Tag Archives: society

Weekly Photo Challenge: Signs

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bb-signs1

As a student of Linguistics, I am very interested in semiotics and, in particular, the affective impact of public signs.

Last week I got to realize a lifelong dream by taking a holiday in Japan. I loved the public signs there and the politeness of some of the signs in the Tokyo subways and trains.

I think people are more inclined to co-operate if a sign is polite than if it shouts, “Do not do this! Do not do that!”.

What do you think?

For more entries to the Signs Photo Challenge, see The Daily Post.

Weekly Photo Challenge: Change

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bb-chg1Can you think of a once strongly held conviction, belief or ideology on which you have completely changed your position?

∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞

Five favourites from this week’s photo challenge from The Daily Post.

Flickr Comments

Ohm Sweet Ohm

Lucid Gypsy

Delightfully Different Life

A Meditative Journey with Saldage

Weekly Photo Challenge: My Neighbourhood

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I am hopeless at taking photos with my iPhone. I’m one of those Luddites who prefers to use my phone as only that, so make no apology for the quality of my entry to this week’s (actually, last week’s) photo challenge, which required us to do some phoneography.

bb-mn1I live in the ‘burbs, and a cacophony of cultivation culling machines pretty much characterizes my neighbourhood on a Saturday morning.

Divine Dementia

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So many days
we are beyond bereft

at some ancient
god’s puzzled mumbles
beneath the night lamp,

his tremulous finger-fumbles
with jigsaw fragments
of our lives,

his fearful look of surprise
at the countless missing pieces
of his Master Plan,

unaware of the devil dog
chewing at his feet.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/16/nyregion/gunman-kills-20-children-at-school-in-connecticut-28-dead-in-all.html?hp&_r=0

http://jmgoyder.com/2012/12/15/children/

http://nrhatch.wordpress.com/2012/12/14/an-unblossomed-bloom/

http://thelaughinghousewife.wordpress.com/2012/12/15/no-humour-today/

http://susandanielspoetry.com/2012/12/14/body-bags/

The Man in the Street

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How often
is he there
in front of you?

Just another bloke
like you

except, perhaps,
a lack of personal hygiene

or its pathological opposite,

his way of regarding you
far too directly
without blinking

for the longest time.

When he asks for a cigarette
do you oblige

in spite of yourself?

Because in this stark room
you cannot reconcile
the rhetoric

on the face of it –

just another human being
in the silence,

no manifest difference
to teach the rookies,

no monster in plain sight
to slay with a bedside light,

just this banality
of evil

sitting in the corner
of your nightmares.

————————-

Dilettantes of Disaster

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The shadows draw long
through our limbs,
impoverished pulses from
indolent hearts carve us
tragic sinkholes for eyes; we are sallow
spectres in the night–
mirror, painting ourselves
in dishwater tincture
for dream-time, a sludge palette
 of effete sorrow.

Until abstraction
manifests from the canvas
and chokes us by the throat,
we do not know gratitude.

Chewing on this

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I read this wonderful post of Kate Shrewsday’s
before going to sleep last night and it got me thinking (they always do)
of

Six impossible things before breakfast

A world without the power of money,
a sun-powered world

Journeys across a borderless globe,
Inter-universe journeys

Born old, growing young,
Spinal cords
growing in a window box

——-xx——-

Impossible possibilities? What are your thoughts? 😀

The Bird

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The bird
doesn’t mind

the indifference
of passing feet,
tossed flint-eyed scraps,
nest of a broadsheet

The bird
doesn’t mind
cold-hearted weather,
garbage-can dining,
piss-soaked shelter,
one-eyed sleep in the underpass,
the ubiquitous predator

The bird
doesn’t mind
existence
on the streets

He’s just a bird

Weekly Photo Challenge: Self-Portrait

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They say

we know
who we are
in adulthood –

sister,
not brother,
wife,
not mother  –

a prosaic mosaic,
fragments of a self

but don’t ask me
to complete the picture –

time has lost
more than a few pieces

No Jacket Required

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Cannot

draw, paint, sculpt,
create symphonies, move to
mirth or action,
enthrall,
sing with the voice of angels
(or the sublime Ms Fitzgerald),
cure with digitalis,
build to withstand
the aftershocks of a billion
humans,
yet,

can,

in an instant,

locate true north
of a moral compass,
see the colour of a

beating heart

The Writing on the Wall

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So, you went to a place you don’t belong,

knew, of course, that it was wrong,

spied troubled waters,  jumped right in

with fatuous thoughts that you could win

Wild force unseen, current strong,

roared out to sea, swept you along,

dragged and drowned you in your whim,

Mene, mene, tekel, upharsin

City Style

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Midday,

it’s lunching,

suited in boardroom sociopathy

By 3pm, its black sartorial

boredom hangs

in downtown coffee bars

The city, at 6, loosens silk ties, casts lustful

stares across crowded pubs

Its throaty, pashmina’d laughs drift

over footlights at 8,

Around 10, it’s sporting fusion-cuisined

energy and scent of MSG

Overtimed road-crew neon reflects

stumbling stillettoes,

come midnight

And at 2am, it’s pyjama-shuffling

its drug-coma’d streets,

mad-haired, in the darkness

But you’ll find it

just before sunup,

reposed against periwinkle sky,

at its naked

best