There’s a jewellry store around the corner from my office that has a sign in the window:
WATCH BATTERIES WHILE YOU WAIT
I keep thinking, “Can’t they get a magazine rack?”
This is my all-time favourite surreal sign. It’s not literally surreal, but in the context (there is a house to your back, about 1/4 mile away, as you face this sign, and a lighthouse almost another 1/2 mile beyond that) bu no other habitation within two hours’ walk:
http://members.xoom.com/labradorian/straits99/9914h.htm
NEURO - a church I pass every day going to work has that same message on their sign right this minute! They change it every week or so, but it’s up there now.
This wasn’t on a sign, but here it is anyway. I worked in the advertising dept. of our town newspaper until my first child was born. Fridays were particularly busy and many mistakes were made. Imagine
my dismay when I was thumbing through the Sunday classifieds and ran across a House for Rent ad I had placed Friday:
“3BR, 2 ba, new carpet, heat pump. Beautiful large wraparound dick.”
I see these regularly near or in Dallas
The All Size Screw Co.
maybe not as good as Quality but you should be able to get a good fit.
A sign on a store on the way to the lake…
BarBQue Waterdogs
Minnow Bait
Gas Sandwiches
A nice artisticly vandalised sign on I 30
If you lived here,you’d be
LIVING ON A BILLBOARD
One not so artistic seen in the middle of NewMexico If you lived here, you’d be home now,but you’d have a hell of a drive to work. Finally out side of a town in the panhandle that has a playtex bra factory
" Welcome to McLean, the most uplifting town in Texas."
“Pardon me while I have a strange interlude.”-Marx
There is a health food store in Santa Cruz with a marquee that often says really weird things. I wish I could think of any of them off the top of my head, but, well, this IS MPSIMS.
Also in Santa Cruz, there is an old movie theater where the marquee read for several weeks “The End Is Near.” I wondered about it every time I saw it, but the theater is shutting down, so I figured that was it. Also, SC is a really weird place. However, while channel surfing a few days ago, I landed on VH1 or MTV or whatever and happened to catch the new Smashmouth video - which is, as it turns out, filmed in SC, and the marquee was for the video. I was quite startled to see it on TV, and a little disappointed that there was actually a reason for it.
~Kyla
“You couldn’t fool your mother on the foolingest day of your life if you had an electrified fooling machine.”
I was in a McDonald’s that had a fire extinguisher mounted on the wall behind the front counter. Above it, there was a wordless pictograph sign with the outline of a fire extinguisher and an arrow pointing down. I guess in an emergency, you were suppose to verify that the object mounted on the wall matched the picture, just in case someone had replaced the extinguisher with a Happy Meal or something.
I found a picture of that Taco Bell sign…
Now Hiring It says it was in Columbus, Ohio. Anyone live there that actually saw this?
“How wonderful it is that nobody need wait a single moment before starting to improve the world.” - Anne Frank
An apartment complex in Memphis, TN:
SLOW CHILDREN CROSSING
How true… 
I pass that place every day! Geary & Masonic, down from the old Sears building. I’ve wondered about that meself, and (being 17) cursed it.
My high school used to be two high schools across the street from each other. The two campuses are across the street diagonally from each other. Driving along Gough street going south, you go downhill as you pass the intersection. Sign there: ABRUPT GRADE CHANGE.
JMcC, San Francisco, JJM’s page from the Bay
If I were a baseball player, and I got beaned by a fastball, I wouldn’t want medical attention. I’d want my limp, lifeless body flung to 1st, cause, dammit, I earned it!
Oh, man, I can’t believe I forgot this one:
On the drive to Los Alamos from Pojoaque, New Mexico, you travel on a fairly narrow paved road cut into the side of the mountains. To your right, there’s a pretty huge sheer wall of pumice that lasts for a couple of miles. There’s a break in this cliff that would allow a person to hike up into the hills.
