Alternate caption: On the Internet, no one know you’re not a dog.

Presumably this institution is designed to serve the needs of Santa Clauses who subsist on Ho-Hos.

Insert your own joke about renting politicians.

(Sorry about the image quality; it was across an intersection, so it was pretty small on the original image. I didn’t even resize it. It’s just cropped. Yeah, my camera isn’t that fantastic once you get down to a 1:1 pixel view)

Wait a minute… how does one lease a tax refund?

This seemed appropriate for a trip to a comic convention. And like the Sylar Industries sign I posted earlier, all it needed was a little adjustment. Can you get a room with the power cosmic? Found in San Simeon, across the highway from our motel. (Keep in mind as you read on that the one on the right is the only doctored photo in the post.)

My personal favorite was this one in Sunnyvale. It’s always nice when city planners (or anyone making a sign, really) have a sense of humor.

Perhaps Mr. Speeder was frustrated by driving this street, somewhere near San Luis Obispo:

This was found in Napa Valley. It was trying to indicate making a U-turn, but the circular arrow brings to mind either old recycling symbols, or directions telling you to spin in place. I guess if your car’s turning radius is too wide, you don’t get the information?

And then there it was: the tourist information center…and deli.

With wine tasting, of course. This place made me wonder whether wine tasting in Napa Valley might be like slot machines in the Las Vegas area, with every little store making it available. This turned out not to be the case. (Apologies to anyone reading this who is disappointed!)

NUMMI (in Fremont, on the east side of San Francisco Bay) is actually a car factory, a joint venture between GM and Toyota. But “Nummy” brings to mind images of food, probably baked goods or something sweet. Or else Wesley Windham-Price, impersonating Angel, talked into drinking blood or blowing his cover, exclaiming, “Dear God! That’s… nummy!”

Which brings us to this:

After we checked into our hotel in San Francisco proper, we met up with my brother at Powell St. Station. He explained the intricacies of getting a MUNI ticket when you didn’t have enough quarters, which involved (IIRC) going to the BART ticket machine, getting change, then going back to the MUNI entrance with the quarters. (It’s been a month, I’m probably misremembering it.) In any case, while we were waiting for the appropriate train to arrive, I looked at the subway map, and noticed that they’d made a spelling error on Sunnyvale [edit: it's a street name; see below]. It was all the more funny because the the past two weeks, I’d been repeatedly calling the city Sunnydale myself! Too much Buffy, I suppose…

This was at a snack bar on the grounds of the Winchester Mystery House, right next to the gift shop (which is, otherwise at least, much classier today than I remember it being when I was a kid). Fortunately, there are worse ways to misspell popcorn.

This next item was found in a book of menus for restaurants in Cambria and San Simeon. Hmm, could a Louisinana be a banana from Louisiana?

Appropriately enough, this was found at the end of stay in San Francisco. And of course, it’s Howards End.

There was surprising variation in “Wash your hands!” restroom signs up and down the coast. Here in the LA/OC area, they’re usually just “Wash Your Hands” in English and Spanish, sometimes getting as elaborate as “Employees must wash hands before returning to work.” Counties in central California made an effort to explain why it’s necessary to wash your hands. Then there was this cartoony one in downtown Napa:

Wash your hands, or the angry chef will get you!

Being Heroes fans, we couldn’t resist. Not only was the name just one letter off of the show’s popular villain, but the elongated S in the logo was just begging for a trio of crosspieces to turn it into the helix symbol that appears everywhere in the show. A bit of photo-manipulation later:

Better something modular and easy to get at (well, except for the one stripped screw) than something intrinsic to the machine. Under the circumstances, I’m just having the shop replace it.

Though I guess I should’ve known better than to trust this guy:

moar humorous pics

(Check out the original lolcat post if you don’t recognize the phrasing.)

Assuming the box continues to pass diagnostics with the new memory, I should be able to pick it up at lunch on Monday.

Update: Success! The computer is back, and working again!

According to Katie, this actually said “quick sins” the previous time we drove past it!

This shot almost cost us our new car. The sign faces the freeway, and rather than stick Katie with shooting from a moving vehicle at night, I tried to find a good angle from the parking lot. We saw that the lot extended far enough to see around the corner, and headed for the end of the lot. As I prepared to turn into the last space on the end, a truck came zooming around the corner of the next building over, a Carl’s Jr. with a drive-through and absolutely no visibility. Clearly they weren’t expecting to see anyone in the lot at 10:00 at night. Fortunately we both stopped in time.

Also, I now know that the horn works.

…now you know what he does for the rest of the year!

From JMS’s Cafe Press store (the same site through which he’s selling his script books with commentary):

With the coming 2008 elections, there aren’t a lot of candidates we can agree upon. So as a public service, we are now providing a slate of candidates that will bring the country together in common cause and preserve many of this nations’ finest electoral traditions.

Slates available include Londo/G’Kar, G’Kar/Londo, and Zathras/Zathras (trained in crisis management!)

I remember having an unofficial Sheridan/Ivanova ’96 (or possibly Sheridan/Delenn) bumper sticker, but I’m fairly certain it was a homemade “Elect The Brain” (as in Pinky and the…) sticker that I actually put on my car that year.

Now if only they’d used the correct punctuation on the ’08 instead of trusting smart quotes. (That should be an apostrophe, not a left single quote.)

Okay, maybe I’ve missed a memo or something, but can someone tell me: what exactly is a new age drink? Nothing in the aisle stood out as being particularly new-agey.

I found this photo while looking for the UCI Student Center pic. This was taken on the way back from a camping trip with UCI’s Campuswide Honors Program in the Angeles National Forest in April 2000. IIRC it was along Angeles Crest Highway.

A permanent sign isn’t necessarily the best way to indicate a transitory condition.