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Saturday, April 6, 2013

Two quirky signs from a road trip

Road trips always give me an opportunity to spot weird things. Here's yet another lucky shot from a trip through the SE part of the country:

South... West... North!

Yes, through the magic of overhead signs, we wind up going south, west, and north all at the same time. Usually you see these things in pairs with a "corner" that makes sense (north and west, south and east, that sort of thing), but the third one here makes it extra-special.

I came up with this little doodle to possibly explain it:

Three routes, one road

Notice my little mistake up by the "55" - it's a bit of a mind-twister when you think about it, and I put the arrow on the wrong end initially. Oops.

I guess there must be a narrow spot where it made more sense to stack all of these things on the same road instead of letting them go their separate ways. Now I want to find some place where someone managed to get all four cardinal directions on the same stretch. I'd award bonus points if they put huge electric coils in the pavement to screw up any compasses in your car. Call it the "Bermuda Triangle Road".

...

Loosely related to the above pic is this one from the same trip. It does sport a wacky sign, so I guess it fits with my usual collections of strangeness. In this case, "Bar-B-Que" aptly describes what happened.

Bar-B-Que, indeed

I'd call that a char-broiled restaurant.

Wasn't there some folk tale about the guy who burned down his house while trying to cook something, and while he lost the house, the food turned out to be amazing? So every time he wanted to make amazing food after that, he built a new house and burned it down?

Doesn't that sound a lot like the software business? Hmmmm! It's sort of like the whole cargo cult thing, only modified for kid consumption.

I can't seem to find any notion of this story online. If you know what I'm talking about, would you please send me a note? Thanks!