Odd Signs & Symbols

There's an odd phenomenon in the bathroom stalls at work.  Throughout the day, certain guys go in there and just make a gross, juvenile mess.  I have no idea who it is.  But I'm amazed that some grown men can't be bothered to take ten extra seconds to aim or clean up a spot or not just throw stuff all over. Sometimes these angry little paper signs appear, printed at some nearby printer.  They only last for an hour or two before I assume ending up in the toilets with more of the other junk.  I also don't know who takes them down.  Not me.  The cleaning lady?  She's not in there in the afternoons.  One can only assume it's one of the slobs who is offended that the rest of us are offended by their offensiveness. Just a silly game of paper signs, going nowhere.

Sometimes a sign is there for a learning moment.  Some trace of science or logic is waiting.  These are my favorite signs.  They are not telling you what to do or saying the shop is closed or you can't play that guitar here anymore ... just giving information. This sign was in the Botanic Gardens at Brengle Terrace Park in Vista CA: This is when whoever is with me is going to expect my professor alter-ego to appear.  So, how does it work?  You go stand on the stone marked with the current month, and your head will show you the time of day. So I stood on September and it was 12:30pm. I'm sure I spent a few minutes explaining the sun's annual path in the sky and why this works.  But that day we were trying to find the last monarch butterflies of the year, so the sun moved on.

I couldn't focus on signs and symbols without looking up at weird lights in the sky.  Here is a shot from just after sunset on Sep 14, 2023.  Escondido, CA.  Whenever one of these appear, people walk around all riled up, or talking in hushed voices like the aliens are going to leap out of the bushes and get them. This is what a rocket launch from Vandenburg AFB looks like from here.  You should know what a rocket launch looks like in this day and age.  Glowing noodles in the sky ... it's a launch.  There are a lot of missions every year, most of them launching more annoying communication satellites to give you a clear cell phone signal at the cost of wrecking the ability to photograph faint galaxies. Anyway, right after sunset, the vapor trail hits unstable air at high altitude, high enough to still catch the last of the sunlight.  The reality is so much more interesting than all the made up fictions and bad guesses and conspiracy talk.  There are...

Of all the wacky, fussy, finicky types of parking rules we've seen painted on the pavement, here is a cute one for a change: Sure, a woman about to give birth definitely earns the most convenient space available, and whatever TLC is needed, even a cute stork logo.  But leave it to management to make everything a little more complex and annoying.  Next to that space we get to further divide into these spaces: So, if a lady shows up in labor, she gets the first space.  If she's expecting, she gets the second space?  If she wasn't expecting, why did she come here in the first place?  And after she gives birth, she has to rush back out here to move her car to space number three?  And the next morning she's not a new mother anymore, so they can tow her car? So .... many ... rules. Ohhh.  Anne just pointed out that there's one strip of letters across these two spaces that says "Expectant Mothers Only".  Still, someone has to move the damn car.

Here's an amusing sign from downtown Salt Lake City.  Normally a sign saying no parking or no loitering would not pop up on my radar.  And if it just said "No Cruising" and left it to our imaginations, I would also pass it by.  Of course I wondered how they know someone is cruising, so they spelled out the definition of cruising. Now we're talking.  Cruising is: "passing a control point in a particular direction more than 2 times between the hours of 11 PM and 4 AM."  That's strangely precise.  Except, where is this control point, and which direction?  If you pass it north and then come back south, does that count as two passes?  They're not the same "particular" direction.  And what if you're just bored and you left your house not really going in any particular direction?  Is that a Get Out of Jail Free card. Below that is a no parking sign.  So if you're about to pass a second time and you catch yourself misbehaving, you're al...

Here you go.  Two elevators at the University of Utah Hospital.  One says they're having intermittent service issues, and the other says "Out of Order".  Guess what?  They're both fine and people are using both of them.  An employee even said, "Yeah, we just ignore those." I don't get it.  Why on earth would I willingly get on an elevator with known issues?  And who are these people who are braving the "Out of Order" one?  That just sounds bad.  I watched people coming and going for a few minutes.  How do they not care if it's safe. These are accidents waiting to happen ... at a hospital.  But damn there are a lot of stairs.   I did try the less broken elevator once.  Once.  It jerked and groaned (the other two people didn't seem to notice) and had shockingly loud beeps at each floor (nobody cared).  I'm not doing that again.   Now, why are the doors painted to look like a peaceful birch forest biome?  ...

  Speaking of change -- see last post -- here's a vending machine with a very rare sticker that says it takes $1 presidential coins.  Wow, I have never seen that before.  Hardly any machine takes those, which is fine because almost nobody has them.  If you want them, go to any vending machine at any post office, and the machines will happily take money and give $1 coins as change ... while not accepting those same $1 coins as payment.  So ... ... in this case the machine says it wants the $1 coins, but what does it give as change. A handful of dimes.  Which you could probably use at the post office.  But for now, my back pocket sounds like a muffled "Jingle Bells" of hot dimes grinding together for the rest of the day. Great system.