We love the re-gifting ability of the Internet. It was our delight and surprise to learn today Wired.com liked our Urban Semiotic article — What to Do With a Naked Chocolate Jesus — enough to link it from their article on Bioartists… way back on December 13, 2007 as you can see in the screenshot below. The Urban Semiotic.com link from April 2, 2007, is the last words in the last sentence:
We always find it fascinating how memes are passed from one mind to another, and when we started this Urban Semiotic blog in 2004, the binding of “Urban” and “Semiotic” into a single idea was not prevalent or popular. Today, a curious site called Osun.org provides this odd search return for: http://www.osun.org/Urban+Semiotic-pdf.html
John Mellencamp sardonically made us fall in love with “Little Pink Houses“
as a sing along national anthem for the perceived perfection of the 1950′s American Dream of home ownership. Today, we turn our naked ears and wanting eyes to Detroit to see “Big Feral Houses” pocking neighborhoods and caterwauling the impending death of the urban core.
Who is Banksy? Banksy is an urban semiotic enigma. Nobody really knows his name or who he is and none of that matters because his urban art speaks in the whole.
I hate noise. I don’t like honking cars or sirens or the sound of people walking on top of me — but that’s life in the Big City and there is no escape from noise. Even suburbia is polluted with sound — lawnmowers, leaf blowers, motorbikes and snow blowers. Everything every day adds to the cacophony of clanking we must all bear with our ears.
The Times Leader of Pennsylvania ran an interesting article — citing an unnamed research study — arguing poor children in the urban core are more likely than their richer peers to grow up obese, yet malnourished.
I am never at a loss for amazement when it comes to the stupidity of inane parents. It has been hot in New York City this week. The streets are hot. Sand on the beach is hot. Black rubber playground mats are hot. Those basic facts of living still do not appear to scare some parents into proactively protecting their children from running around barefoot and getting burned when that danger to life and limb is completely avoidable by invoking common sense and human decency.
Jackson Brown’s historic song from 1976 — “The Pretender” — is the perfect Urban Systems anthem.
Needle Exchange Programs in the Urban Core promote good health practices and are important mechanisms for predictably protecting the well being of the mainstream community while saving those who are the most incapable of making good decisions about their health.
Why does the USA Federal government punish those who most need a clean needle?
UPDATE: April 23, 2008. This Urban Semiotic blog — and all of David W. Boles’ domains and blogs are now solely hosted by Pair Networks! We will give you more information soon. We are leaving this article online to protect the chain of understanding and we will update this space as necessary.
As you know, we recently moved this Urban Semiotic blog from WordPress to Movable Type 4.1 and we were hosted by the fine folks at Pair Networks. We are grateful for their previous love and support as we announce today yet another move of this blog – as well as RelationShaping.com and WordPunk.com – over to my pre-existing Media Temple 3.5 dv-Rage server and Movable Type Open Source 4.1.
I do not like April Fool’s Day. I find it dull. The only worse day of the year is “Speak Like a Pirate Day” — that I battle each year with “International Never Speak Like a Pirate Day” — because one idiocy deserves another.
It’s a pain to put up with everyone trying to put one over on you on April 1. Have you ever been played as the April Fool? If so, how did they “get” you?
What happens to a free nation and a freedom of spirit when the economy is so bad families are forced to go on food stamps in order to survive? Freedom dies in growling stomachs.
Have we met our match in inventing our own assassins? Is it part of our evolutionary, technical DNA, to foster devices that intend to kill us? Have we have created a death wish covenant with technology?
