So I’m relatively new in town, so I assume that the quaint little building in downtown that says “City Hall” in big letters is well, the city hall. There were work crews there, so I figured they were revamping it, as the cornerstore says 1938 on it. Then one day, there was a big banner stretched across it annoucing the opening of a new resturant. I could not figure this out. A resturant sharing office space with the mayor and clerk, WTF?
Then someone politely explained to me that city hall moved several years ago to the ugly municple building and that the old city hall had been various things, including a hallowen store, since then.
As I was driving home from work last night, I saw a deer nonchalantly walking along the sidewalk, admiring the area. A few people were behind and in front of the deer and didn’t seem disturbed to see a deer walking around at 11pm at night. I suppose it’s expected since we’re at the base of the Berkeley hills but dude, there’s a deer walking around the neighborhood that’s not disturbed by people or vehicles. :dubious: I guess I’m too much of a city girl to not be shocked by seeing wildlife hanging around my house.
The other morning I went outside at about 1:30 am to have a cigarette, and there was a guy hiding behind the steps to the neighboring apartment, wearing only a T-shirt, boxer shorts, and socks, and holding a baseball bat. When he heard me come out, he started giggling and skipped away a couple doors down the block. He came back a few minutes later and hid behind the same steps, then snuck over to stand behind a van, all the time holding the bat.
I eventually realized he was waiting for one of his buddies to come out so he could jump out and surprise him, so I stood around waiting for the payoff. But a few minutes later, a guy came down the block holding a beer bottle, then looked at hiding bat guy and just pointed at him. And bat guy didn’t jump out or anything, he just came out from behind the van and followed his friend back to the apartment. What a let-down.
I live in Las Vegas. Kind of hard to pick that special WTF moment. Just walk The Strip a few minutes and you will have your own moment.
However, the other day this was on my back patio, on it’s hind legs, using it’s front legs to shield the sun and was looking in the glass door. Imagine a person peering through a window. Just as calm as could be, I watch as it “cased out the joint”.
My link above is not as good as I hoped, but click on the picture of the squirrel like animal in the box at the top of the screen. That was my little voyeur.
Deer can make inroads into populated areas. As unpopulated ones get built over, I guess it becomes all the same to them (either that or NY State just has a lot more deer).
I was a little put off by seeing a doe in broad daylight here recently - like, was she sick? - but maybe that’s just the next step in their eventual taming. They do carry the Lyme tick here, however, so it’s a real concern to people.
I forgot to mention - when I was living in West Hollywood, CA I saw a guy hitchhiking on Santa Monica Boulevard.
No big deal?
It was about 2 in the afternoon and he was wearing a jeans jacket, sneakers and a jock strap. Nothing else.
There is a strange, 80’s type moss-covered building with reflective windows near the City end of the Sydney Harbour Bridge. One of the windows has had its reflective coating scraped off and someone has stuck a “ONE WAY” traffic sign there instead - and modified it by putting the word JESUS underneath thusly:
ONE
WAY
JESUS
Also, the roof of another building nearby has a permanently lit TAXI sign perched on the edge nearest the Bridge exit. It’s like a modern art installation or something.
We’ve got the “beauty queen” downtown here. A woman in her 50s-60s, wearing a sparkling gown (she has many), done up to the nines, and wearing a sash with no lettering. She wanders the streets.
A few years ago my dad found a man lying in the road in front of my parents’ driveway. He only had his head out of the road and the rest of his body was stretched across the highway lane. My dad stopped and got out, think the guy was dead. But no, he was just extremely drunk and said he’d laid down “to take a nap”. On the highway. :eek: Seems that his friends had dumped him out of the car a few miles from home.
My dad got him up, put him in the truck and drove him to the nearest gas station so the man could call someone to pick him up.
A few days later my parents saw the same guy walking along the side of the highway. Luckily, he was walking and not taking a nap this time.
Not long ago I saw a car sitting at a traffic light. It’s hubcaps/wheel covers were rotating backwards even though the car was not moving. As a side effect of a medicine that I take, I do get visual hallucinations, stuffing flashing by the corner of my eye or floating upward out of my field of vision. I thought for a moment that I’d graduated to the big leagues of hallucinations. I’ve always kind of wanted to see pink elephants but I realized this was future shock instead. Darn!
My “WTF” moment was when my next door neighbor decided to mow her lawn at 8:00am Saturday morning. And yeah, her lawn is right next to my bedroom window.
On Saturday afternoon I heard some loud, booming music outside. I opened the front door to see what was going on. As I expected, it was a “boom car,” one of those cars with a huge, powerful stereo blasting music that rattles the chandeliers and blows the birds outta the trees. But this boom car was playing grand opera. Instead of the usual rap or rock, Mozart’s Don Giovanni was pulsing out of the car.
I live in Central Virginia, so you can imagine my surprise when my daughter came inside and said, “Daddy, there’s an ostrich in our yard.”
A neigbhoring farm is a sort of animal shelter (the people take in abused or unwanted animals) and they had recently obtained an emu. I went outside and the damn thing was wandering across the yard. They have some pretty nasty looking feet and I didn’t want to get kicked, so I called the neighbors and asked if they had misplaced their emu.
The weirdest thing I had was we had a (small) fire in the office last week. As we were being evacuated, we overheard a snippet of conversation, “It’s a fire! Just like in Larry’s office, last year!”
In the new housing development they’re erecting down the road from us, the developer commissioned an artist to make a piece of sculpture to put on the “island” at the center of a traffic circle. The art was “pornographic,” according to the residents, because it had pictures of naked women on it. I said WTF for two reasons: one, naked women in art doesn’t automatically make it pornography, and two, why would a developer of a neighborhood meant for families with small children commission such a sculpture, when the result was so predictable?
Upon hearing of this, my mom and I immediately went over to see the “pornographic” sculpture. When we got there, we found a worker there sanding the images off the (otherwise ugly) sculpture.
My mom (a 60 year old librarian) rolled down the window and yelled, “Hey, I’m here to see the porno! Where’s the porno?!?”
The worker laughed so hard I thought he’d wet himself.
A neighbor of mine (chronicly underemployed and habitually drunk) collected colored bowling balls for years. Originally they were spaced out under the bushes along the front of his house.
Eventually he had enough and built a three foot tall pyramid of bowling balls on his front lawn. Odd, but not as tacky as it could have been.
The WTF moment was the morning this summer when they were gone. Somebody in the middle of the night carted off a couple dozen bowling balls.
Poor guy was heartbroken and still tears up whenever somebody mentions it.
I saw a pair of Mallard ducks (one male, one female) sitting in a neighbors yard. The odd thing is, there isn’t a pond, lake, creek or river within 6 miles of our house.
I guess they got tired of flying and just landed there for a break? Who knows.
I walk along a scenic coastal route in the mornings and there is a big rock right off the cliffs where cormorants and pelicans like to roost. Some time ago, someone took to putting large sculptures of random objects on the top of it from time to time. We’ve had a giant crab, an Easter Island head, a festive Christmas tree, among other things. Eventually they fall apart or get taken down. I’m not sure how they get out there. The rock is very tall and steep.
Yesterday was the debut of a large orange-winged pterodactyl. The birds were avoiding the place, for some reason.
:eek: Seems that his friends had dumped him out of the car a few miles from home.