Sunday, April 06, 2003

Signage - The Underappreciated Surrealist

Signage - The Underappreciated Surrealist

Highway 24 runs through Berkeley, under the Berkeley Hills, out into Moraga on the other side and all the way to Walnut Creek and the domain of the rampant suburb.  Once you’re through the Caldecott Tunnel and emerge into Contra Costa county near Orinda and Rheem, the landscape is bucolic and beautiful, with voluptuously rounded hills furrowed with deep crevasses dotted with a light blanket of oaks and scrub.... It’s a lovely area through which to drive at high speed on a ten-lane freeway.  But there’s a sign on that road that detracts from all this gorgeousness - “Rheem St. Mary’s College!” Okay I put the exclamation point in there but it’s obviously a typo that it was left out.  It’s less a road sign than a command directive.  It either makes me giggle or shout back, “Yeah, and screw Cal State Hayward too!”

Meanwhile, on my street yesterday I saw a big piece of industrial equipment hitched up to a big ol’ truck - I wasn’t even really sure what it was.  Well, the name should have clued me in - not King Katt, that’s typical construction-site self-adulatory anthropomorphization (that’s what you though too, wasn’t it, just typical), but the company name - of course it’s an industrial pump. 

MORAL: It’s so worth it to read pretty much everything you see - if only for an occasional laugh.