(source: Jean Bellus)

City Creek, Utah

It seems the elusive Banksy and Osama bin Laden both showed up during the recent Sundance Film Festival… though apparently the latter has already been removed by local authorities (or perhaps a posse of terrorist-hunters)?

Mizen Peninsula, Ireland

A picture is worth a thousand words; Tomi Ungerer’s simple yet insightful illustrations speak volumes with narrative clarity and power.

Minneapolis, Minnesota

“Now I’m a trained professional artist, well-paid, looked up to, and with a real future… and look at my model!”

(flashback, in situ)

In case you may have missed this selection of eminently quotable profundities, bon mots, maxims, aphorisms, and engaging witticisms by the sage rhetoricist Marshall McLuhan when first posted here—well, here we go again…

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Whereas convictions depend on speed-ups, justice requires delay.

Money is the poor man’s credit card.

We look at the present through a rear-view mirror.

We march backwards into the future.

Invention is the mother of necessities.

You mean my whole fallacy’s wrong?

Mud sometimes gives the illusion of depth.

The trouble with a cheap, specialized education
is that you never stop paying for it.

People don’t actually read newspapers.

They step into them every morning like a hot bath.

Today each of us lives several hundred years in a decade.

The price of eternal vigilance is indifference.

News, far more than art, is artifact.

When you are on the phone or on the air, you have no body.

Tomorrow is our permanent address.

All advertising advertises advertising.

The answers are always inside the problem, not outside.

Politics offers yesterday’s answers to today’s questions.

The missing link created far more interest
than all the chains and explanations of being.

When a thing is current, it creates currency.

Food for the mind is like food for the body:
the inputs are never the same as the outputs.

The future of the book is the blurb.

The ignorance of how to use new knowledge stockpiles exponentially.

A road is a flattened-out wheel, rolled up in the belly of an airplane.

I may be wrong, but I’m never in doubt.

This information is top security.
When you have read it, destroy yourself.

(Image: detail of rear-view McLuhan photograph taken by the late great Canadian photographer Yousuf Karsh on 21 January, 1967)

Holyoke, Massachusetts

A cautionary poster of yore (that seemingly fell on deaf ears) by award-winning illustrator Howard Scott (1902-1983), a Pratt Institute graduate…

Any questions? (source: unknown Fabio Gioia)

Winnipeg, Canada

These effective anti-smoking billboards are excellent examples of meme-usage in the design of visual communication. Although there is no direct reference to smoking or to the Marlboro cigarette brand, you understand the context of the message immediately, thanks to your meme-sensitivity; (images of cowboys riding under the open sky, in concert with the familiar typographic “voice” used in the centered headlines), conjure up the context.

What is a meme? A meme is an idea (or a behavior, style, symbol, or practice) that spreads from person to person within a culture—much like a virus does within a body. In this age of information and ideas, we are surrounded and saturated by memes…

Don’t say you weren’t warned! (original image sources unknown)

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Seen on a Swiss restaurant menu:

“Our wines leave you nothing to hope for.”