Peace, HOA, and Australians
I ran across a news story today that some home owner outside of Denver is going to be fined $25 per day by her home owner's association if she doesn't take down her peace symbol Christmas wreath. The HOA president stated that some people could see it as a protest against the Iraq war and that he'd received 3 or 4 complaints (in a community of 200 homes). It's an outrage, blah blah blah. Anyway, the part that got me was that he said, "It’s also an anti-Christ sign. That’s how it started." Now I'm all for anti-Christ symbols, especially around the holidays, but unfortunately his facts are a bit mixed up. My twenty seconds of research on the GOOG turned up the origins as a nuclear disarmament protest group. Further reading found that part of the origins are the combination of the semaphore letters for 'N' and 'D', as in Nuclear Disarmament. Here's some hotlink action to some images from an Australian website.
Draw a circle around it to represent some hippie's womb and you're all done. It's all well and good for people to fuck with each others' rights/freedoms/civil liberties/etc but please at least get some of your facts right.
As for the Australians they're quickly gaining notoriety for having the most restrictive copyright laws in the civilized world. If search engines were blocked here, as they could become there, I wouldn't have been able to find the origins of the peace symbol and discovered that Bob Kearns (the HOA guy, remember? Stick with me) is a gargantuan idiot.
Well I've shown the Aussies at least. Their semaphore site has probably crashed now that my several readers have pounded it mercilessly. Without the cheat sheets their "flag-net" will be crippled!!!111<shift+one><shift+one> (as the kids like to punctuate).
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