared throughout our discussions.  This man is someone who has studied the American way of doing business, and he was quite good. Lethally so.

He knew exactly what he wanted, the size murals he wanted, the type of tile and size tile he wanted, and the subject matter he wanted on the murals. He sent me four small images of past (and I am assuming, much loved) Nigerian leaders for the murals. After telling him I couldn’t use such small images, that they were not high resolution enough for printing and not even good for enlarging, we both discussed options about what we could do to get high resolution photos or illustrations of these men. He asked me if I could reproduce from Nigerian currency, which he later sent small scans of via email. I said I probably could from the original currency. He expressed concern that the currency numbers on the bills would look bad, and could I retouch them out? Yes, I could, I told him. He also wanted custom text under each man’s name, such as their birth date and death date, and some other information.  Could I do that? Yes, I told him, of course I could. In other words, what he wanted was very specific and exacting. Just like anybody spending a goodly amount of money would be—and the desire to cover such specifics are very unlike most scammers operating online. In fact, he called me on the telephone a couple of times–something else these scammers *never* do. They have always limited their contact to email. This, too, was disarming.

He provided a full name, street address, company name and phone numbers and fax numbers in Lagos. In fact, his email address was generated from a corporation, not merely a web-based email addy. So far, all looked legitimate. In fact, he urged me to call *him* a few times, but I always opted for email.

After working up a bid for the four murals, and explaining the amount of work involved, he complained that our price was too high and asked if I could come down. He did not realize how expensive this would be. This also had the net effect of relaxing any suspicions I might have had, because this is a very typical way of conducting business—not only in the United States, but all over the world, people will always try to get the best price. In this case, the price came to $18,500.00 including shipping.  Now that we are on the subject of shipping, most Nigerian scammers will insist on some involved, twisty shipping process that includes their own”special courier” and what not. This man never insisted that the boxes be shipped a certain way, or by using *his* special courier. This, too, had the effect of relaxing any suspicions I might have had. So far, he was batting a thousand.

Yesterday, we reached the end of the week-long negotiating process, and had hammered out all the details. I had won the bid, he told me. I was getting the project because I could do what no other tile company was able to do as far as intensive retouching. (Here, too, he was correct. It is safe to say that no tile mural company has the customization capability that we have. He was not wrong.) He also expressed extreme admiration for our tile mural site, and this, too, was not unusual–we receive glowing compliments quite frequently about the quality of our work and presentation online. We realize that we are an anomaly as far as our capabilities, and we know that our competition cannot come close to doing what we can as far as from-scratch, intensely customized design. We *are* special, so we didn’t feel that he was “blowing smoke up our skirts” a little southern expression my Texan husband likes to use. We know that we are different, and we know that our capabilities are singular.

He was to send me the currency I was to use for reproduction, and he also wanted a sample tile. This, too, was very smart. Anybody sending eighteen thousand dollars would insist on seeing at least one sample tile, and the fact that he did, as well, continued to relax or erase any suspicions I might have had. He also wanted to know “what percentage” of the fee I wanted up front instead of blithely agreeing to send the whole thing. This too, was very smart, putting another roadblock up, and not an unreasonable one. I explained that for an order this size, and because he was a first-time buyer, we had to have the whole amount up front. He agreed to that, albeit grudgingly.

And then three things happened. First, I saw a North Carolina number on my caller ID when he phoned. I questioned him about it and he seemed honestly befuddled, wondering if it had anything to do with the fact that he was on a cell phone. It concerned me enough to mention it to my husband, and we both were ultimately too excited about the possibility of the huge order to give it much credence. Cell phones can show wonky numbers and be tied into any network, who knows why that happened? We blew it off. Kinda. It was a red flag, though, and I started to be on my guard. But at this point, we had every intention of going through with the transaction.

Then, in order to ease his mind about sending eighteen thousand big ones to a strange company in a strange country, I offered to contact the Nigerian Embassy in Washington, D.C. in order to proffer our business credentials and prove our legitimacy. When I mentioned this offer of good faith on the phone, he couldn’t change the subject more quickly. *That* was my second red flag.

