viz.

Yuck!

So I've put off posting about this image because I find both it and PETA's numerous ways of using women in confusing and often objectified ways distasteful. They've titled one of their latest campaigns "Milk Gone Wild."

A just as smarmy take on Joe Francis' "Girls Gone Wild," PETA's current campaign wants to draw a connection between hot women and the dangers of drinking milk. But for me, the images they use don't add up to making any kind of supportive visual argument. Instead, they lose credibility. (Update: Some of the images below the fold might not be safe for work.)

Easter is one of those odd holy days turned secular holidays that creates a lot of incongruous images. Why do we have baskets with marshmallow bunnies instead of a nougat filled crucifix? Perhaps it is that kind of visual confusion that lead a group of protestors to create a new kind of visual Easter mix up.

On Sunday , a group calling themselves Catholic Schoolgirls Against the War stood up in Chicago’s Holy Name Cathedral right before Cardinal Francis George’s homily and sprayed stage blood on themselves and other worshipers. The gaps between visual display and reality are as confused here as they are between the Easter story and Peeps.

The ACLU is using this video to promote their campaign to collect signatures for a petition to stop a national ID and database program. The Real ID Act, passed by congress in 2005, would connect all state DMV databases into one interlinked database, “facilitating government tracking of Americans.”

I’m wondering why the debate over meat-eating and the treatment of animals keeps happening on women’s bodies. This newest addition to the controversy happened on America’s Next Top Model when the contestants were taken to New York’s meat-packing district where they participated in a photo-shoot dressed in various articles of clothing made out of raw meat.

While scrolling through HollaBackNYC, a site that allows users to post pictures of those that harass them on the street, I came across two websites that seemed like great visual rhetoric resources. The Just Seeds Visual Resistance Artists' Cooperative offers a blog, resources, as well as information about current projects and artists. The picture below comes from a 2004 project from the Street Art Workers entitled "Whose Media?" You can also find archived material from the group's previous website here.
Just wanted to share!

Here is an amusing/horrifying animation of the history of human conflicts (WWII to the present day), which uses the foods typically associated with the various countries involved to act out the conflicts. It’s called “Food Fight.”

According to this New York Times article, office décor and location can be very important if you are a psychologist.

Here's a Telegu (East Indian) sex-ed video extolling the virtues of using a certain brand of condoms, featuring a Bollywood-style anthem and men dressed up as dancing condoms. I have to wonder, though, who is the target audience for this video? They address men and women both gay and straight, but the message seems geared toward a younger demographic. At the very least, the dancing condoms juxtaposed with line drawings of gay sex is jarring. But this might just be a problem of cultural legibility.

This photo of Adrien Grenier had me totally pegged as I perused celebrity blog perezhilton.com in an effort not to do any of my real work.

The Copyranter, a blogger I'm becoming more and more of a fan of, recently posted these images from an Italian ad campaign for stove-top coffee makers. The title of the ads, or the slogan paired with them is, "the bite of coffee."