The blankest blank

Greetings, homepeople of the internets. I hope that all is well with you and that this webpage finds you in good spirits. If not, you might want to come back another time when you're feeling more jovial because you might enjoy this more in a better state of mind. Disirregardless, Happy Friday. I hope this is your happiest Friday of the entire week.

While that last sentence might have seemed just like a typical "Peter being weird and not having a backspace key" thing to say, there's actually more to it (insert dramatic chord here). You see, the structure of that last sentence is actually representative of the theme for this post. Intrigued? No? If I said there was some kind of grand prize drawing at the end of the post, would you be intrigued then? That's not going to happen, but I was curious to see if that would make a difference for future UOPTA offerings.

I was traveling earlier this week, and not in the basketball infraction sense. Rather, I was on an airplane. While mid-flight, I looked out the window and saw a very cool cloud cover below. It almost looked like a herd of white buffalo, if you can imagine that. I don't normally see animals where they don't really exist, but this stuck out and encouraged me to look some more at the things in the scenery below. I was trying to make very quick decisions about what things looked like. For example, as soon as I saw land below that was roughly triangular, I forced myself to make a connection immediately, which led to me settling on the fairly boring "slice of pizza" association.

(Crap, here's a quick side note that is so parenthetical that I'm putting the whole thing in...ya know, those rounded brackets. Anyway, my friend Dusty and I used to play a very similar game, but with people instead of objects seen from a plane. We'd be walking down a city street and force ourselves to make extremely quick comments about who the strangers approaching us resembled. Bald guys were often Telly Savalas, naturally, and anyone with a beard looked like Dusty's dad to me. We'd get pretty out there sometimes, but the point was that we had to say something for each person. That might lead to me saying that an old Asian woman looked like Jimmy Smits, but hey, those things are bound to happen.)

Back to the plane and making those instant associations. I glanced out and saw a rectangular piece of land with a couple of smaller boxes near one end. "Ah, Storke Tower," I thought, referencing a landmark on UC Santa Barbara's campus. Then my inner tour guide took over, and I couldn't help but follow my own thought with, "The tallest concrete structure in the tri-county area." That was an "interesting fact" to share with students and their parents while showing them around. I always found that fact to be funny because of the number of qualifiers in it. It's not the tallest structure, but the tallest concrete one. And not in California or even the Central Coast of California, but just the areas of San Luis Obispo, Santa Barbara, and Ventura counties. So you see, the superlative's impressiveness is mitigated quite a bit by the phrase's limiting factors. You can't argue with the factual nature of the statement (like the happiest Friday of the entire week), but it's not quite jaw-dropping.

After I spent a minute thinking about Storke Tower, I thought about another landmark near our old home of SB. While driving along a bridge a little ways out of town, my lovely wife said something that I've never let her forget: "This is the somethingest bridge...somewhere," she said. She didn't quite remember if it was the longest bridge of whatever kind it was or maybe the highest elevation of its kind, but definitely the somethingest. And as for where, it was either California, the United States, or Earth. The last time we were on it, we noted the name and said we try to figure it out. So I did a few Google searches, and I mostly found out that a lot of people use that location for committing suicide. However, I also came across this nugget from someone's personal site: "I took...Cold Springs bridge, which is special for some reason like 'longest single arch span' or something like that. I'm not sure, haven't stopped and read the sign in like 30 years." I found a bunch of other sites that list cold hard facts about the bridge, but no superlatives so far. I guess I'll have to stop and read the sign next time. By the way, here's what it looks like as it connects Santa Barbara to Santa Ynez:

As I stared out my tiny airplane window, I wondered what other blankest blanks I knew of. Less than one second later, I had my answer. Everyone who has ever driven from Los Angeles to Las Vegas already knows what I'm going to say, but that's never stopped me before. Yes, in the tiny-ass town of Baker, there stands The World's Largest Thermometer. As its Wikipedia page points out, it's technically an electric sign and not a true thermometer, but I guess World's Largest Electric Sign That Shows the Temperature was too cumbersome. Dusty and I once joked that we should pool our money to build a thermometer that's one inch longer, just as a giant "fuck you" to the town of Baker. We have nothing against that town, but to know that we could take away the entire town's claim to fame is a powerful feeling. Then we talked about also making it a cross, since Effington, Illinois proudly claims to have the largest one of those. Just by building one giant cross-shaped thermometer, we could virtually wipe two cities off the trivia map. Sure, it would be mean, but I'd probably get some decent press out of it.

As I perused Wikipedia's list of largest roadside attractions (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_world%27s_largest_roadside_attractions), I have to admit that quite a few made me ask aloud, "But...why?" Some sound cool, like the paper airplane in Mukilteo, Washington or the kaleidoscope in Mt. Tremper, New York. But I could do without the World's Largest Hairball in Garden City, Kansas or the World's Largest Raisin Box in Kingsburg, California. Those just make me ask questions that I really don't want answered ("Whose hair? Was it coughed up? Are there giant raisins inside? If not, then is it only a "raisin box" because you wrote "raisins" on it?) I guess people need hobbies, and building giant shit seems to be a popular one. I encourage you to check that list out, because it's fairly stupefying. Let me know if you have any favorites or ones that you've actually seen.

Without any further ado (since I believe I've already adone enough), let's see what the Car Watch has in store for us today.

I saw a bumper sticker that struck me as either...well, first I'll just tell you what it said: "Caution, I stop at all stop signs." The way it was written led me to believe that it was trying to be funny, because it sort of looked like those stupid "I brake for (insert something moronic)" stickers. But I don't get the joke. Could it seriously be someone warning cars behind him or her? "Look out, Mr. Tailgater and Mrs. Happy-Honker. You see that red octagon over there? Well I intend to do my (Honda) civic duty and make a full and complete stop before the white line on the road. Then I'm going to look both ways and maybe even wait an extra beat before I slowly accelerate again to normal driving speeds. If you can't handle the way I plan on following the laws that govern us as automobile users, then I kindly suggest that you take another street." I think I'd prefer the not-funny joke to the latter interpretation. (You can't spell interpretation' without Peter, don't ya know.)

My homey Rockabye sent me a bumper sticker that left me a wee bit confused. It read,
Penguins next 5KM." Considering this was in Los Angeles, that simply was factually inaccurate. Even if we were in a penguin's natural habitat, why select that distance? If I were to go 5.1 kilometers, would I get through the throng of penguins and find myself in a flightless bird free zone? There are the things that keep me up at night. Well, that wondering if Throng of Penguins makes a better band name than Giant Cross-Shaped Thermometer.

Lastly, I saw a plate and seriously did a triple-take. I shit you not, friends. It read, "8 BOOGER." To be perfectly honest, I probably would've included the plate with any number in front of "booger," because that's funny enough by itself. But when you have a number that sounds like the past tense of "eat," well that's just high comedy, folks.

And with that, I have completed my September 2008 posts. I'll be back here next week with more thoughts and stories about stuff that I've thought about. If you celebrate Rosh Hashanah, have a happy one starting Monday at sundown. If you don't celebrate it, I hope you still have a happy sundown on Monday. I'm a caring guy, what can I say? And happy half-birthday to my co-worker Rob next Thursday. As always, please write to ptklein@gmail.com with absolutely anything at all. Shaloha, and see you next Friday.