August 2007 Archives

Mel Torme Sings Paul Williams

By David W. Boles on August 31, 2007 10:19 AM | 8 Comments

Here's a great video memory from 1976 to cool things off and chill down a melting world: Mel Torme singing a Paul Williams classic, "I Won't Last a Day Without You" -- and the last held note will make you cry if you have an ounce of human left in you.

Paul Williams is a Good Nebraska Boy who hails from Bennington and he wrote songs -- when melody meant something -- like "Evergreen" and "Out in the Country" and "Close to You" and "Rainy Days and Mondays" and "Rainbow Connection" and "An Old Fashioned Love Song" and "You're Gone" and many others as well as the theme from "The Love Boat." SuperGenius in action.

As an added Weekend Bonus, here's Jazon Mraz singing Paul Williams' "Rainbow Connection."

Jesus Does Not Heal AIDS

By David W. Boles on August 24, 2007 8:21 AM | 30 Comments | 2 TrackBacks

In a rare and astonishing disconnect between Jesus and the media, the Cape Town Advertising Standards Authority ruled it was "out-of-order" for a religious campaign to claim "Jesus can heal AIDS" without "objective substantiation."

Continue reading Jesus Does Not Heal AIDS.

Genius Born in Collective Ciphers

By David W. Boles on August 23, 2007 7:51 AM | 9 Comments | 3 TrackBacks

Genius is born in collective ciphers -- and the brilliance in the cooperative remains hidden until there is an expressed peril to group stakes -- then an emergency encryption of memes and forms of protective thought are ignited, risking decoded secrets and nothingness.

Continue reading Genius Born in Collective Ciphers.

Cities Paying for Grades

By David W. Boles on August 22, 2007 7:40 AM | 10 Comments

When I was growing up, children were expected to get good grades in school because it showed they had a love of learning and were dedicated to being a proper part of society; however, that didn't mean some Lincoln, Nebraska children with smart parents were not paid $200 USD for an "A" grade, $175 for a "B" and so on along a sliding scale in 1980's dollars.

Continue reading Cities Paying for Grades.

Timidity

By David W. Boles on August 21, 2007 9:20 AM | 16 Comments

Is timidity ever appropriate? If so, what role does it play in society?

Does being timid serve to advance the efforts of politics or health or family? Or does timidity only wound the timid and play into the hands of the powerful? Are "meek" and "timid" synonymous in your experience?

I Married a WordPunk

By David W. Boles on August 20, 2007 9:12 AM | 23 Comments

Okay, so I have David W. Boles' WordPunk ™ up and running and Going Great Guns over at TypePad. Now there's the problem of identity and branding.

I came up with this simple logo. I love logos that look like text but are really images. Here's the single-line logo:

Continue reading I Married a WordPunk.

Help Test WordPunk and WordPrescience

By David W. Boles on August 17, 2007 9:38 AM | 18 Comments | 2 TrackBacks

I need your help testing two new sites. The first site is a new blog called WordPunk.com -- hosted on the for-pay TypePad blog service owned by Six Apart -- you can click on the following image to be taken straight to the feedback article:

Continue reading Help Test WordPunk and WordPrescience.

1970 Diet Plate and the Microwave Nation

By David W. Boles on August 16, 2007 8:47 AM | 13 Comments | 1 TrackBack

I have a vague memory of the late 1970's in Middle America where every female member of my extended family was on a daily diet -- at least when in the public company of others. The standard 1970's diet plate -- in case you need reminding or edification -- consisted of the following:

A lump of cottage cheese
A lean, grey, paper-thin "extra lean" hamburger patty on wilted lettuce
One slice of tomato
One canned peach slice in light syrup
Non-sweetened iced tea, weakly brewed

Continue reading 1970 Diet Plate and the Microwave Nation.

Memes of Belonging

By David W. Boles on August 15, 2007 7:33 AM | 20 Comments

Are we required to join? Are we made to create? It is necessary for us to belong to someone other than ourselves? What happens when we are carved from each other and caved in a culture from which there is no escape?

Continue reading Memes of Belonging.

Crimes of Birth: Dying Black in the Urban Core

By David W. Boles on August 14, 2007 10:16 AM | 15 Comments | 3 TrackBacks

It has always been treacherous to be Black in America -- and if you're a Black Man in America -- your chances for even average survival are slimmer than your White peers.

Continue reading Crimes of Birth: Dying Black in the Urban Core.

Sycophants in Rejection: Making Terroristic Threats

By David W. Boles on August 13, 2007 7:50 AM | 23 Comments | 5 TrackBacks

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.

Mixed Martial Arts: The Bloodthirsty Bloodsport

By David W. Boles on August 10, 2007 9:16 AM | 19 Comments | 1 TrackBack

Sanctioned violence and public beatings have always been the intended, unofficial, delight for those who follow Bloodsport that started with fox hunting and cock fighting and progressed into major mainstream sports like American football, hockey and boxing.

Continue reading Mixed Martial Arts: The Bloodthirsty Bloodsport.

Born Poor and Condemned to Lifelong Poverty

By David W. Boles on August 9, 2007 8:04 AM | 16 Comments | 1 TrackBack

There's an old saying about the crisis of being born: "You can't pick your parents." There's another unspoken -- yet harder and uncrackable -- chestnut that rings truer and harsher: "You can't pick your income level." For children across the world, that reality means millions are condemned to lifelong suffering because they were born into poverty without any sort of clear economic path for breaking free of that chain.

