10

There are 10 cell phone stores/kiosks in the Vintage Faire mall in Modesto. That's not counting either Radio Shack or Circuit City, which of course both also sell cell phones.

Douglas Adams loved physics, but in the radio series of Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy he also explained an economic phenomenon called the Shoe Event Horizon. The Shoe Event Horizon is the tipping point in a civilization's economic development when shoe shops overtake all other production, so that it becomes unviable to build anything but shoe shops. As a result, the economy and civilization collapse and everyone who survives evolves into birds.

Obviously he was right, he just had the wrong product at the center of the theory. But to be fair, cell phones didn't exist when he wrote Hitchhiker's Guide. At the current rate, by 2011 every shop in the mall will be a cell phone store, and all anyone will do is work selling cell phones to one another.

I am not a fan. I don't desire an iPhone, or a camera phone, or a Blackberry. We have a pre-paid cell phone we only use while driving to LA, to report on our progress or the smog level in Bakersfield (on a scale from Totally Obscured By Brown Air to Instant Death). But even I felt like I should have a more up-to-date and snazzier phone, passing all those damn stores - all of them busy, by the way.

hunh? huh? go 'way, I'm tired

Yesterday my loveliest and I got up at 7 and drove to Yosemite, with the express purpose of hiking up to the top of Vernal Falls via the Mist Trail. This is my favorite hike. In the spring the trail is soaked by the water bouncing off the rocks below the falls, but in late summer in a dry year, it looks like this:

Check out that waterfall rainbow.

To get to the falls you hike from the floor of Yosemite Valley up around 1000 feet. At times, this is a steep climb, as for instance on the steps:

A closer look reveals that the tiny dots below us are in fact other hikers. There are 550 steps.



Then, after a long day's driving and hiking, we ate pasta and stayed up until 3 to see the eclipse of the moon, and I took these riveting and lousy pictures.

Earth eating the moon.

Moon eaten. (By the way, this is the best shot I got of the red, shadowed moon, partly due to my inability to stay completely still, but I think also due to the poor quality of our digital camera, a Pixblecch 3000.)

adding to the list

Doc Nagel's Top 100 Things

78. Lists. I just love 'em. Why, look right here: a list! I have often said there are two kinds of people in the world: people who list and deranged sickospeople who don't. Like the standup comic Rick Reynolds, I put things on my to-do list that I've already done, just to scratch them off. I sometimes also put things on my list that I wouldn't need to remind myself to do, or to give myself credit for being productive because my list looks like this:

- write to do list
- finish Pro Ethics syllabus
- eat lunch
- pick up campus mail
- write blog entry
- play guitar
- play other guitar

See? I'm more than halfway finished with my tasks for the afternoon!

77. Joke mottoes for towns. I just love 'em. Around here, the reference point is usually the visually and olfactorily appalling Tracy, which one could drive through on the way to and from the Bay Area. Once through Tracy, heading east, you hit Manteca, which prompted the Manteca motto: "It's no Tracy." Modesto became "Modesto: At Least It Ain't Stockton" (alternately, "No Me Modesto"). Yesterday we went to Lodi to go to a wedding, prompting the (obvious, I suppose) "Lodi: Oh Lord" (honorable mention to "Lodi: I'm Stuck!"). Then of course there's Sacramento, "The Town So Nice, They Named It Sac."

For years, I've called Turlock "Land of a Thousand Smells," but lately I've realized the city hobnobbers wouldn't go for this, so I'm thinking of proposing "Turlock: Nicer Than Tracy." Which is true, but is also sort of like saying "more enjoyable than having holes drilled in your face."

dem things, dem dry things

And now a couple more of

Doc Nagel's Top 100 Things

80. Gin and tonics. I just love 'em. Back in the wild days of my misspent youth, we would gather together for meetings of what we called the PhDC - the Philosophers' Drinking Club - at UNC Charlotte. At some point, for reasons that the ages have made obscure, etched though they are in the firmament, we decided that the official drink of the PhDC was the gin and tonic. This makes sense on a number of levels, not least of which is that, as PhDC co-founder Jim "The Most Optimistic Man In America, And That Includes John McCain" Williams has said, it is the alcoholic salt of the earth.

