First off, our local skywriter-for-god had a fantastic weather day the other day. Clearly not too breezy up there; some days, the first letter is blown into a smear before he’s done with the second. Also, he was kind enough to write his messages so that the viewer didn’t need to look directly into the sun to read them. You’d think this would be an obvious move, taught in Skywriting 101, but more often than not you have to squint into ol’ Sol in order to read what he’s writing.

A coworker and I had a small bicker about whether or not the skywriter himself/herself is the actual religious person, or whether it’s a rich religious person who has hired the skywriter. I vote for religious skywriter, myself. Although this picture was taken on a Sunday morning, which means if the skywriter is religious, he/she was skipping church. Hmm.

This business card, which I saw today, hits several of my design/grammar sweet spots. A hearty combination of serif and sans-serif fonts! The perilous Occasional Capitalization (because words like Butts are Very Important)! Missing hyphens galore (second-hand [or even secondhand], cancer-causing)! “Quotation marks” around “Electronic Cigarette”! And don’t forget, you can either Leave a Message, or call the other number and be yelled at by JAY (!!!!).

Lastly is one of the regular pin-traders here at Epcot. I don’t know if you know the hullabaloo about pin trading, but some adults take it very seriously. They come in and park themselves at these little cocktail tables with their ginormous binders full of pins, and hang out all day. I’ve seen this guy before, and was hoping he’d come back again. And he did! With his sparkly floor-length tail! Sadly, this time he wasn’t wearing his dogs-playing-poker cabana shirt.

People. Their variety just delights me.

Lots of construction walls are up in the Magic Kingdom, and instead of just telling us something like “This area is being refurbished for your enjoyment”, they have signs on them with inspirational quotes. The grammar on this one perplexes me. I think the period after the first word should actually be a comma, to make this one complete sentence. Either that, or an additional word needs to be socked in there, like “it” after “me” — although “Togetherness. For me, it means teamwork.” still sounds awkward. I’m sticking with my preferred two-comma, one-sentence approach.

And you know what? Don’t even get me started on the font. What a weird mishmash of lowercase and uppercase letters.

There really should be a “People of Costco” photoblog. I never see anyone weird enough at Wal*Mart, but there are frequently good snaps to be taken at Costco. This guy was totally into the pool table display. That’s right, this guy. And did you know, I have a phobia about ultra-long, untrimmed hair? Can’t stand the idea of it touching me. Neatly trimmed and well-kept isn’t nearly as bad, but when you can tell they haven’t had a haircut in a decade? Ewwwww.

This display was at a McDonald’s out on the coast. They had their Easter display all set up, with the glitzy tinsel cross and the creepy, doughy bunny. Both of which seemed inappropriate for a McDonald’s.

Last but not least, I visited the mall with a buddy this last week. And we always like to try on weird and unusual things. I paired together this ribbon-shouldered shirt (Tommy Hilfiger, forty bucks!) with some ghastly plaid shorts — the waistband is almost all the way up to lower boobsville. Add in some ankle socks and sandals, and I think I could fit in with the best of the tourists.

Sherwin-Williams Van

Is anybody else horrified by the Sherwin-Williams logo? They want to “Cover the Earth” with paint! How environmentally-friendly is that? Every person, animal, and object would end up like that chick at the beginning of Goldfinger (and according to my other half, in the original book of Goldfinger, the whole painted-chick thing [along with most of the other good action stuff] doesn’t happen).

No Peaking Playing Cards

We saw these playing cards at a Pier 1 store right before Xmas, in with all of the other crappy little gifties. I don’t mind round playing cards; what I do mind is the concept of not “peaking” at the cards, a homonym error mentioned by The Rejectionist just yesterday.

We also put up our fake holiday tree. Pictures to come in a future post. So far, the cats have been slightly interested, but not overly so. We worried they’d want to climb up inside it, or chew it up, which is why we got the super-cheap starter tree. So far, so good. A couple of other items are coming up this week: some experimental food, as well as a new project I’m getting ready to start.

From the camera phone this week, I have the following items:

All hail the Jebus.

I was driving behind this bus for a while on my way into work. What with the script they used, at first look I thought it said “JE BUS” on the back. Which made the Homer Simpson within me laugh.

Web sites and closers and tarot, oh my!

Here in Orlando, you can count on seeing these throwaway signs on the side of every road. I always pass this popular spot on my way in to work, and I had to wonder: what kind of Web site are they offering for $299? Since you can get a domain for five bucks, and hosting for another two bucks per month, I have to hope there’s all sorts of databases and shopping carts and fancy crap involved. I’ve also sent this picture over to Lowercase L for the “ClOSERS ONlY” sign.

Mission STS-129, Shuttle Atlantis

Last but not least, we had a shuttle launch last week. It’s still surreal to see these things in real life, instead of on TV. I was on a break when it launched, so I was able to head up from the tunnel and watch. It’s also cool to have everyone in the park stop and watch and applaud.

She dreamed a dream in time gone by.

On this week’s Dancing with the Stars results show, Susan Boyle sang “I Dreamed a Dream”. What was especially strange was this shot, where her giant head loomed over the two dancers. It reminded me distinctly of one of Scott’s favorite YouTube videos, Telly Savalas doing a spoken-word rendition of Bread’s “If”. Scott loves that video so much, he did a comic strip mocking it. The whole thing has become terribly meta.

Crayon is bad. Smeared crayon is worse.

Next up is this example of fabulous “parenting” spotted at a local restaurant. This little girl drew all over the glass window with crayons. At no point did either adult tell her to stop. The servers didn’t tell her to stop either, but that’s not surprising; they probably have a policy about letting this kind of thing happen and cleaning it up later, so the customers don’t get irate at having their parenting skillz called into question. At this point of the meal, the little girl took a napkin soaked in water and smeared the crayon wax all over the window, making an even bigger mess.

Vinegar. Vingar. Vingr. Vinnygur?

Last but not least, this is a menu that was shoved under our door by the good people at “NY Style Pizzeria”. As you can see, they can’t decide how a vinaigrette is spelled, but they’re covering all of their bases. None of which is the correct base. By the way, did you know that a vinaigrette doesn’t need to contain vinegar? Any acid (like a citrus juice) will do. Dear NY Style Pizzeria: just call it “house Italian”. But be sure to capitalize “Italian”.

Rules of Conduct

The list goes on, it’s about 20 items long. But the second item really caught my eye — seems to me that if I’m skating in a “wreckless” manner, that’s a GOOD thing. Wreckless skaters don’t skate in a reckless manner, that’s for sure.

I see decals of “the shocker” all the time on cars. This is my first time spotting this hand signal. Does anyone know what this is? I’ve tried making this sign, and it cramps my fingers. What the?

Hurt in accident? We help! We nice nurse lady, mean officer! Maybe call good helper lawyer man!

Me also capitalize preposition.

This could be read two ways. The company could be called “JUS BLAZE,” with the crafty use of a dollar sign in place of the letter S. Granted, that doesn’t make any sense as far as grammar or spelling or anything.  Or, it could just have an artsy dollar sign to separate the words “JU BLAZE.” 

I really, really hope it’s the first one.