Signs. And wonders.

Me, blogging

Hiya. Happy Cinco de Mayo. I would have written that en español, but I’ve been informed by some people with too much time on their hands that it’s not really a generally-observed Mexican holiday, but only an excuse to eat tacos and guacamole, and drink Coronas and margaritas. To which I respectfully respond: and your point is…?

Anyway, today’s subject is signs. Also pictograms, which are just signs made by third graders. I have an extensive collection to share with you today, and by “extensive” I mean three.

My pal Tommy recently bought a tractor, and I drove it. It has cruise control, because when you’re going three miles per hour, you can’t be distracted by having to keep your foot on a pedal. Although now that I think about it, I can’t remember if the throttle was foot-controlled. But I digress.

The tractor is covered with pictograms, mostly attempting to describe all the potentially fatal things one can suffer while driving a tractor (of which there are many; the primary purpose of owning a tractor is apparently not to drive it), but mainly succeeding in being unintentionally hilarious. OK, amusing.

Like this one:

Frankly, I can’t think of many things a tractor is better suited for than an exciting game of catch using a beach ball.

Here’s the actual uncropped but much less fun sign.

I still like “use this tractor with a beach ball” better.

Then there’s this one, inscribed on a tube affixed to the deck of the tractor and which, frankly, took four of us chronologically adult persons several minutes of collective conjecture before we figured it out.

For the life of me, I can’t imagine why the graphic designer thought that a pictogram instructing the tractor operator to pick up and drink a thermos of coffee, then read a book, and then put the thermos down could possibly ever be interpreted as “open this tube to read the tractor manual.”

Finally, while this isn’t technically a sign or even a pictogram, it’s close enough and this is my blog. We recently received a FedEx delivery and apparently our location is still something of a mystery to that company’s GPS system. Some enterprising logistics specialist determined that the treeware solution was the ideal approach to making sure the package arrived at the indended destination. In this digital age, it’s nice to know that analog still works.