But don't listen to us. Listen to Douglas Adams, who noted in The Restaurant at the End of the Universe that "85 percent of all known worlds in the Galaxy" have some homophonic drink, whether it be "jynnan tonnyx" or "jinond-o-nicks," or my personal favorite, "gee-N-N-T'N-ix."

Gin and tonics are terrific accompaniments to Macanudo Ascots, and are best served outdoors, in warm weather, with good company.

79. First days of semesters. I just love 'em. I'm also petrified of 'em. There's just under 2 weeks left before the first day of fall classes. Am I ready? Does the Pope shit in the woods?

But that's not the reason I'm petrified. I can do more academic prep work in an afternoon than most people can do in a month. I am the Philosopher-Chef, and I sauté knowledge.

No, I'm petrified in the way you were petrified before the start of 4th grade, when you were aware enough of the whole school politics scene that you knew somehow it mattered if the other kids didn't like you. To this day, having taught now for (holy freakin' Gordie Howe) 15 years in one capacity or another, I still face the first day with that nervous feeling. And it matters so much less for me if my students don't like me, really. We'll be rid of each other in 14 weeks.

But it's fun, too. The jitters are sorta yummy. Everything is fresh, too. I'm trying new things, they haven't heard any of my jokes, I've got new jokes prepped. At Cow State Santa Claus there is an annual start-of-fall General Faculty Meeting, which I'm sure dates back to the days when the university held classes at the county fairgrounds and everybody ate dinner together once a month at somebody's house. New faculty (full-time faculty, that is) are introduced to all the assembled academics, college by college and department by department. It's as corny as Hee-Haw, but I love it. I'm a sucker for pomp, circumstance, and the idea that universities could actually be communities, even at this late date in the irreversible, irrevocable, ineluctable bureaucratization of the social world. Velvet cage, indeed.

2 reports from the "what could possibly go wrong?" department

Say you're a large toy "manufacturer," like Hasbro. You find that one of your main costs is labor, and that subcontracting the actual manufacture of your products to another country, say China, reduces your labor cost. By like 90%. You might find this a really attractive option, and hey, what could possibly go wrong?

Well, they might do things a little differently in China, use lead-based paint for instance. And it might turn out that labor conditions are extremely bad, and someone might eventually point this out, to your possible embarrassment.

Better yet, say you're a bank. You find that as housing prices escalated throughout the 1990s and early 2000s, and as income stagnated or dropped in real terms (as it has overall since the early 1970s), fewer and fewer people can afford to buy houses. This is inconvenient, since mortgages are such a solid profit-maker. So you might decide to offer mortgages with unique features to attract customers, like a $400,000 loan with payments starting at $1200 a month. Then, when you've got a deal made, you raise the interest and payments to about $3500 a month. What could possibly go wrong?

On the other hand, if all the other banks do it too, and if nobody's really backing these loans with actual money, you might create a gigantic international mortgage and banking crisis. And you might have to close your own mortgage branch. Oops!

more things

Doc Nagel's Top 100 Things

82. Macanudo Ascots. I just love 'em. Yes, from time to time Doc Nagel smokes cigars. This isn't a recommendation. But it's just a nice sensation. I especially like the maduro variety of the little ascots. I associate smoking cigars with being outdoors in good weather, mainly because I have never wanted smoking in my home. This is because I am a non-smoker. I am a non-smoker who smokes. Everybody has contradictions.

81. Pictures of the sky. I just love 'em. Approximately 66% of photographs I take are of the sky. We get a lot of sky hereabouts, too. I took these:


dusk looking like the sky's on fire

a little later, now looking smoky and smoldering

pink and orange clouds!

birfday present!

Wednesday is my birthday, but the gifts are already piling up! Look, here's a pen and pencil set that my sister turned for me:

My sister is cooler than your sister (unless you're Zach).

things, but so much more than things

(Not that anyone pays much attention to it)

Doc Nagel's Top 100 Things

84. Letters of appointment. I just love 'em. Yesterday I got mine in the mail: three years, full time, lecturer range B. I get a three year contract because of a strong provision in the CSU-CFA collective bargaining agreement, that awards three-year deals to "temporary" faculty who have 6 years' continuous service in one department, and another three years to follow that, provided the lecturer in question hasn't strangled anybody and actually does the job reasonably well. Ah, collective bargaining.

83. Good blogs about stuff I'm interested in. For instance, The Comics Curmudgeon.

brief public service announcement

Look out! It's the masked flasher!