Continue reading Born Poor and Condemned to Lifelong Poverty.

Bollywood Meets Pretty Woman

By Kathakali Chatterjee on August 8, 2007 6:45 PM | 15 Comments

Kathakali Chatterjee wrote this article.

I was pleasantly surprised while watching movie "Inside Man" as it started with a famous Bollywood song directed by A R Rahman.

Continue reading Bollywood Meets Pretty Woman.

Crumbling Infrastructure as America Deconstructs

By David W. Boles on August 8, 2007 7:54 AM | 14 Comments | 1 TrackBack

The crumbling of an Interstate bridge in downtown Minneapolis brings to the forefront the Dirty Little Secret of the American Urban Core: Our national infrastructure is neglected and deconstructing and instead of rebuilding it we are rebuilding Iraq's infrastructure.

Continue reading Crumbling Infrastructure as America Deconstructs.

Gangland in Newark: Murder at Ivy Hill

By David W. Boles on August 7, 2007 9:13 AM | 20 Comments | 5 TrackBacks

Handguns are made to kill people. We know this in our bones because of murders in Far Rockaway and Fulham and Orange and now, once again, in Newark. The bloodshed in New Jersey, spewed Gangland style, killed three kids and injured another on an abandoned schoolyard in a tonier part of Newark -- where this sort of thing doesn't happen -- called Ivy Hill.

Continue reading Gangland in Newark: Murder at Ivy Hill.

Voter Caging Means Junk Mail Trumps Civil Rights

By David W. Boles on August 6, 2007 8:36 AM | 8 Comments

If you aren't aware of the direct marketing junk mail campaign term "Caging" -- and its relationship to "Voter Caging" and the stolen 2000 and 2004 presidential elections in the United States -- you are not alone.

You were failed by the mainstream media as "tens of thousands" of minority votes were caged in the 2004 presidential election in Florida -- 35 students at a traditionally Black college in Jacksonville alone -- as well as the caging of over 35,000 voters in Ohio and many more in other states. Republicans challenged the legitimacy of Black voters via a junk email scam. Here's how it worked:

Continue reading Voter Caging Means Junk Mail Trumps Civil Rights.

Celebrating the Sheffield Sound

By David W. Boles on August 3, 2007 8:56 AM | 18 Comments

The other day I watched an incredible documentary, Made in Sheffield, that brought back many of the musical memes and memories of my reckoning youth. What I call "The Sheffield Sound" was a movement in the UK in the '70's and '80's that changed the music world with the introduction of "synthetic sounds."

Synthesizers were given priority over the standard musical drive of a lead guitar. David Bowie said the music coming out of Sheffield was "the future of music." Was David Bowie right? Or did the Sheffield Sound implode in vanished wishes and bitter competition? "The Human League" was the lead "sound" coming out of Sheffield, and of the two versions of the band, one didn't make any money:

Continue reading Celebrating the Sheffield Sound.

The Mark of Cain and the Mountain Meadows Massacre

By David W. Boles on August 2, 2007 9:28 AM | 18 Comments | 2 TrackBacks

As an avowed atheist -- I prefer to worship art and nature -- it may seem strange that I have a long list of religious friends. Of my many Mormon friends, I have discovered there are two topics that, when mentioned, will cause them to give you the stink eye and turn away from the conversation. If you press the matter, they will refer you to the LDS website for official commentary.

The first verboten topic is colloquially known as "The Mark of Cain" and it is an interesting and undeniable stain on the Mormon church where Blacks -- men of African descent -- were denied the priesthood because of their "mark"... their skin color.

Continue reading The Mark of Cain and the Mountain Meadows Massacre.

Urban Semiotic Articles Deleted From Google?

By David W. Boles on August 1, 2007 9:52 AM | 1 Comment | 1 TrackBack

(UPDATE: UrbanSemiotic.com is no longer hosted on WordPress.com. We now run on Movable Type 4.1. We are keeping this article in publication to preserve the record.)

Over the past few days I have noticed something curious happening with this Urban Semiotic Blog and Google. For some strange reason a lot of our articles are no longer being returned in a basic Google web search and that is killing our readership because Google usually sends a lot of traffic our way.

Those articles used to appear in Google -- they still appear in Yahoo! and Microsoft Live Search as the top returns -- but they have been removed from Google view. We'll see if this article you're reading right now ever appears in Google and remains there or if, it too, eventually mysteriously disappears from Google's search returns.

Continue reading Urban Semiotic Articles Deleted From Google?.

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Kathakali Chatterjee: It depends David! What if they are just incapable to read more
David W. Boles: I guess you need to be mindless to just accumulate read more
Kathakali Chatterjee: That's a lot of hard work David! Most people want read more
David W. Boles: What is wrong with thinking hard, Katha? Why is that read more
Kathakali Chatterjee: Heh! Thanks David! I agree. Majority do not want to read more
David W. Boles: If you'd asked me two days ago, Katha, I would've read more
David W. Boles: I am remembering your Cityscape likes, Katha! SMILE! A true read more
Kathakali Chatterjee: One question about the image David, it seems very familiar...from read more
Kathakali Chatterjee: Hi David! Sydney did look better than Nashville - for read more
David W. Boles: Hi Nicola! I love your Mona Lisa story. I'm right read more

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