With equal nods to semiology and humor, I welcome you to the best of the Evansville region’s signs––or “signage,” as the bureaucrats might say. And I’ll throw in a few other signs from around the country and the world, just to give the whole experiment breadth and depth.
After all, does anything reveal the tempo of the times more clearly than the print media we choose to display?
Add a pinch of context, and what we have is our populace revealed and our social mores on parade...
Enjoy!
The local elementary school, spring 2008. I will charitably assume the sign was not posted by a teacher. The sign remained, however, unedited, unfixed, unchanged, for an entire week.
As if a Hooter Girl were a species instead of a restaurant employee with a tight top and a specific sort of figure. Ah, beauty and brains!
A chicken-and-egg scenario if ever I heard one...
Photo date: 11/4/2008, a.k.a. Election Day.
Looks to me as if PepsiCo and Coca-Cola are the winners here. Can you guess the date?
And who was this sign intended for? Taken at Chatsworth Hall, UK, April, 2007––which I freely admit is not the same thing as Evansville. Not even remotely.
Do you trust the pink elephant? Even Dumbo, not the brightest of lights, didn’t trust pink elephants. Yet here we have a local coffee shop & car wash combo that also dares to rent signs, elephants included. But not, apparently, spellcheck.
R.I.P.
So did anyone at Droste’s pass that ninth grade quiz on misplaced modifiers?
This place is for real. Corner of Washington and Green River Road. If I showed this on TV or posted it at large on the web, I imagine people would be screaming “Photoshop! Doctored!” But it isn’t. This is just...reality. The truth behind the sign is that the lingerie cum sex shop next door decided to start using the insurance company’s sign once the insurance company went out of business.
Well, and good luck to ya’! (Photo credit: James Carwile)
Less than a mile from my home stands the only hair salon owned and operated by, apparently, Steven Wright.
Sometimes aesthetics aren’t the point. Taken in early 2009.
Talk about a negative attitude! Taken near the Alhambra in Granada, Spain.
Indeed.
This is part of a sign displayed in the Museum of Communication in Berlin. Just up the street is Checkpoint Charlie.
Anti-G8 graffiti is fairly common in Europe, especially once you get away from the scrub and polish of any given tourist sector. This one, however, stayed with me longer than most, and not merely because I snapped a photograph. There’s something about the image of Snow White with a machine gun, the sudden arming of Disney, that ultimate exponent of American culture...
To quote Leonard Cohen, “I have seen the future. It is murder.”
The translation, for those who don’t speak British: “Proceed slowly in your automobile, and sound your horn. No one on the other side of this five-hundred-year-old stone wall can see or hear you coming.”
From Chatsworth Hall, Derbyshire.
