Semiotics: Earth Day: photo set on a digital-page, juxtaposed to a text of Earth piety and politix

REALTORS.com photo (above, of course) and text (below)
for a particular Earth Day piety & politics.

The ad's message in textual form (alphabetized, fontized, written!--Roland Barthes); but, so texted, is precisely juxtapositioned to a quite different semiotic-medium (the medium being in this second case the digitization-driven graphics where a specific electrodigitally-designed picture in colours and occupying a specific number of pixels, to attract, "captivate" (Strauss), "shimmer" (Seerveld), "shiver" (Dorothy Day), to stimulate however fleetingly the human perceiver's imagination

Established in 1970 by then Senator Gaylord Nelson, Earth Day began as a nationwide environmental protest against the abuses common with major industries at the time. The concerted effort rallied 20 million people, and led to the organization of the Environmental Protection Agency [USA Federal EPA]. Today, the focus of the Earth Day campaign centers around finding clean sources of energy to help create a healthy and diverse world for generations to come. As a homeowner, making a difference on Earth Day is easy and cost effective.

Keeping in line with the Earth Day campaign’s clean energy iniatitives, take a look at Nicole Maxwell’s list of energy-saving tips to see if there are ways you can cut down on your household energy waste and on your energy bill:

“Happy Earth Day! Today I will be sharing some tips on how to green your home on a budget. If every American home replaced just one incandescent light bulb with an Energy Star bulb, like a compact fluorescent, by some estimates we would save enough energy to light up more than 3 million homes for a year. In the average home, 75 percent of all electricity used to power appliances is used while those appliances are turned off, according to Matt Golden at San Francisco home performance consultant Sustainable Spaces. Think phone chargers, laptops and DVD players. If you’re not using it, unplug it.”

Semiote Analytics, by SeMiOtIkOs

Energy waste can take its toll on the environment and your wallet. Taking a closer look at how energy efficient your home is will undoubtedly save you money over time. What’s better than helping the environment and saving money? Getting paid to do both, of course. The Obama stimulus plan provides credit and incentives for homeowners making green upgrades to their homes. With so many reasons to act now, doing your part is easier than ever.

Next to an Earth Day rhetoric-and-discourse that cites passionately and compassionately the grandeur of the Creator/Creation relation (yes, the spine and underbelly of an ad-worthy rhetoric), including on Earth Day the modally-different law-structures for creation and all creatures, including us humans of course--sphere by sphere, each relation in each societal sphere recognized in its due ("due recognition").

Calendar: April 22, 2009

Back to the digital graphics quoted from REALTORS.com at the top of this page. With this particular ambiguous, fuzzy, hazy near-picturation, but with a blue blue-green sl+tly neon-lit optimism, overlapping near-spheres, even good-cheer, this superb graphic rings true as a vision for an environment-loving society. Yet, it is not just neonlit eye-candy, with its full shine-thru of the sun (or, is it the moon?) as in . One m+t read it as actually a graphics case of "troubled cosmos" format (Seerveld says there are basically only 8 or a dozen of these formats in the whole history of Western art painting).

Lingering a moment, you notice below all its br+t optimism, you notice its troubled sea darkening down where it drains full-darkly into the solid black colour of the bottom sector the graphic, the bottom sector also handsomely (so-aesthetically-sweet electrodigitally) doubles as the background for the poster-label text which reads in two simple lines: Earth Day, and in a second line with a smaller font-type saying, April 22.

Humour: Dirty Talk: TV anchors use faggotry to mock Anti-Tax Tea Parties, says homo

In an article on Fox News reporting mistakenly that the coded obscenity played with at length by TV anchors and their guests in hatred against the Anti-Tax rallies, those expressions Fox Politics says originated in Frat Houses (implying the terms arose at the universities, not today's internet-porn version of "frat houses"). Actually, the tea-metaphor was used "humourously" for faggot-conversation in gay bars as long as forty years ago; the deed itself took place in "tea houses" (gay-sex bath houses), so I was led to believe. "Cable Anchors, Guests Use Tea Parties as Platform for Frat House Humor: Cable anchors and guests covered the anti-tax tea party protests by cracking a litany of barely concealed sexual references" (Apr16,2k9). Make that faggot-sexual references. And think consumption of the butch's urine by the nellie tea-drinker (different from a "Golden Shower" where the urine is not necessarily ingested). A number of websites viciously speak of "the Homosexual Agenda" and insultingly use homo as tho it were synonomous with "Gay," faggot, etc. Bullsh-t! It's dishonest to confuse the Gay Agenda (which is real) with simply being homo or even with wanting legal recognition of a 2woman or a 2man intimate union. But that's not marriage, in this homo's thawtful opinion. Anyway, here's the generally informative article from Fox:

For thousands of Americans, Tax Day was a moment to protest what they see as bloated budgets and a pile of debt being passed on to their children.

