Any big blog that’s been around awhile — like Urban Semiotic — has its share of rejected sycophants who just won’t go away after violating our publication policy or for being a personal nuisance.
Continue reading → Sycophants in Rejection: Making Terroristic Threats
Michel Foucault is one of those certain talents where a quirky mix of genius, talent and savantism all congeal in the mind of one person to shed the powerful glow of meaning and context on the rest of us One of Foucault’s passions in life was his love of words and his research into the power of labels.
Ugly is everywhere. Some of it is visual. Most of it is internal. None of it is ever hidden.
A lot of it used to be punished via Ugly Laws. Some of the best Ugly Advice I was ever given came to me as a 
youngster in the form of punches to my face from a crew-cut boy two years older than me — but in my same fifth grade class. His name was Alex.
He was a bully. He wore a perpetual scowl.
He outweighed most of us in class by 75 pounds.
Everyone hated him.
Everyone admired his giant fists and punching power.
He was a brute in a boy’s body.
He was a boulder that gathered moss.
While the rest of us wore mop-top bowl haircuts, Alex waxed the ends of his crew cut and shaved the base of his neck every morning.
Alex imparted his reality to me in a flurry of blows to my face after I had taken the advice of my mother’s boyfriend to “stand up to a bully and fight him on your own turf!”
Are you aware in the early-to-mid 1900’s it was illegal to be “found ugly” on the streets of some mainstream American cities like Chicago, Illinois (Chicago Municipal Code, sec. 36034) and Omaha, Nebraska (Unsightly Beggar Ordinance Nebraska Municipal Code of 1941, sec. 25) and Columbus, Ohio (General Offense Code, sec. 2387.04)? Your punishment for being caught in public ranged from incarceration to fines of up to $50.00 USD for each ugly offense.
If you are a Real Man you have — at least once in your life — wanted to, wondered on, or actually pushed a woman into a swimming pool. Any man who denies this urge exists is lying. Civilized men the world over fight, but always give in to, this undeniable desire to get their women wet — and no one can ever begin to explain the why of this unfortunate phenomenon — and I admit the woman below is giving me fits because she’s already halfway in the pool and just a nudge from my foot…
Ripping a page from the Google playbook, Microsoft have stepped up to compete with Google Apps for Your Domain by offering you a free Office Live Basics website and communications portal.
Yesterday’s fascinating conversation concerning — Is Intelligence Inherited or Earned — inspires today’s post.
Does society need – and please forgive the easy opposite term for “intellectual” and read yesterday’s article to fully understand the context — “stupid” people? If yes, why? If not, why not?
If you believe stupid people are a necessity, please provide analysis of their roles in the following three landscapes of society — Economics, Aesthetics and Education — in addition to the rest of your argument.
There is nothing quite like facing a year-by-year, moment-to-moment mirror of who you used to be and what you used to stand for and how you chose to release your aesthetic on the world.
The Interet Archive’s Wayback Machine is a living testimony to the mist of your past and with its bony, pointed finger you are shown What Used To Be and how Ye Shall Discovereth The Truth of Who Ye Are and the horrors of where you’ve been.
Okay, maybe I’m being melodramatic, but if you’ve had a website domain for any amount of time you can travel back in living history via the Wayback Machine and see what you did and maybe even wonder what were you thinking.
Some of the archived domain pages on the Wayback Machine don’t load and sometimes text characters and images are unavailable. The archive still creates an amazing snapshot in time.
November 27, 1996
Let’s start our journey back with my Boles.com website as our exemplar while we “stroll through the years” of my design for that site. Since Boles.com is my main site I have always wanted it to be clean and really fast. I never cared about animation or Flash or any other goo-gahs to make a site jump and sparkle.
“Internet Insider” became “GO INSIDE Magazine” and “Boles: The Mag” was also folded into GO INSIDE Mag. I liked the text link for my “Resume” because it took you to a text page while everyone else at that time was posting Resumes-As-Images. You clicked on the metered stamp to send me email.
Continue reading → A Mirror of Moments: The Wayback Machine Review
I was just watching a CBS Morning News story about a couple that gave birth to a Down Syndrome child. The reporter was thrilled to tell us the couple’s next baby was “completely normal.” That kind of crass inconsideration in the media is the sort of cruel framing of a person by label that then seeps into all of society and permeates a popular cultural mindset against those who are thought to be outside the range of “Normal.”
Has “Average” become the new “Normal” — where the middling height, midline intelligence and the ordinary outlook are christened as “acceptable and necessary” in order to fit in to “Normal” society?
Labeling people in order keep them out of some vague and undefined idea of Normal is a dangerous and hurtful game that ostracizes those among us who most need our considered care and who deserve our unconditional love and acceptance.
Continue reading → Defining Down Normal and the Separation of Needs
I know this article may tick off 90% of the blogosphere but sometimes the truth stings and a barb or two can bump things back into an entertaining reality.
I skip reading blogs on Thursdays for two reasons: Half Naked Thursday and Thursday Thirteen.
You must be logged in to post a comment.