It's Steve (now in blog form)

My obsessions with signs continues. Here are some I’ve come across recently.

Caught this in Toon Town at Disney Land.  The economic meltdown is much further reaching than I’d imagined.

The cafeteria at work sold me this when I asked for green Jell-o.  This is definitely not Jell-o.  It has been my experience that when food comes with a cartoon character wearing a sombrero, that’s the international sign for diarrhea. 

You should be careful of guard arms in parking lots

Special thanks go to Jake for shooting this one over.  I like labels that clearly show the item’s function.

Being the paragon of fertility that I am, we’ve got another baby due in September.  Very exciting stuff.  Here’s his (and I specifically say his because I’m not sure if I could handle the idea of a girl given that they often become teenagers at some point) first picture:

I’m hoping that down the road he will look like this:

Ben is thoroughly engaged/zombified with some Curious George, so I have a chance to bang out some posts. Crazy kid has decided that he should pick out his own outfits.  This morning was wearing a lovely wetsuit and t-shirt ensemble.  Here are some of the winners recently.

The look that says “Hey, I’m preppy, prepared for rain, and pantsless.”

Stickers are a great accessory when you have footie jammies.

I’m Superman!

I’m Superman without pants!

Here’s a weird one.  I recently finished the Cryptonomicon (the first 800 or so pages were great.  The last 20 were just terrible).  Anyway, Douglas Shaftoe is one of the main characters in the book.  The weird part is that a couple days after finishing the read, I’m now being followed on Twitter by this fictional character who only tweets segments of the book.  Very strange.  Check him out.

The bit I’m trying to sort out is what mechanism triggered the follow.  I’m using Living Social these days to catalog my reading activities, but I’m not sure how the leap was made from there to my twitter account.  Going to have to do some digging.

Ebay is more than just the central hub of the illegal ivory trade, it also has some really incredible things now and again.  I just got something really cool.  The last time I was in Vegas I came across an odd shop in the Venetian.  It sells antiquities; ancient coins, helmets, jewelry, etc.  They also introduced me to the Roman archer’s ring.

Let me bore you for a minute with the details.  Western archers shoot off of their index, middle, and ring fingers.  Eastern archers shoot off the thumb.  Turns out that ancient Roman archers utilized the thumb technique as well.  They protected their thumbs with a specialized archer’s ring that lined in the inner length of the thumb with bronze.  

I didn’t even know that these existed until I saw the one in Vegas for $600.  Vegas shops are always a rip off so I headed to ebay.  Turns out that they are pretty readily available given the fact that they were so common.  After a few failed auctions I finally just won one for $60 with shipping.  It’s from the 1st to 4th century AD found in the Balkans (going to try and get more details to place which provence of the eastern Roman empire  that would be).

Here are some pics.  So cool.

How many times am I going to have to repeat myself about this?  Ok, one more time for those of you who haven’t been listening.  If you’re going to smuggle animals on long international flights, your pants are not the best place to hide them.  See how simple a concept that is?

A while back I covered a man with his britches full of monkeys.  Now we’ve got pigeons.  Wow.

Australian man caught with pigeons in trousers
MELBOURNE (AFP) – An Australian man was caught with two live pigeons stuffed in his trousers as he got off a flight from the Middle East, authorities said Tuesday.  [read full story]