Tuesday, January 02, 2024

Did you know...?


That's the building we used to jokingly call "Broad Ripple's skyscraper", before the neighborhood sprouted a jungle of 4- and 5-story "mixed use" residential/retail spaces.

It was a professional building, with dentist's offices and whatnot on each floor. Now it's owned by the bohemian Hotel Broad Ripple.

Hence the big peace symbol.

Back during the Cold War, conservative Boomers and Silents called that "the footprint of the American chicken". 

GenX and Millennials mostly knew it from the button on Private Joker's helmet cover, next to the scrawled "BORN TO KILL" slogan. Occasionally, on posters or fliers touting a Sixties hippie-themed school function, a clueless X'er or Millennial would hilariously get it mixed up with the Mercedes-Benz three-pointed star logo.

I once heard a fundie preacher... I've mentioned that I grew up in a Baptist concentration camp, right? ...tell the congregation that it was actually a secret satanic symbol; an inverted cross with the arms broken. I guess when you're looking for the devil behind every bush, you get a lot of false positives.

In actuality, as I learned while reading P.J. O'Rourke's essay "Among the Euroweenies" in Holidays in Hell, it originated in 1958 as the logo of the British Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. It's a combination of the semaphore signals for "N" and "D".

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