Smoots is the ultimate in graffiti as far as I’m concerned.
I used to live in a town called Ontario. That name was on a water tower in the center of town. Someone changed it to Blow Farto. It was that way for years. One night I was riding arouind with friends, and someone mentioned it. For the first time, it was funny.
There is a charming story in Sydney of an old alcoholic, illiterate sailor who one day passed a seaman’s mission, heard the music and the sermon, and was suddenly struck with the capacity to write one word - Eternity.
He then made it his mission for several decades from the 1940s to the 1960s to go out at night and write the word “Eternity” - the name of God - using chalk and a distinctive laborious copperplate handwriting style, on walls and footpaths all around Sydney on as many surfaces as he could.
For years, people noted the words, but it was a complete mystery who was doing this until Arthur Stace was identified as the author in the 1960s. It is estimated that he wrote the word something like half a million times.
People became quite fond of discovering the quirky presence of the word as they moved around the city. That is why, in the fireworks display in Sydney for the turn of the millennium in 2000 (yes, I know-let it go) the centrepiece of the display was the word written in Stace’s distinctive style in fireworks on Sydney Harbour Bridge.
Hey, I’ve driven past that several times. Now I feel like I missed out by not stopping at the mall, or joining in on the Labor Day festivities. Yes, my life is that dull.
Winding roads in Australia sometimes have a sign reading ‘Do not overtake unless safe’. I like the idea that elsewhere, you can overtake whether it’s safe or not.
Who knows…maybe the real Bill Cosby actually does get his kicks late at night with a can of spray paint thinking “those fools will never think it actually WAS me and the joke will be on them bwwwwaaahaaahaaa”
I thought of this thread this afternoon when I drove past a sign outside a local pub advertising an “Evening of Clairvoyance”. The temptation to print out and paste onto it a banner reading “Cancelled due to unforeseen circumstances” is almost irresistible.
I like the story of the guy who defaced the poster for The Usual Suspects with “Keyser Söze”, and an arrow to the location of the appropriate cast member.
Not a sign per se, but I saw a license plate last week that was “BLU BYU”.
I wasn’t sure if the owner of the vehicle was attesting to his speeding or his relations with the co-ed population of a certain institution of higher learning in Salt Lake City.