notes.husk.org. scribblings by Paul Mison.

The Boneyard Up Close on BBC News. This huge image is presented behind a nice slippy map navigator, but here’s the whole thing.

From synecdoche on Flickr, an art project in Houston:

Using 13 billboards along the city´s downtown freeways, Olivier will replace the usual advertisements with images of the urban landscape that would be visible if the billboard did not exist - the sky, trees, and buildings obstructed by the ads will now be “revealed.”

Having been to the southern US, I can certainly recognise the pattern synecdoche describes in the description of another photo of a billboard from the project:

Houston is a city of billboards and big signs, sprouting everywhere above the highways in gleaming, glaring, blinking, clashing profusion. A billboardless vista is rare; in traffic-dense commuter areas there are so many that they cancel each other out, becoming visual background noise. Even on a relatively deserted stretch of highway there will be at least one or two every half-mile or so.

That makes this project, time-limited though it is, even more wonderful.

peterbaker:

“As metropolitan regions continued to expand throughout the second half of the 20th century their boundaries began to blur, creating a new scale of geography now known as the megaregion.

- America 2050

As a Neuromancer-era Gibson reader, I find it interesting that the BAMA sprawl is cut in two on that map. The size of the “Front Range” accumulation surprises me, too.

bestoflife:

Famous image of African American flood victims lined up to get food & clothing fr. Red Cross relief station in front of billboard ironically extolling WORLD’S HIGHEST STANDARD OF LIVING/ THERE’S NO WAY LIKE THE AMERICAN WAY.

Margaret Bourke-White, February 1937, Louisville, KY