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You Are Part of the House

I love discovering new interoperative cultural memes, and I happened upon one over the weekend at the local McDonald’s.  I’m not a big fan of McDonald’s, but they do try to offer some healthy food, and I appreciate they set a major agenda when it comes to creating an entire landscape of community dietary choices.  There is grand power in creating caloric counts.  Oftentimes, the only affordable meal in an urban neighborhood is found under the Golden Arches — and that creates a static economy and a trapped customer base. We’ll discuss more about that dangerous, if unassailable, economic power tomorrow.

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Wired Covers a Chocolate Urban Jesus

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:

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Urban Semiotic in Context

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

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Big Feral Houses for You and Me

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.

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The Banksy Semiotic

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.

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The Noise I Am

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. 

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Are Food Stamps Making Poor Children Fat?

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. 

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