For CNN, MSNBC and other media outlets, it was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to use the word "teabagging" in a sentence.

Teabagging, for those who don't live in a frat [or gay-sex bath] house, refers to a sexual act involving part of the male genitalia and a second person's face or mouth.

So when the anti-tax "tea party" protests were held Wednesday across the country, cable anchors and guests -- who for weeks had all but ignored the story -- covered the protests by cracking a litany of barely concealed sexual references.

CNN anchor Anderson Cooper interspersed "teabagging" references with analyst David Gergen's more staid commentary on how Republicans are still "searching for their voice."

"It's hard to talk when you're teabagging," Cooper explained. Gergen laughed, but Cooper kept a straight face. [Gergen was Cooper's "straight man".]

MSNBC's David Shuster weaved a tapestry of "Animal House" humor Monday as he filled in for Countdown host Keith Olbermann.

The protests, he explained, amount to "Teabagging day for the right wing and they are going nuts for it."

He described the parties as simultaneously "full-throated" and "toothless," and continued: "They want to give President Obama a strong tongue-lashing and lick government spending." Shuster also noted how the protesters "whipped out" the demonstrations this past weekend. ...

Tea Party participants were not amused. The events were held in dozens of cities across the country, and while some demonstrators were criticized for wielding off-topic and sometimes insensitive protest signs, most took to the streets to speak out against government spending.

Dirty Humour, by Homo

Andy Cobban on YouTube

Brent Bozell, president of the conservative Media Research Center, said the media coverage was "insulting," reacting specifically to CNN reporter Susan Roesgen's combative interviews with Illinois demonstrators in which she declared that the protests were "anti-CNN" and supported by FOX News. She left the teabagging jokes to her colleagues, though.

"I've never seen anything like it," Bozell said. "The oral sex jokes on (CNN) and particularly MSNBC on teabagging ... they had them by the dozens. That's how insulting they were toward people who believe they're being taxed too highly."

Max Pappas, public policy vice president at FreedomWorks -- a small-government group which promoted the tea parties -- said it's a "shame" media outlets cracked jokes at a genuine "grassroots uprising."

"I think what that reveals is how worried they are that this might actually be something serious. You make fun of things you're afraid of, I'd say," Pappas said.

If anyone thinks the orally charged remarks on mainstream cable were just a coincidence, MSNBC's Rachel Maddow's segments over the past week with guest, Air America's Ana Marie Cox, would dissolve all doubt. Their on-air gymnastics, dancing around the double entendre of the week, looked like live-action Beavis and Butthead.

By one count, the two of them used the word "teabag" more than 50 times on one show. And on Monday, Cox even let the viewers in on their joke -- referencing Urbandictionary.com, a site which offers a number of colorful definitions for the term "teabagging." [Not really, the term is hedged and "fratted" and insufficiently a urine analysis.]

"Well, there is a lot of love in teabagging," Cox said. "It is curious, though, as you point out, they do not use the verb 'teabag.' It might be because they're less enthusiastic about teabagging than some of the more corporate conservatives who seem to have taken to it quite easily."

Jenny Beth Martin, a Republican activist who helped organize one protest in Atlanta, said she's not too worried about the protests being dismissed by some media outlets. She estimated 750,000 people attended more than 800 protests in all 50 states, and that at the very least the local media and community newspapers documented it.

"Our message definitely got out where it needed to get," she said.

And what of those of us who went to no public assembly but had cups of Red Rose tea together in a kitchen or living room, watching the telecasts? Add a million.

On the other side, there was a mention of the Gay Tea Party in Boston Harbour. Now, there you m+t have seen some lowdown dirty "teabagging" of the metaphorical kind, because aggressive Gay agendistas promote public sex.

-- Homo Christian

Arts: Architecture: Top prize in discipline goes to Swiss, Peter Zumthor

Lawrence Pollard of the BBC reports "Swiss architect wins top honour" (Apr13,2k9):

The most prestigious award for architecture, the Pritzker Prize, has been awarded to ... Peter Zumthor [most of whose works are located in his home country of Switzerland].

The prize, worth $100,000, is given for a body of work across a career, and is mainly valued for the prestige and commissions it can bring.

Zumthor's works are found mainly in his native Switzerland, as well as elsewhere in Europe and the US.

His most famous commission is the thermal baths in Vals in France.

Architecture, by Archibald

Here an artist--who is not celebratarian, so to speak--is recognized for his craftsmanship and creativity. He was trained as a cabinet-maker and has attended to his interiors and materials with special care over some 30 years.

He says he doesn't ally himself to an ideology or school of architecture, but aims above all at creating an interior suited to place and use, simple principles aimed at producing human architecture.

One extraordinary recent building is a chapel built by wrapping concrete round a wigwam structure of tree trunks.

Zumthor then burnt away the trunks, leaving the imprint of the wood as the texture of the interior, which retains the smell of charred wood.

Congratulations to the artist and to the Prize judges. Refreshing!