I don't know why, but I'm charmed by this idea. I'd never actually do it, but I'm glad he is. Plus I enjoyed the way the story was written.

them things

Doc Nagel's Top 100 Things

86. Vernal Falls and Nevada Falls trails. I just love 'em. Yosemite is my favorite place on earth, and my favorite hikes in Yosemite have been up these two continuous trails. In fact, my very favorite hike ever was up to Vernal Falls, leaving at 4:30 in the morning and hiking across the Yosemite Valley floor before making the climb. The round trip of that hike was around 7 miles, I think. It was beautiful. We were just in Yosemite yesterday, up at Glacier Point, looking down on my beloved trails. There's a telescope up at Glacier Point's geology exhibit you can use to spy on hikers at the top of the falls, dipping their tootsies in the pool of water the Merced River makes just prior to dropping off the cliff.

85. Pizza joints that sell by the slice. I just love 'em. This, like most all the items on my list so far, is a timely selection, as we've just returned from such a joint righ-cheer in our very own burg of Turlock (motto: Land of a Thousand Smells). I never really became a habitue of the local slice shop in Pittsburgh (where the term is "cut," not "slice"; they'll correct you and regard you with suspicion of being from out of town), but I always enjoyed the hangout feel and the way people would try to look and sound like tough New Yorkers.

this looks like the set-up for a joke, but I'm not the man to tell it

Just checking my RSS feeds, I saw a headline from the San Francisco Chronic-Ill about an armless man being sentenced for various driving and drug offenses. The start of the first sentence of the story is "A man with no arms and one leg who wouldn't stop driving..." and I immediately thought of those awful "What do you call a man with no arms and legs" jokes.

But read the story. This guy is someone to be reckoned with. Not only did he teach himself to drive with one leg and no arms, but apparently he managed to kick a cop, at least, he's charged with doing so.

Yeesh!

thingy

You don't think we should tax . . . ?

Doc Nagel's Top 100 Things

88. Writing/falling into new tunes. I just love 'em. If I were making a seriously concerted effort to make this list a ranking, this would probably be higher. Instead, it comes in #88 because, no sooner than we finished putting together another disc of our own stuff, but I've started writing or completed a half-dozen or so more tunes. A couple of them have been percolating a while, but two have come into being just in the last couple weeks, both of which are really promising.

I don't think of names or themes first, usually (one notable exception being "Mt. Diablo Windy Day Rag"), so I assign fairly random names to the tunes while I'm piecing them together. This time my working titles may stick, because at least in two cases they bespeak the mood of the tune: "Small Apartments In Large Cities" has a feeling that I associate with same, and is also more or less insanely complicated (there are - lessee - 26 chords in it, as of this writing); and "Working Title: Oasis" has a very satisfying habit of resolving the melody, so it feels like it could be about reaching an oasis.

I'm very nearly entirely untrained as a guitarist. I play what it occurs to me to play. I think that's what folk, rock, and blues music, and every other people's music, is really about, so I feel in good company. I had exactly 3 lessons when I was 17. Otherwise, I've learned things watching other guitarists or, in fact mainly, by spraining my wrist on the fretboard. In truth, I am able to make anything at all happen on a guitar because of three people and one animal: my loveliest, who inspired me to pick the thing up again after 13 years; my friend Jim "The Most Optimistic Man In America" "Talks Trash To Pete Townshend" Williams, from whom I learned how to find a finger-picking pattern and how to play "The Needle And The Damage Done"; my brother Mike, who was the first to show me that it's cool to play; and the cat, Morgan, who inspired an early song and who would always come to hear me play.

87. Mornings. I just love 'em.

I am not a morning person. I regard morning persons with suspicion, if not scorn. Nevertheless, I adore the morning. I love waking up. I love getting out of bed. I love morning light streaming through morning windows as I stumble down morning stairs into the morning kitchen to make ridiculously strong and badly needed coffee. I love every single thing about the morning, up to and including the ritual claw assaults and murder-by-tripping attempts of my beloved cat, Lancelot.

I even like mornings that are sickeningly early, waking to get on the road at 4 am for instance. And at that hour, or really at most any hour, I greet mornings in ill humor, but still, I love 'em.

