Warning signs of the times
Warning signs are like little blasts of levity in an organized, tourist-friendly world.
One of the more fun ways to kill time while waiting in long amusement park lines (as we did often during Holy Week) is to look around for humorous warning signs. This is a hobby of mine that dates back to our first visit to the Wizarding World of Harry Potter at Universal Studios down in Florida. The warning sign outside the Quidditch ride was most helpful: “Guests prone to motion sickness or dizziness should not ride.” For those not into wordy warnings, the pictorial warning was sufficient: a dude blowing chunks over the side of a railing. I’d never seen a pictorial representation of someone vomiting up pixels of puke before, so this one — delivered by “The Department of Magical Transportation,” no less — called for a Kodak moment.
Warning signs are like little blasts of levity in an organized, tourist-friendly world. We see them around everywhere — sometimes in elevators in Malaysia, warning people NOT to eat durian inside elevators in Malaysia; sometimes on Bangkok bus commode doors, urging people, in the most universally understood manner possible, not to fart. (Represented by a line drawing of a derriere emitting a powerful cloud blast, with a red arrow through it, in case you were wondering.) We were at Nara Park in Japan recently, a wonderful preserve of temples and natural beauty, and quickly found ourselves surrounded by hordes of shady-looking live deer. The 1,200 or so deer at Nara are kind of cute at first, but you get over that initial impression real fast, usually around the time they start cornering you in droves and digging their noses into your backpack or purse. When they went after my sister-in-law — who was innocently eating a snack when a couple of nasty-looking deer started tearing into her pasalubong bag, initiating a tug-of-war and eating the plastic in the process — we began to see why Louis CK calls them “rats with hooves.” This isn’t what Walt Disney had in mind, I’m pretty sure. The park has a good warning sign, though, depicting deer doing lots of un-cute, unfriendly things like kicking, biting, butting and knocking down what looks to be somebody’s lola. Can’t say you haven’t been warned.
When visiting most theme parks these days, you are obliged to witness various people carrying around and eating large turkey legs, which has become the sort of go-to theme park snack food. I don’t know if this is because theme parks remind us of medieval times, when people would wander around Ye Merry Olde Faire with roasted legs of various fowl in hand, or if turkey legs just taste damn good. But Tokyo DisneySea,
which is an immaculately run operation, draws the line at lettings guests eat turkey legs while enjoying the various rides — the sign showing a turkey leg with a red line through it makes this abundantly clear.
Japan is a treasure trove of fun signs, and most of these admittedly have to do with a slightly, well, humorous take on English, presumably for the amusement of foreign visitors. A warning outside a shrine burial ground near the Bamboo Forest in Kyoto spells out that “It is off-limits of the graveyard this ahead excluding parties concerned.” We assume the parties concerned are in the ground. Meanwhile a van tooling around downtown Tokyo brazenly announces what it’s peddling: LSD. That is, “Lighting Systems and Department.” And a vendor of souvenir items lures tourists in with the promise of inexpensive “T-Shits.” I recall a bizarre cartoon sign near Shinjuku Station that ( apparently) warns young girls to be wary of pervy men lurking behind them on escalators, trying to take cellphone pictures up their skirts. (There’s a phone number to report such pervy activity.)
Even using the public bathrooms in Japan can be an entertaining experience. In the great tradition of cuttingedge toilet technology, they even allow you to play video games while you pee. Yes, you can test your skills while standing at a urinal, such as the ones at the Decks Tokyo Beach Mall, where a row of video games are actually activated by your urine stream — choose between an abashed, somewhat naughty angel who fills a beer mug with his pee, earning you points in the process, or one in which two tough-looking cartoon beer drinkers spray each other with nasal fluids until one dies. The strength of your snot determines who wins the contest. I know. This is weird. This is Japan, after all.
L est we think that Japan has a lock on weird signs though, let’s return to our local shores for some of my favorites. Of course, funny Filipino store names are practically a category all their own — there are websites devoted to this — but my best finds were in Mall of Asia, where one store offers the finest T-shirts and merchandise available, catered exclusively to the cockfighting enthusiast (you can’t miss the big neon “COCKHOUSE” sign out front); then there’s Everything At Steak restaurant over in Greenhills, which exercises the inborn Filipino right to pun; a car-waxing place near my home offers “The Best Hand Job” you can get for as low as P400 (comes “complete with washing and vacuuming”); another favorite of mine was the Ouch! Tattoo Studio in my nearby SM Hypermarket, which, for some reason, closed down after only a few months.
Filipino signs in general can strike either a note of humor or pathos. For example, there’s this sign at a port area somewhere in Palawan that offers deadly truth in advertising: “KILLING ZONE SMOKING AREA” it reads, in case the picture of a skull puffing away at a lit cigarette didn’t explain things well enough. One lurid sign I spotted while visiting the men’s room at Ringside Midget Boxing Bar warns foreigners, in particular, to “Say No to Hookers!” Not only could these predatory young women (“and ladyboys,” the sign adds) take your wallet and cell phone, but they might also “give a life-ending STD.” Again, fair warning.
Some signs just point out the banality of existence. Found at a Baguio park bench was this oddly truthful plaque: “On This Site in 1897, Nothing Happened.” Hey, not every place in the Philippines was a hotbed of history.
A locale in Quezon City’s club zone that once offered untold pleasures now looks to offer only ironic amusement: the sign reading “DREAM WORLD” drips with detritus and decay.
And of course, if you’re looking for amusement on the road while stuck in traffic, you could do worse than observing the many slogans and phrases painted on the rear bumpers of jeepneys, such as the ever-popular “UNRICHTABLE STAR,” a sentiment that would strike even an old romantic such as Richard Harris with its unbound poignancy.