The end game: I was just about to send him my bank routing and account numbers—a second away from clicking “send”—when I stopped. A little voice in my head said, “no. Is this safe? You better find out.” I removed my finger from the “send” button and instead Googled this phrase: “is it safe to send bank routing and account numbers?” and boy, did I get an eyeful. No, it wasn’t safe, and people on support groups and discussion boards enumerated all the reasons why it was not. Yes, they could remove money if they know how to work the system, but even more often, they use that information and identity to set up bogus accounts and get bogus credit so that they may ship/receive hot merchandise all over the world. Now, I have had people from other countries wire us payment before, with no problems whatsoever. I had assumed it was safe. I had no idea it was not.

Then, I phoned my bank. I told them my concerns and the manager was pretty adamant about *not* sending him that information but instead, demanding a bank check sent by mail. Yes, sending this information was dangerous, she said, and the bank could not guarantee protection. That’s all I had to hear. I wiped my forehead, relieved I followed my instincts. “I have to tip my hat to you, honey”, my husband said. “I thought being the recipient of a money wire was perfectly safe, too.”

I asked for a certified bank check and have not heard from him yet. Since I have heard from him every day for a week now, it’s pretty clear I won’t be hearing from him again. Nothing yet today, and he usually emails first thing in the morning. I think we dodged a bullet. And, after this post, I hope you have more ammo with which to protect yourself.

Addendum, April 2009: Well, it just goes to show you. Sometimes you can be surprised, pleasantly, by the world. You know what? Not all Nigerians are scammers. Call it a a miracle, call it a fairy tale, but a about a month ago, the deal was closed and they proved themselves to be perfectly and completely legitimate. To that end, we received a rather large cash payment drawn on an American bank for twelve, yes, twelve tile murals. The biggest order we’ve ever had in our six years in business. We are in production right now, and are thrilled to be working with some of the nicest and most professional people we’ve ever had the pleasure of working with. These murals are for a city beautification project in Lagos, Nigeria. They depict beloved (mostly, albeit assassinated) Nigerian leaders banked by a beautiful African pattern mural on each side of the main mural. I shudder when I think about how close we came to losing the project;  I made them jump through hoop after hoop to prove their legitimacy, all the while believing nothing they said. They took it with calm good humor, because, after all, they are used to it. “It’s a shame,” my client says, “that because of our country’s bad reputation and some bad apples that people like us have a hard time conducting international business.” Nigeria, here’s to you I am sorry I doubted you. -MS

Free software I can’t live without.

There are wonderful free software programs that are indispensable to any artist, or, for that matter, anyone who owns a computer. From font management to batch management to free plugins and anti-spyware programs, I’ve become a bit of a software phreak and have come to depend on a few in a big way.

Here are some of my all-time favorite freebies. I hope that they may be helpful to you in your art and design pursuits, as well as keeping your compy safe

THE FONT THING
This little freebie installs quickly and is not a bloated program. It helps you manage your fonts by installing, uninstalling and viewing them. Easy to understand interface.

PICASA
If you don’t have Picasa yet, you are missing out on one terrific piece of free software. Picasa will scan your whole system (external drives, too) and make it so you can manage, view, edit, find every single image file on your computer. You can even organize your images any way you like. But Picasa does much more than that. It’s an image editor, you can make screensaver slideshows and even mosaics from your images. I adore Picasa. I think you will, too.

VISUALIZER PHOTO RESIZE
Have to resize fifty images all at once? This little program is a keeper. Batch resize JPG images in a folder, and optional subfolders. It supports different aspect ratios, automatic color correction and grayscale conversion, as well as customizable image dimensions and JPG compression level. In addition, you can also embed a small text in the image, add a visible watermark to each, and optionally create a ZIP file containing the resized images.

PIXILLION
There are many times that I have a bunch of files which I want to convert to another format…for example, .jpg to .pdf…in one fell swoop. Pixillion supports .jpg, .bmp, .png. .gif, and .pdf. Nifty!!