I almost always get up before Lauren, which I also love, because one of the very finest aspects of mornings is the feeling of being the only one up in the household. Man oh man oh man, is that a great feeling. And it's one, I feel certain, you either get or you don't.

top 100 things

Yet more of

Doc Nagel's Top 100 Things

90. Going for walks. I just love 'em. Walking is, hands down, my favorite form of exercise. No, wait, let me retract that. Walking is, feet down, my favorite form of exercise. I don't walk on my hands, though if you like that kind of thing, I'll bet you have callouses I don't have.

I walk to work, as I've noted, whenever possible, which is most of the time. It's only 3.5 miles round trip, but that's more walking than a lot of people do. And I walk this much on what are quite probably unofficially the 3rd worst feet in Turlock.

We walked a couple miles today, before it got hot. It was hot enough anyway.

89. Going for day trips. I just love 'em. Yesterday we went on a day trip, driving to Turlock Lake, with the intention of swimming, not realizing that it's a bracing temperature. Today we stayed home, went for a walk (see above), and tucked into some work.

I started on a book review I'm doing for an environmental philosophy journal. I'm reviewing an anthology of papers on Merleau-Ponty and environmental philosophy, and my friend Bob has a paper in it. In fact, I knew this paper, and almost all the others, because they were mainly drawn from the Merleau-Ponty Circle conference held in St. Louis a few years ago. At that conference I made someone laugh so uncontrollably she had to leave the room to avoid completely disrupting the conference.

The speaker was someone renowned for a spiritual approach to environmentalism, including that we needed to get back to listening to the sounds and songs of the Earth, and all the rest of it. Bob regards such an approach with what I can safely say would be polite to call skepticism, so before the talk we were joking about starting to make bird noises while this guy was speaking. I offered my now years' distant friend Sally $20 if she'd do it. We laughed and laughed, and then the talk started. About halfway through, the speaker started to say we should listen to the sounds of the earth. I pulled out a $20 bill and put it on the table in front of Sally. She stifled a laugh, as did my friend Dave "Dave" Koukal. Bob retained poise. Sally and Dave recovered theirs, and then the speaker said something about birds (possibly even chickens), and I pulled out another $20 bill and put it on the table in front of Sally. She left. Dave snorted loudly, and I think Bob did too. I smiled very broadly.

Lauren is working on a special project, doing some research.

Tomorrow, we may go on another day trip, destination undecided.

things!

Still more of

Doc Nagel's Top 100 Things

94. Tom's of Maine toothpastes. I just love 'em. Lauren and I switched to them long ago. They're less sweet, have better flavors, and most of them still have flouride. My favorite of all is definitely Wintermint.

93. Wearing bright colors. I just love 'em. Over the last couple of years I've developed a serious fixation on matching the color of my shirt to my socks. This morning I'm wearing one of five green t-shirts I own, and I have three pairs of green socks to choose from. Bright colors please me. They feel joyful somehow. Plus they elicit some interesting comments. One day in a 9 am Intro to Philosophy class I overheard a student whisper to his friend "God made me come to class this morning so I could see that shirt," referring to a particularly colorful display. Whatever motivates.

92. Global knives. I just love 'em. I started buying them when I started to get serious about cooking. My knife work is decent for someone unschooled, I suppose. Because of the way we buy meat, I tend to have to break it down a bit, into reasonable quantities for us to eat, so I've become pretty good with a boning knife and a cleaver, as well.

91. Clouds. I just love 'em. I know, you do too. I never said this list would be profound.

more things? yep, more things

Onward! More of

Doc Nagel's Top 100 Things

96. Goalie masks. I just love 'em. When I was a kid playing goal, I wore glasses, so I couldn't have one of the fiberglass masks that gave goalies of the day that canvas for artistic, team-spirited, or humorous expression. I had to use a helmet and cage, which was what a few NHL goalies were starting to do. In the 80s that became the vogue, until sometime in the late 80s the current breed of hybrid masks-with-wire cages became the standard. They combine the best of each: the protection of the wire cage, the close fit of the mask, and thankfully, above all, the space for painting.

