Yesterday while driving out of the mini-mart parking lot I was confronted with a hand-lettered sign:
FREE KIDS
FOOTBALL WEEKEND
Had to parse that for a moment, but to be fair it was early in the morning.
Last summer our neighbors got their driveway repaved. The guy who paved it left little flyers on nearby driveways that said:
(guy’s name)
DRIVEWAY SERVICE
I JUST DID YOUR NEIGHBORS
There’s probably been a zillion threads on this, but what have you seen recently?
I see some of those “garage sale” type of signs around here every once in a while that say “GIANT KIDS SALE!” And I always think, “No thanks, I don’t need any giant kids.”
For the past few years I keep seeing the same bumper sticker over and over. I haven’t been close enough to read one, but it’s got two lines of cursive and some kind of yellow splotch in the middle. Then my mom got a magnet of one.
Here it is.
It says.
Love People
Cook them tasty food.
I’ve been sooooo tempted to run around and put a comma (period?) between cook them and tasty food. I honesty read it that way the first time I finally saw it and thought it was a joke.
Slow children at play
A store I shopped at had a display by the register with a sign over it saying “POTHOS”.
I thought “Porthos? Potholes? Portholes?”
Then I saw the plant…
There used to be a commercial food service company (local to Northern California, I think) that had “Enjoy life… eat out more often” on its trucks in flowing script. I think - but can no longer recall for sure - that a variant was “Please your wife - eat out [tonight | more often].”
Not in the same class, but it’s bugged me for way too many years: “Integrity is Our Service” on a tire shop. Not the marquee - the very expensive and stylish site sign.
Special offer! Buy one get one free on all mens shoes.
Erm… isn’t that how buying shoes normally works ?
Pot hos, just like crack-hos, but not fully certified yet.
Bob’s Butcher Shop
You can chew my bone, but you can’t beat my meat!
And I don’t even need any garages.
City limit
Enforced by radar.
(Seen in San Luis Obispo, IIRC.)
Long ago but it still sticks with me. A little corner store in the country that ran a fireworks concession around the back during the summer and had a banner facing the street.
“Fireworks in rear!!!” :eek: OWWWW.
Does Yoda work there?
Once, outside a grocery store, the sign that always announced what was on sale that day said “One gal homo $1.”
Lesbians are cheap. Stock up.
There’s also one that I guess is unavoidable, but there are a lot of cemeteries in Indiana that started out as family burial plots, so they’re called “The Hamer Cemetery,” or the “Harris-Newman Cemetery.” There’s one where the original family had what is actually a fairly common name around here, and the word probably did not have its slang meaning when the cemetery was named. Anyway, it’s “The Gross Cemetery.”
It happens a lot, and in the early days of the internet, you could find lots of photos of fast food restaurants advertising for “closers,” where the “C” had fallen off the sign. Nonetheless, I still laugh every time I see that McDonald’s is “NOW HIRING LOSERS.”
There was an automotive shop that moved twice in the years I knew it, and each time it took the back half of a facility. Its sign thus always read like an AIDS warning/invitation:
CAPITAL TRANSMISSION IN REAR
There was a car dealership in town that jumped on the pink ribbon bandwagon, with a huge, like, six-foot cling ribbon in the window. Whoever put it up missed the point of the pink ribbon campaign-- confused it with the yellow ribbon for the troops, or something (or maybe wasn’t a native English speaker). Anyway, under the ribbon it said “Support Breast Cancer.”
When I told that story to a friend, she told me that there was once a “Rally for Melanoma” in her town. “Yay! You go, Melanoma!”
An item called “Pro Select Crack Fix”
Newspaper headline for local sports team: “Riders Ready for Willy After Romp”
A food label: “FAP Pacific Rock Cheese”
Store signs: “Women’s Dresses”, “Women’s Bras”.
A product called Touch Kids Lunch Fork
Several final product signs with their Lorem Ipsum still there, not replaced by actual copy.
A product called an Aqua Zoom Osculating Sprinkler.
A children’s video called Pony Play Date. I show the picture of that one to people to see how they react.
???
Google “Pony Play”. Don’t do it at work.
It wasn’t a sign, but it was a bit of garbled English with similar humorous results. First, there’s a large children’s hospital in Indianapolis called “Riley,” named for James Whitcomb Riley, a bizarre poet I don’t like, whom some people in Indiana are fanatically proud of.
Anyway, many years ago, Riley was running ads for some fundraiser for their new burn unit, and they had a racecar driver in one of the ads, asking people to participate in a fundraiser to raise money which would be given “to burn children at Riley Hospital.” Direct quote. Not “for burn children,” not “to the burn unit,” not “to burned children.” Nope. The commercial ran a lot, and I’m positive that is exactly what he said “to burn children.”
In college, I ran a 5k called the Run for Sickle Cell.
