I can’t stand this new thing all the stores, restuarants, and shops around town are doing. Everywhere I look I see these stupid ugly neon light boarders around all the windows up and down the street and I can’t friggin stand it!!! Is it just me or does this look tacky and ugly and…Light Pollution!!! That’s it! Light Pollution.
Green, yellow, blue, red…I friggin hate it! This haze fills the street with tackiness! Help!
Sorry, dude.
I guess it’s just you.
Ooooh! Look at the pretty liiiiiiiiiights…
There is a hair salon about two blocks from where I work. It is named “Scrupples.” I suspect they meant “Scruples” but the person who chose that name was too damned stupid to look it up. Anyway, what makes me bring this up now is that they have a carefully-crafted neon sign in the window. Very large. The light tube is bent to spell “SCRUPPLES” in all its misspely glory. It is all I can do sometimes not to run in there and tackle the owner and demand an apology to the English-speaking world.
Something about the neon sign. I’ve seen other business misspellings and been amused. The neon slap in the face puts me over the edge, though.
Had I been the neon maker? I would have turned down the job.
There was a new restaurant in town, put up a new Neon lettered sign. within a week, one letter burned out. We still call it “uffet World”.
The thing that bugs me the most about this is that I really like neon lights. I mean, artfully done neon. Las Vegas is amazing with the creativity of neon. And I love old beer neon signs like Papst Blue Ribbon, Coors, etc. But those rectangular window frame neon lights just make me crazy. No art or creativity. They don’t even blink, but come to think about it, they would make me even more crazy if they did blink. So I guess it could be worse.
Since this is sort of evolving into broad discussion of neon sign oddities, let me share mine.
There is a chinese food restaurant downtown whose specialty must be sea food; they’re called something like the Sea Palace. Anyway, they’ve got a neon sign in the front window showing a lobster crawling on a seabed. Here’s the thing: the lobster is green! Not red, green.
Now, it’s not like the signmaker didn’t have red tubes – some other shapes or lettering on the sign is red. But not the lobster. Funny thing is, I’ll bet a million dollars nobody else on the planet notices or cares. Yet I do a double-take every time.