Page 5 of 8

Posted on

Eleven Heart-Shaped Balloons

Janna came home last night and presented me with eleven giant, red, heart-shaped helium balloons.

She apologized one was missing.

She told me on her way home from teaching American Sign Language at New York University she found a guy selling bunches of balloons for .64 cents each. She bought a dozen.

Waiting for a PATH train at the Christopher Street station, a man tried to strike up a conversation with her.

That happens to us a lot and since Janna is Deaf she usually just smiles and points to her ears and shakes her head to let the person know she isn’t interested in communicating.

The guy followed her onto the train and persisted in trying to speak with her. Wrangling twelve helium balloons onto a packed train is no easy task.

Continue reading → Eleven Heart-Shaped Balloons

Posted on

Miracle Miscommunication

The deaths of 12 miners in Sago, West Virginia is no less a communication tragedy than the deaths of two Jersey City Police Officers who were killed in the line of duty after plunging off the edge of an open bridge last week.

Continue reading → Miracle Miscommunication

Posted on

A Year Under the Gun

Yesterday, the Jersey Journal reported this in one article:

There were 50 homicides in Hudson County in 2005, the most since 1989. Thirty-nine of those homicides happened in Jersey City — the highest city total since 1982.

Continue reading → A Year Under the Gun

Posted on

Plunging into Death

Two Jersey City police officers, Shawn Carson and Robert Nguyen, were killed on Christmas night when they were called to the Lincoln Highway Bridge over the Hackensack River to help set up road flares to protect drivers from motoring off the middle of a unique “vertical-lift” bridge that had its safety features disabled by a truck crash two days earlier.

Repairs would take two weeks of intensive construction so during that time police officers were called in to shield the public from the dangers of the bridge as it was raised for boat traffic. Some call this kind of bridge an “elevator bridge” because the center of the bridge rises straight up into the sky to allow boat traffic to flow below. Maritime law requires preference be given to commerce boats over motorists. The bridge is raised only at the radio request of boats and not on a predictable schedule. There are no angled ramps to indicate the bridge deck is no longer fit for cars and trucks — the middle of the bridge just disappears up into thin air.

Lincoln Highway Bridge

Continue reading → Plunging into Death

Posted on

Shoes on a Wire

In the urban core, especially Jersey City, if you’re looking to score drugs, you look up, not down, and when you see this hanging above you:

Shoes on a Wire

Continue reading → Shoes on a Wire

Posted on

Google Sitemaps Clicks

Here are the top search query click-throughs (people searched for these terms and then actually clicked on an Urban Semiotic post title return to read it) for your favorite Urban Semiotic blog as provided by Google Sitemaps: 

Continue reading → Google Sitemaps Clicks

Posted on

Girl or Woman

If you are female, which term do you prefer if you had to be labeled by one of these words: “Girl” or “Woman” or “Female” or doesn’t it matter?

When I was an undergraduate at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln I was educated, roughly and roundly, by certain forces in the English Department that one must never call a female a “girl” if she has had her period — how one determines if menstruation has happened or not was never explained — and the correct term for the rest of her life was “woman” but never “lady” because “lady” was an Olde Englishe synonym for “bitch.”

Ladies and gentlemen rightly translated to the modern ear, I was told, as Bitches and gentlemen and it was an unfortunate, but culturally accepted, put-down of women who fought to advance their self-worth beyond being seen merely as property.

Continue reading → Girl or Woman