Odd Signs & Symbols

I know that retailers love to use prices just below the dollar marks to try and fool us into thinking tge price is lower than it is.  So $2.95 instead of $3.  Sadly, it works.  Almost everyone who sees $2.99 has some chunk of their brain thinking it's only "two something", not properly rounding up to three. But what's the deal with this?? $2.99.99 is not a real use of numbers. May 15 update: we saw a short documentary on the 99-cent stores going out of business, and I think it said that company invented the extra .99 bit during a few years of trying not to raise their prices to $1.

Right next to the "No Dumping - I Live Downstream" markings from my last post, I saw this washed-out attempt to "Stop Littering". I must have walked past this dozens of times before realizing it was there.  Whoever sprayed this mish-mash of upper and lower case letters was obviously conflicted.  I mean, they clearly think littering is bad but their graffiti is okay?  Let's stop people from making this corner an ugly place ... by making this corner an ugly place.

At many storm drains in our area (San Diego County) there are these cute template graphics trying to get people to stop dumping crap down our drains.  They say "No Dumping - I Live Downstream" (more or less) and with have cute outlines of fish or dolphins.  I always enjoy seeing these, they add a nice human "caring" touch to otherwise drab bits of concrete.  Here is one a drain where I work which has two different graphics, one sprayed on and one engraved: In my mind I thought it was a fish and a dolphin, but looking at the photo now, it's a swordfish and a duck. I have seen a lot of regional variations on these, as if every town has their own version.  Then again, I have seen at least three designs just on my lunch breaks around the office.  I will try to get some more shots of these to show the range of designs. I don't know if this is a California thing or if it's nationwide.  I'm not sure that the kind of people who are going to dump paint or tox...

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...