viz.

I am a big, big fan of the little warning signs that depict stick figures in various injurious situations. I call them "lawnmower people" because I first noticed them as warning labels on mowers when I was a kid, where they inevitably had their toes and fingers whacked and stones thrown in their eyes all at the same time. As a public service, probably my greatest to date, I will occasionally post images of lawnmower people that I find amusing. Enjoy.

Since fall of '06 I have been giving a PowerPoint visual rhetoric presentation in UT's RHE 306 and RHE 309K classes. The presentations have been pretty successful and seem well received by students and instructors alike. I have had some requests to distribute the presentation but have been holding off for a couple of reasons: 1) the presentation is composed almost entirely of coprighted material and unlimited distribution would almost certainly violate the fair use terms under which I am currently using the materials; 2) the images I included are often controversial, for a variety of reasons, and I am hesitant to distribute the presentation to instructors without backgrounds in visual rhetoric or who might not be attuned to some of the delicate classroom issues some of the images present.

With Vonnegut's recent passing it seems worth noting that his books almost always featured a simple hand-drawn image at least once per novel. I'm not exactly sure how to describe the rhetorical effect of these drawings, but someone with more time could do a fascinating study of how these drawings operate within Vonnegut's texts.

I am happy to note that at Vonnegut's official website, http://www.vonnegut.com/ , the favicon is a replication of the asshole drawing from, if my memory serves, "Breakfast of Champions".

For a light-hearted example of someone who does some amazing "rhetorical analyses" of visual texts, check out the Comics Curmudgeon blog at http://joshreads.com.

Josh routinely uses visual cues in the crappy comics, the ones you read but aren't sure why and never make you laugh, to transform the comics into much more entertaining texts than their original authors were capable of achieving.