I’ve been frequenting a couple of nearby smoothie shops this summer, including Jamba Juice. Lately they’ve got an interesting contest:
OK, it’s a sweepstakes promoting a book on “Hundreds of ways to live to be 100,” but the way the promo is phrased makes me think of a different kind of contest entirely. I mean, it seems pretty clear who wins: anyone who enters, then lives to be 100, wins.
So what do you give the lucky 100-year-olds as prizes? A lifetime supply of smoothies?
We both did a double-take approaching this pick-up truck a few days ago:
Once you think about it (though it helps to see the logo on the side of the truck), it’s clearly a AAA service that delivers and installs replacement car batteries.
The lack of punctuation makes it easy to read as a service that delivers and installs… AAA batteries.
Ordinary tagging? Or someone who got the point of the PSA and took it a bit too far? 😉
Start your own cable company like Jack and Jill* did!
This showed up in our latest cable bill. Time Warner is taking over from Comcast, and while their “Hello, my name is ____” campaign makes sense in a sort of cutesy way, I can’t figure out the logic of this one.
Though I imagine many people would agree that their cable company acts like it was run by eight-year-olds.
*I was trying to think of something to name the kids. My first thought was something like Wakko and Dot, but it didn’t fit the tone. Then I thought of Jack Warner, and Jill was obvious.
Friday afternoon I was walking down Fifth with a couple of Subway sandwiches in my backpack. This section of the Gaslamp Quarter is almost entirely restaurants, and most of them have dining areas out on the street, with the host or hostess’ podium right there on the sidewalk. I had spotted something odd ahead of me, but I’ll let this overheard exchange speak for itself:
Hostess: “Come quick, or you’ll miss something really cool! There’s a sandwich in the street!”
Voice from inside: “Oh, I already saw him.”
For the record, it turned out to be part of a big promotion for the movie, Accepted.
The convention clearly strains resources to the limit. These traffic cones, used for creating lanes for the shuttles and whatever traffic was allowed in front of the convention center, include such messages as “Reserved,” “No Parking,” and “Stop”—none of which applied to their current use!
Now, I have yet to figure out the connection between Playboy models and comic books, except that these days they do seem to have the same target audience. There were several models doing signings and photo ops around the hall. On Thursday morning, though, this model hadn’t set up her booth yet. The bag on the table looked disturbingly like a body bag.
This last one actually has no connection to the con, but I forgot to post it on Monday. It’s probably only funny if you’re familiar with the BSD operating systems. (It took me a while, but I eventually realized BSD in this case meant Broadway San Diego.)
Here’s the latest round of strange sights from San Diego.
![[Outhouse on a crane]](https://hyperborea.org/journal/wp-content/uploads/2006/07/floating-outhouse.jpg)
We stayed at the Radisson Harbor View. The end of the hallway had a view of the harbor, but our room had a view of the construction across the street. When we first stepped onto the balcony, we saw a crane lifting an outhouse up to the topmost floor of the site. There’s something inherently absurd about a port-a-potty flying through the air.
We walked up and down Cedar Ave. from the hotel to the Little Italy trolley stop at least once a day, stopping at the same It’s a Grind coffee house we frequented two years ago. Strangely, we didn’t notice this message on the street until our last day in town:
Now, it may look like a tagger’s commentary on outsourcing, but it makes more sense if you happen to know that India Street is just a block away.
There were quite a few high-rise buildings that looked very much like this one. Sort of the skyscraper equivalent of clone homes, I suppose. This one had one difference: One of the tenants had set up a large, red umbrella on their balcony.
Moving on to the Gaslamp Quarter, we saw—but didn’t photograph—a club called Tsunami Beach. I don’t know about you, but if there’s a tsunami, the last place I want to be is on the beach!
This next one was actually pretty neat. The window boxes outside Dussini (a Mediterranean restaurant on Fifth Avenue) are full of low-water plants. Practical, low-maintenance, and still decorative.
Finally, here’s a sign from somewhere along the 5, elsewhere in San Diego:
I think it’s pretty safe to say that Richardson isn’t a fish…
Next: con-specific weirdness.
Found on a stamp vending machine:
OK, it’s not hard to figure out from context that “semipostal” simply refers to the fact that some of the cost of the stamp goes to the Post Office, while some of the cost goes to the chosen cause.
But given the prevalance of the term, “going postal” as associated with violence, perhaps using the label with the “Stop Family Violence” stamp was not the best choice. Now, I’ll apologize in advance for the gallows humor here, but would “going semipostal” be what happens when you want to go to work and shoot people but decide to stay home instead?