95. Farmers' markets. I just love 'em. We went to the Modesto certified farmers' market this morning, and found the usual suspects there. The potato lady had Yukon golds, 5 pounds for 5 bucks, so we picked them suckers up (which means it's gratin de pommes de terre à la dauphin night!). There were Mariposa plums, all kindsa peaches, and so forth. The MoFaMa (or rather the MoFoMa) isn't big, but the variety of stuff has gradually improved. Buying local doesn't assure you're buying sustainably or organically grown stuff (except that there are a couple certified organic growers at MoFoMa), but of the triumvirate of local, sustainable, and organic, my tendency lately has been to regard local as a trump card. It doesn't make a lot of sense to me to buy organically grown apples from Peru. And if your beans have travelled 1500 miles to come to dinner, as the average US-eaten vegetable has, I don't see how sustainable that practice really is. Hence, local.

more things

. . . part of the ongoing series

Doc Nagel's Top 100 Things

98. Blue pencils and green pens. I just love 'em. I made a deliberate choice a few years ago not to use red ink to mark or write comments on student papers. My sense was that red ink suggests a great deal of negativity, not to say bleeding from a newly-forged orifice, whereas blue pencil (the traditional mark of copy editors) suggests revisability and green ink hints of spring and growth.

97. New sets of John Pearse light guage phosphor bronze guitar strings (for a 12-string). I just love 'em. My friend Bobo the Wandering Pallbearer plays D'Addario phosphor bronze extra-lights, and I certainly see the reason why one would play them. I ordered the John Pearses as an experiment, and found the trebles smoother and the overall playability just a smidgen lighter, even in the slightly heavier weight string.

top 100 thingies

Having read Joe. My. God.'s post about the Time magazine top 100 albums list, I of course followed his link to the list, to be confused/bemused/disgusted/entertained. (I didn't put that link in this post, because I'd far rather direct random readers' attention to Joe. My. God. than to freaking Time magazine.)

Because it's Time's list, it's obviously suspect. There are albums on the list that really have to be there (Rubber Soul, Abbey Road, Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, Moondance, Kind of Blue, Joshua Tree, Goodbye Yellow Brick Road), and definitely artists who have to be there (Talking Heads, R.E.M., Neil Young), but as often as not they seem to be picking the obvious, rather than the best or even the most influential. I refuse, however, to fall into the trap of arguing with their list, because that would grant them the power to canonize that such lists aim for. Besides, I've never thought it made any sense whatsoever to argue about what should or shouldn't be in the canon. I once put together a list of 10 jazz records everybody should hear, put 12 on the list, and wrote about why you should hear them. But I did it mainly to tell someone something, and secondly for the sake of the exercise for myself. Sometimes it's fun to write about music (or indeed to dance about architecture).

It gives me an idea for a list of my own, a more comprehensive list than Time's:

Doc Nagel's Top 100 Things

I don't know if I'll be able to sustain this list, but I'll make it an occasional series (like the list of people not allowed in the house). Today, let's start with #100 and #99.

100. Binder clips. I just love 'em. Terribly useful gadgets, low tech, can hold together paper, chips bags, flour sacks. Can be used in place of clamps of various sorts in (if you'll pardon the pun) a pinch.

99. Jelly beans. I just love 'em. I especially like purple and red jelly Brachs jelly beans, but the oranges are good too. I've never been overly fond of Jelly Bellies, not least of all because of their connection to Ronald Reagan, but also because they're just not what I'm looking for in a jelly bean. Except the tangerines and the coconuts, which are sublime.

life continues . . . aaup summer institute . . .

Despite my recent demise in the new Harry Potter book, ordinary life resumed today after I got home from the AAUP Summer Institute last night. I'm normalizing as well as possible. My brain is cloudy.

The Institute was a mixed bag. There were a few minor but significant details that seemed to have been left unattended, or for reasons unknown impossible to achieve. University of Nevada at Reno has a wifi network on campus, but not in the dorms, where attendees mainly stayed. Instead, the AAUP's information said the dorms had ethernet connections, which was true, but for most people the connections weren't working (although mine was, by some fluke). The wifi connection on campus required a password-protected account, which we weren't provided. Apparently there was wireless connection in the basement of one dorm building. Other similar technical problems perfused, but the programs themselves seemed to go off without too many hitches.

I did the contract bargaining workshop, and I left with mixed feelings about that too. The presenters/facilitators took rather a long time talking about bargaining techniques, and I would rather have had time devoted to practice and to reflection on that practice. Instead, after 4 hours of lecturing to us about how to bargain, we broke into 3 pairs (management vs. labor) to negotiate on the basis of a scenario they cooked up for us, putting a lot of pressure on us with a scoring rubric to complete agreements, but not giving us much time to think about the process itself - which would seem to me to be the chief benefit of the role-play.

