Odd Signs & Symbols

This sign was a head-scratcher.  We were in Santa Barbara and this sign was et the top of a flight of stairs leading down to some subterranean space. It did make me a bit curious.  What is this Salt?  Why do I want to go down there?  It could have been an antique shop, a museum of body salts, or just a trap of some kind.  There could very well be a shop that has nothing but salts, hundreds of kinds of salt, because consumers love to be told that one salt is healthier than another, ever since that hilarious Himalayan Salt mess where they claimed it had 90 essential minerals when there aren't that many, where they counted undetected and trace elements just to bump up their numbers ... don't get me started on that.  Is any salt actually healthy?  WHy take an elevator just to get to salt?  It's only going to raise my blood pressure. We asked someone who was coming up the stairs and they said it was a day spa of some kind.  But unless you went there looking for a spa, the sign i

Here is a cute sign we saw recently up near Morro Bay, CA ... This was during the pandemic years, and I think everyone was getting weary of "six feet apart", so someone came up with this new kind of measurement, and it was nice to have something to smile about fo a moment.

This one came out of left field while we were having some frozen yogurt a few nights back. Time flies, there was a pandemic, sure, but we had never seen an official No Vaping sign before. How sad that we even need such a thing.  I can see it now: millions of people convinced by the all-so-trustworthy tobacco industry that vaping is safe, and so many of them vaping in front of No Smoking signs ready to give a lecture on how they're totally NOT smoking.  But there is smoke coming out of their face, so well, I guess we need more laws and signage. After getting over the initial sad sigh of it all, I had to wonder exactly when this new sign came into being. Google was no help at all .  I had no idea that something as boring as a tube of gunk could be drawn in so many different ways.  Is there really no standard?  Are we imagining that ANY of these signs has ever been standard?  And the flipside: how do you make this new tube of a thing not look like a cigarette? How about ComplianceSign

You never know where symbols are going to leap out at us.  Here I was, stopping at the drive-thru at George Burgers on the way home from work, and chunk of wall was completely plastered with stickers.  About fifty little signs begging for attention, none of them saying ANYthing useful.. I remember being in a garage band back in 1988 or so, and we were always told that if you have a gig you need to go plaster the town with flyers or stickers, but that sounded like littering AND a waste of effort, so we never did.  But we saw plenty of stickers for other bands and events.  Now it's 2022.  Do people still do this?  And if so, were they always this vague and unhelpful?  I don't know what half these things are -- are they bands or home brews or raves or gangs or some kind of fizzy lifting drink?  Let's see ... wood carving, something from Tucson AZ, In Memory of Someone (really? glue these all over town?), a Rest in Peace sign someone else (maybe that is the way it's done),

Here is a digital sign fail at the local Kaiser pharmacy.  27 July 2022. Wow, that's broken.  And it started breaking about nine months ago.  Every few months we need a refill of something and wait until it's too late to have it mailed to us, so we trudge off to the pharmacy ... and every time it is worse off that the last visit, and they just won't fix it.  I have no explanation for this.  I guess we're just so used to being told what to do by machines that we've all just settled on some patchwork of white noise.  I ghecked in and spent at least 15 minttus looking for the kckup line. The whole presentation looks like children are playing Pac-Man on the screen after hours and never bother to clear their screen before going to bed.  Does nobody know how to fix it?  Is it going to be even more of an eyesore the next time I see it?  Stay tuned ... 21 Nov 2022 update: Yeah, they finally just shut it off.  It was not helping.

We are living in a world filled with odd signs and symbols.  There are signs full of rules, signs with funny slogans or gags, clever sidewalk gags that get us to go into stores, signs that make us wonder what's going on, signs with errors on them.  As for symbols, there are many layers of iconography on buildings and signs and packages, sidewalks and pavement: hazard symbols, traffic and vehicle symbols, children's chalk drawings which draw from an odd shared heritage, weird stickers that show up at drive-thru windows, doodles, industrial icons.  The only real difference in that signs say things in words, and symbols are their own statement, and of course, signs with symbols are right in the middle. I can't possibly create a separate blog for every tiny sub-topic here.  It wouldn't make sense to have one blog for signs that I thought were funny at the time, and another one for discussing construction markings on the pavement.  They are all related in the stream of image