David Boles: Human Meme

Why does the salesmanship of childhood stick with us inside the adult? We dissect some of the most memorable commercials from the 1970s to wonder at the everlasting effects upon their intended, advertising, targets.

We owe our future to the history of those who joined us. We celebrate the immigrant experience, and those who choose to give up their lives at home to join our lives here in America. 

The homeless and the mentally ill creep on the seams of society. We try to figure out how we can help those who are unable to think of their own welfare. Incarceration is not the solution. Ignoring these desperate people hasn't worked. What's next?

What breaks us can never can never bind us. Here is an original ghost story we wrote about a Nebraska legend.

We are surrounded by smoke and poop! We take a sniff at how the mores of society are changing right beneath our noses! Medical Marijuana and Service Animals are beguiling more than just our sense of smell!

Academia is just as cutthroat as Wall Street -- but will less morality and more humor. We share canonical insight into the PhD hiring process, and how it unravels into unfairness and backslapping in order to fill empty faculty lines. 

We have the need to be cleansed. Yet, we can never be clean. We reveal the memes of purity and cleanliness as cultural controls. Can we ever become Virgins again after the loss of verifiable innocence? 

Students who attend school in Newark, New Jersey discuss Race and Racism in performance. In this episode, our instructor gives the story over to his Fall 2004 "Page to Stage" class at Rutgers-Newark where his students dramatize the hard, biting, realities of their lives -- recording the truth of them, in situ, in studio, preserved in the amber of audio history. NSFW: Language.

We are always being watched by someone who is not us -- or OF us. We walk through the sky above and the eyes below that are looking down on us and around on us -- recording every move we make. Can we escape this Panopticon of our own doing and desire?

In a crumbling world, the comedians make the news, and skewer the truth. The old world newsreaders are scuttled to the dustbin -- unless they compete on the lowest level of giggling and desk-slapping. In this episode, we track the downfall of the American news personality.

The Irish sense of tragedy takes many forms and mournings. We dive into Irish culture and the work of Playwright and Poet John Millington Synge. There are some Irish pronunciation name games herein as well as the redacted version, IN LIVE PERFORMANCE, of "Deirdre of the Sorrows."

Three cunning bigots? Three kind solutions! We share our experiences in a week filled with censorship and cruel bigots! There's the bigoted Race-baiter, and then there's the Civil Rights ruiner, and, finally, there's the culture-dissing inHuman Troll!

There is no value in us. We are built on hubris and breadcrumbs, and we prick the notion that we only bleed when we're struck -- and not in perpetuity. We are not unique. We only resemble. How then, can we fight for a right niche in life and become, in essence, the meaning of, value?

"I am Become Death, the Destroyer of Worlds." We discuss the idea of a "Trinity Moment" -- and how that notion is inspired by the scheme of Robert Oppenheimer's "Trinity Test" bombs during WWII. We cannot reoccur, or recover, from a Trinity Moment. Like Pandora's Box, once a Trinity Moment is let loose upon us, the Devil cannot be sent back to Hell. 

We are not always our talents. We want to believe we can arc above the sky and land on our feet; but our parents often try to hold us down, for our own sake, against our wishes and our dreams. We answer a talented student of the Performing Arts from California who wants to take up an offer for a full-ride scholarship that her parents refuse to approve.

Every friend is your enemy! Yes, it's true! Every enemy is a friend and every friend is an enemy. The trick of life is to know which way that pendulum is ticking against you.

We are our hatreds. When we, the majority, choose to pick on the minority among us, we cheapen our own dreams, and wishes, and we poison our future with violence. We examine a not-so-distant time in America when were were rougher, and more, cruel with -- "The Others" -- than we are today.

Is there a difference between a coward and a terrorist? We struggle to find the difference between terrorism and cowardice. In the Age of Modern Warfare Against Civilians -- do those labels even matter any longer, when killing is done, virtually, from afar?

Achievement vs. Originality matters. Knowing the difference between authenticity and imitation is not as easy as it once was. We reveal the imitators among us -- the copiers, the pale comparisons, and the almost was.

Why are we obsessed with venerating the Evildoers among us? We take a look at our like for the bad influences in our culture. Hitler, the KKK, Pigeons, Sports, Criminals and Bad Boys -- they're all here -- waiting for the burning!