At that moment, if you look up into the hills, you’ll see a sign, set far from the road, on a post set in the center of a huge rockpile. It’s easily 100 horizontal and vertical yards from the road. It’s a diamond-shaped yellow highway sign, and on the sign is the black silhouette of: a cow. I am not making this up.
I think I’ll need to sneak away while I’m home for the holidays and take a picture of this sign to share with y’all. If I can get a picture, I might take second place in the ‘surreal sign’ competition. No one stands a chance against ‘stop casting porosity’.
Oh, well if we’re going to include pictograph signs! The funniest one I saw was on a pop machine (I forget which brand) intending to discourage you from tipping it to get free soda (I suppose!) I forget what made it so hilarious, but I think it was a silhouette of a guy lying crushed under a horizontal soda machine with lightning bolts all around him, like tipping the machine brought on the wrath of God! LOL!
On the subway in Paris there is(was) a sticker on the door showing a mother rabbit and her young bunny and the kid had his hand shut in the door (again with lightening bolts around it.) The words (loosely translated) said something along the lines of: “Keep hands away from closing door or you risk getting a big pinch!” One of the kids traveling in my group claimed it said “Don’t put your hand in the door or you’ll turn into a rabbit!” 
“There’s a snake in my boot!”
Voguevixen, that sign is in my french textbook! If I has a scanner, I’d scan it in for you, but as it is, I’ll simply describe it:
A pink bunny, wearing a yellow shirt and pants, has his hand trapped in a door, appearently. The text above says: “Attention! Ne mets pas tes mains sur la porte: tu risques de te faire pincer très fort.”
It’s on page 258 of the Glencoe/McGraw-Hill textbook, “À Bord”. You did remember your textbooks, right children?
SanibelMan - My Homepage
“Step away from the bell curve, sir.”
There’s a chain of video stores in this area called “Flick Video.” One of their stores had a sign that had each letter spelled out in neon lights. Well, the “l” and the “i” look the same from a distance and it made it look like a “u.” Needless to say, after many complaints, they got a new, non-neon sign!
The margarine of evil
National Lampoon used to, maybe still does, have a regular feature where readers would send in pics of these types of signs, newspaper misprints, stuff like that.
They compiled some in a book, called National Lampoon Presents True Facts : The Big Book.
Hey, I looked it up on Amazon.com to get the name right, and in the “Customers who bought this book also bought” section is “Return of the Straight Dope; Cecil Adams, et al”.
Coincidence?
There is some really funny stuff in the book. My favorite was a pic of the Sesame Street characters, and the caption listed them something like “Big Bird, Grover, and The Cunt”. I practically laughed up my spleen when I saw that one.
I’ll have to get a pic of the signs they have in the municipal parks in Ottawa, reminding you to stoop and scoop. They show a cute little puppy dog squatting over a pile of neatly-curled, STEAMING, shit.
I saw a funny one in Nepal, on the way up to Nagarkot. It was an ad for a restraunt which gave all the usual info—name, location, hours—but then it said “Come alone”. I’m sure they meant somthing along the lines of “It’s OK to come alone”, but they missed the mark a bit.
“I should not take bribes and Minister Bal Bahadur KC should not do so either. But if clerks take a bribe of Rs 50-60 after a hard day’s work, it is not an issue.” ----Krishna Prasad Bhattarai, Current Prime Minister of Nepal
OMG!!! FINALLY! the mystery of this sign is revealed! I couldn’t remember the name of the town in MD, but I knew it had something to do with water… Anyway, thanks for clearing that up for me - I’ve wondered about that one for a few years now.
And to thank you, I guess I’ll have to take a little drive down the road and find out what the hell “Stop Casting Porosity” means…
StoryTyler
I am too in shape! :::muttering::: Round is a shape.
C’mon up and see me sometime.
I think this speaks for itself:
http://pages.infinit.net/konrad/EMERGENC.JPG