Of the three pairs, only ours completed the agreements on 6 out of 6 areas, and so we won the high score. I get the feeling that the others ended up stuck in a very competitive mode, and ended up not reaching compromises. Our two sides, although we bargained hard, tried to make the other side accept a deal, rather than stick to our guns. I think that was partly because both sides got something they wanted, and partly because both sides wanted badly to convince the other to agree. (In the lecture portion, the presenters told us about traditional vs. "interest-based" bargaining. Traditional bargaining is starting with positions, and compromising to reach middle ground. Interest-based is starting with expressing what each sides interests are and trying to problem-solve to help both sides achieve as much of their interests as they could. Our approach strikes me as neither of these. Our aim was to persuade the other side to take the deal, so it was sort of motivation-based. The whole time I was contemplating the labor side's psychological state of mind and set of priorities, trying to read their minds and push them and pull them to agree.)

It reminded me a little of what a professor of mine at UNC-Charlotte once called a "refrigerator" class. You get out of class, get home, open the fridge, pull out a beer - and then realize what the hell that class was all about. I can't yet quite put down in words what I have learned, but the above is close. The point is to find ways to press toward agreement, however you have to do that. (At one point our side decided to act as though we believed our budgets were about to be cut. I think that pushed the labor side to agree to a smaller raise, and as it turns out, their secret information was that our budgets were going to be cut. They may have been motivated by that information, or they may have been motivated by our posture that we knew the same thing. In my view, it doesn't matter which worked. I think that's my point.)

So anyway, Lauren got up late on Saturday, bussed over to Border's for her copy of the last HP book, and read is yesterday. We've started reading it aloud today. Five chapters later, here I am, not yet killed off in the book, and so, having blogged, ready to play guitars and then cook beef properly to get the memory of bad prime rib on the Lake Tahoe dinner cruise out of my head. (In all seriousness, this is getting to be sort of annoying: I'm routinely disappointed in any beef cooked by anyone else but me. You can't even get rare meat anywhere anymore!)

harry potter spoiler alert! harry potter spoiler alert!

The buzz about the next and allegedly last Harry Potter book is reaching a pitch that is usually reserved for Second Comings, but I'll leave that unexplored for the moment in order to announce this startling bit of news:

I die in the new Harry Potter book!

I know! I know! This was as shocking to me as it no doubt is to you! But according to reputable sources online, including iamdeadnowpleasestopspammingme.com and the Great International Chinese Communist Harry Potter Conspiracy (dot com), that miserable bitch J. K. Rowling kills me the heck off in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.

Well, first of all, BITCH!

Secondly, this makes absolutely no sense whatsoever, because (1) my death contributes nothing whatsoever to the plot; (2) I'm such a minor character that no one has ever heard of me, let alone become attached emotionally; (3) not only did my character not become more friendly with Hermione, but in fact couldn't even get friendlier with Hagrid, before this ignominious demise; (4) she didn't even have the decency to have Voldemort or Snape, or even a prominent Death Eater off me, but I had to die by misfired wand; and (5) I'm not getting paid for this!

Well!

Well!

Well, I suppose, Mizz Rowling, if that is your real name, you'll be hearing from my attorneys! (That's "solicitors" in your weirdo language, you miserable media whore!)

Wow, am I cheesed off about this. Plus I'm dead, so there's a limited amount I can do about it.

another new song posted

I posted another new one to our Soundclick page, a nicely askew song called "Falling Rocks." I enjoyed writing it. The guitar part is slightly discordant and doesn't resolve the proper way, which I love. I wanted to write a lyric that matched, and ended up writing an absurd bit of stuff while driving through heavy traffic in the Livermore Valley (the only way to travel, at least there). It fit the feeling of the song (which, if it had a working title, I don't remember it), so we put the two together. Lauren wanted an off-kilter sort of reading for her vocal, and achieved that too. This one also has an electric guitar part that you can't hear all that well, and aren't supposed to really, but it adds a dimension.

The song is not inspired by one of my favorite traffic signs. What I like about this sign is that although it's obviously supposed to mean rocks fall in this spot, I like to think of it as saying "Please park your car here so we can throw rocks on it. Thank you."