in the tradition of the "shorter" meme (popularized by blogs like sadly, no and busy busy busy):

shorter rishawn biddle: the city of indianapolis sucks much harder than it used to before i moved here.

shorter advance indiana: while i can't prove that julia carson is an evil mastermind who controls everything in the city, circumstantial evidence shows it to be true.

shorter dennis ryerson: we at the star hope to increase readership by eliminating the middleman: we'll just have our readers write the paper, too.¶

It would be giving biddle too much credit to point out that maybe there's a correlation between his moving here and the city starting to suck. ¶

Too funny, Steph. ¶

The people who are the most willing to badmouth Indy seem to be those with the least stake in how it turns out. Biddle will move on to some other McGannett outpost or some other job in some other city before long, and his buddy Abdul doesn't even really live here.

Of course, any increases in the crime rate are a concern. But the central city didn't fall apart after 1998 (quite the contrary) and it's not going to fall apart now, unless the blathering of guys like him makes it a self-fulfilling prophecy. Of course, his selective use of statistics and inconsistent time periods makes me think that the bag is mixed. The ridiculous comparisons to Detroit are so absurd as to deprive the argument of any credibility. ¶