KMP PLAYER
I was always having trouble with Windows Media Player and other media players playing every single file format without problems. I’d get “codec” errors (what the heck is a codec and why should I need twenty different ones?) or other kinds of errors and suffice to say, no one player plays every single audio or visual file format without problems. Except KMP. It’s free, has a slick interface and works with every single file format I can throw at it. And I throw a lot of stuff at it. A must have.

ADAWARE ANTI SPYWARE
If your computer is acting wonky—loading and booting slowly, lots of popup windows, unusual error messages, etc, you may have a worm or just some adware or spyware. Or worse, maybe you have a virus, rootkit or trojan. Anti virus software is not always enough to protect your computer from spyware, and spyware can be just as damaging as a virus. Malware Bytes is free, even though they have a professional version. The free version works just great. It will scan your drives and registry and clean up all the nasties, especially the ones every other program misses.

AVG ANTI VIRUS
Personally, I swear by Kaspersky. They are, hands down, the best anti-virus software on the market. However, they do not have a free version–only a trial. If you can’t afford to buy anti-virus software, AVG by Grisoft is the next best thing. They have both a paid version and a free version, and both work extremely well. PC World said AVG performed admirably well (top five) in the toughest virus tests they tossed at it, catching and cleaning even the newer viruses. Highly recommended.

IRFANVIEW
I cannot say enough about Irfanview. What is amazing about Irfanview is that it’s free, and it is far superior to many other paid image viewers, such as ACDSee. However, not too many people know about this wonderful little software, but more and more are hearing about it every day because it’s just the best at what it does. Yes, it is an image viewer. But it’s also an image editor, resizer, EXIF data manager, batch processor and more. I use it for many batch processing commands such as mass renaming or resizing or desaturating, and I even use it to process and download images from my digital camera.

FILEZILLA
I tend to use WS_ftp when I am in a hurry and Cute FTP when I am changing file and directory permissions (CHMODding), but Filezilla is no slouch no matter what your needs and preferences are in an FTP client. Free, intuitive, easy to install, if you want the best free FTP software around, it’s Filezilla.

CC CLEANER
Oh do I love CC Cleaner. Nothing is worse for your computer than a ton of uncleaned registry entries, cookies and temp files. This small, easy to install and run freeware program will clean it all out, and within minutes.

Protecting your art online.

If you are posting images–even if they are not high resolution images—online, do you know that they can be easily reproduced and stolen? Did you know that even a 500 x 500 pixel, low resolution jpg (72 dpi) can be scanned, printed and sold?

They can. Very, very easily. It has happened to me. More than once.

Granted, the reproduction will not be as fine or high quality than if it was printed from the original, but a thief can get very usable print indeed. And then he/she can resell it–as posters, postcards, greeting cards, you name it.

Do I have your attention? Good.

When you post your work online, remember this: anybody can steal it. And most likely, someday, somebody will. You can put in a no-right click script, jumble your code, etc., but a simple little screenshot can grab it. It can end up as a greeting card or on millions of desktops as wallpaper or even as a poster print somewhere, and you will have not seen a dime from it.

The very worst thing you can do is to post high resolution artwork online. Even if you have it residing on your server, Google can find it if you don’t know how to configure your robots.txt file on your website. So…NEVER upload high resolution, printing-ready images unless they are in a locked directory and not displayed online.

So how do you protect yourself?

There is only one way: by watermarking. Digital watermarking, to be effective, needs to be visible. A watermark is your name, website url, copyright, etc, printed across the image in diminished opacity. Few thieves will want to bother with the extensive retouching required to remove it.

There are a few ways to watermark your images. There is watermarking software available (Google “watermarking software”) or do it yourself in Paintshop Pro, Photoshop, Photo Impact, Elements, etc. I believe even Picasa has a watermarking feature.

To do it yourself, open the image you want to watermark. Create a new type layer. Type your name, “sample”, or whatever you want on it. Make the text white if the image is dark, and black if the image is light. Diminish the layer’s opacity to about 20-30 percent, you decide which looks best.

For beveled watermarks that are transparent, make the type layer in “multiply” mode. Go to your layers palette with the layer selected, and click on “bevel emboss.”