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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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Note to Parents: Hot Things Burn Your Children

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.

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Urban Systems Anthem

Jackson Brown’s historic song from 1976 — “The Pretender” — is the perfect Urban Systems anthem.

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Federal Punishment of Urban Needle Exchanges

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?

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Moving Movable Type 4 to Media Temple

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.

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Playing the April Fool

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?

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