Odd Signs & Symbols

We have had some perpetual construction in our area, and while walking just now, I noticed that the spray-painted tags for bike lanes have changed.  Or they are still evolving, or whatever is happening.  There is one traffic logo with a little person with a helmet (but no bike), and another with just a bike (no rider).  And in the new paint jobs of just the past year, in the same development, they used both logos.  Here they are just 20 feet from each other. Is the no-rider logo replacing the no-bike logo because someone got bent out of shape about the rider not looking male enough or female enough or neutral enough?  So now we have to watch out for bikes with invisible riders because we can't look at people anymore.  Maybe that logo didn't look "bicycle" enough. Or maybe after years of bike logos without riders, someone finally noticed and felt that a rider was needed.  But now it's a mime pretending to ride some tires instead of an actual bike with r...

Here's what should have been a simple drop box for clothes and shoes for some charity, but OMG, it turned into THIS: If I even got out of my car with do-good feelings in my head, this would scare me away.  No Dumping dumping trespassing, no trash mattresses blah blah no stealing or loitering, the police are watching, lift handle up, no trash, THANK YOU. And run.  Probably under surveillance, too. I suppose so many people abused this simple box of hope that it has become a nightmare.  It makes me sad.  For every helping hand, so much crap and misuse.

We went down to the big cat show at the Del Mar Fairgrounds this weekend.  It's a great spot for people-watching.  So many personalities (and cats) and competitions (with cats) ... what are they all doing?  It can be funny being out of place at some event where you have no idea what's actually going on.  Thankfully, someone posted this big sign explaining the rules of the competition: Now we just felt everyone was taking themselves (and cats) way too seriously.  How about having pets because you make each other feel good, not traveling across the country to be the best and make money.

For fun, almost home from a sunday drive, we took a detour up a hill near Anne's place to see one of those fancy new developments that are being built all over town.  There's never anything remotely affordable, but we figured it would be interesting to see how the people were settling into these new buildings.  We might even roleplay that we're actually looking for an apartment, we toy with the idea of looking around one of the "model homes" to see what we would get for our hard-earned bucks. Um ... Apparently, for your $3000 a month, you get threatening NO PARKING signs written in dripping blood, another jerry-rigged crap cardboard threat and garbage flapping in the wind a few feet from your fancy car, no signs of life, no safe place to walk with the kids.  So, you've been working for decades, and your idea of the perfect life is some prison-like heap of housing units with nothing worth looking at beyond the windows. We couldn't even turn around to get ou...

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...