Recently in Culture Category

I was listening to SportsRadio in New York City the other day and I heard an interesting argument from the on-air host.  He believes the Summer Olympics are intended for male fans, while the Winter Olympics are intended for female fans.

On the eve of The New Year, it's time to once again fecklessly peer into the future to divine the yet unknown for the year 2010. 

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

The celebration of the backside of the Black female form -- from Saartjie Baartman in 1810 to Fergie in 2010 -- is a fascination of cultural values that has been amalgamated in mainstream music for fifty years.  In the 1960's, the celebratory code phrase for the pleasing female "big butt" was "big legged" and I suppose there's some anatomical sense to be made from that rising frustration:  If you have big legs, then your butt has to be even bigger to better negotiate your sense of balance.  In the late 1960's, Blues sensation Albert King immortalized the "Big Legged Woman" in his ovaric song, "Born Under a Bad Sign."

When you think of the history of The Blues in America, you are struck by two, stark, gender realities:  Women sing The Blues and Men play The Blues on guitar.

Does carrying a gun indemnify free speech or condemn it?  Recently, in New Hampshire, a citizen appeared at an Obama Town Hall wearing a sidearm and wielding a Thomas Jefferson quote about "Watering the Tree of Liberty" -- a favorite quote of Oklahoma City Bomber and homegrown domestic terrorist Timothy McVeigh.  Is the man with a gun and a protest sign suggesting a living semiotic that supports President Obama or is he really there to actively chop down the first Black president?

Janna and I have been watching Big Brother 11 slowly recover from its infection of vile players -- especially recently "expelled" Chima who wanted to have sex with a "terrorist" because she was bored before she falsely labeled him as such -- and we have enjoyed the rise of "good-hearted" and the "non-schemers" into power.  However, with power comes a closer examination, and current power couple Jeff and Jordan are already sounding relationship alarms even as they share the same bed.