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Set Weasel on KILL!

margargetcalvertMargaret Calvert is still alive, but only because I haven’t found her yet. When I heard her interviewed on Radio 4, it’s the first I learned her name, but I had been looking for her for years. By her works I knew her.

Margaret and her boss, Jock Kinneir, undertook a much-needed redesign of British road signage in the middle 1950s and introduced thereunto previously unknown levels of suck and stink.

crossing

Weasel exaggerates? You decide. Let’s start with this here. The previous ‘school crossing’ sign was a charming little boy in a cap with a satchel leading a littler girl. As Margaret describes it, “It was quite archaic, almost like an illustration from Enid Blyton, and very grammar-schooly. I wanted to make it more inclusive, because comprehensives were starting up, and I didn’t want it to have a social class feel.”

So she smashed it to bits. Class warfare, feminism AND it looks like ass! Trifecta! Margaret later confessed that the little girl was based on a photograph of herself as a child. Yup. She had a model for this glommy piece of shit. Boggles the mind, don’t it?

She’s a Kiwi South African. Did I mention that? She emigrated all the way from far-flung colonies to screw over the mother country’s signage. Speaking on behalf of resident aliens everywhere: naughty, NAUGHTY immigrant!

abomination

But I don’t hate her for the School Crossing sign. I hate her for a sign I’m not even positive she designed. IT IS THIS ONE. Can you spot why this sign makes Weasel shiver and foam at the mouth? WELL, CAN YOU?! (Hint: say yes, or I’ll fucking come over there and hurt you).

Yes. Yes, that’s right. In order for a skidding car to make these tracks, the left front tire would have to detach itself, cross over and land on the right rear while the right front tire correspondingly travels diagonally over and does the other thing.

COULD. NOT. HAPPEN. This is suck writ huge. A graphical “ain’t got no” — times the tens of thousands of them jammed by the side of the roadall over Britain. How many people signed off on this abomination? How many bovine visual illiterates drive past it every day without a second glance?

I have one of my ‘funny spells’ whenever we pass one. It hurtssss ussssss. And oh…OH!!! There’s one at the end of the driveway!! MY DRIVEWAY!!!! I took one look and I thought, “Right! That’s how it’s going to be?”

So you can understand, when the vicar came at me waving a page of Miz Calvert’s best work and asking me to choose which three best typified my future life, I was like, “ZOMG! Darth Vader is really Luke Skywalker’s father!!!!!” and hid under the sofa.

Two more sessions to go!

Comments


Comment from Uncle Badger
Time: December 18, 2008, 6:14 pm

One bovine visual illiterate reporting for duty, Mz Weasel!


Comment from jwpaine
Time: December 18, 2008, 6:37 pm

Does it count if we’re visually dyslexic bovines?


Comment from porknbean
Time: December 18, 2008, 6:41 pm

At the end of your driveway, eh? Can you move it and would anyone notice?


Comment from Andrea Harris
Time: December 18, 2008, 6:43 pm

I love how the British ruling classes are carefully removing everything that makes people love British culture from British culture. No one wants them to do this — the British don’t, the immigrants don’t (remember the hot cross buns incident? that no Muslims in the area were actually bothered by? Fortunately they had a Concerned Person to be bothered for them!), visitors and tourists certainly don’t — Americans at least go to England for a taste of all that stuff they spent all those years watching Masterpiece Theater for. But somehow the people in charge of Blighty seem hellbent on making that island into something that resembles a cross between a Soviet-era Ukrainian post office and a Burbank Ramada Inn circa 1988. I don’t get it.


Comment from dfbaskwill
Time: December 18, 2008, 7:20 pm

I’m sure that if you print out this blog post and present it to the vicar, he would understand. Yeah, that’s right, he’ll understand. Let’s keep telling ourselves that. Let’s stick with that. Vicars are really people too, right?


Comment from Gnus
Time: December 18, 2008, 7:25 pm

One thing about it: you knows you’ll be in a helluva skid if ya hits a slick place.


Comment from Uncle Badger
Time: December 18, 2008, 7:39 pm

Andrea Harris has it exactly right, I’m afraid. Heaven only knows what their problem is – some sort of auto-immune, self-hating disease among Leftists is my best guess.


Comment from wendyworn
Time: December 18, 2008, 7:45 pm

At least you aren’t getting married in Germany. My boyfriend at the time and I were both stationed in Germany so we went to a German Justice of the peace (also a woman.) She told us that she would do the ceremony but that we had to pay 50 marks for a translator. So we are standing at the altar on the day, and first she would say the marriage stuff in German and then say it in English! She was the translator! It was weird because when she talked in English I would get all emotional and teary but I would dry up during the German parts.


Comment from Mrs. Peel
Time: December 18, 2008, 7:54 pm

*twitch*

That sign is definitely teh suck.


Comment from Buffoon
Time: December 18, 2008, 10:40 pm

HI Stoat, just wanted to drop in and say hello, its been awhile and a reminder, I still hate you because your blog is better than mine…….<——- ACTING! (Lovitz)


Comment from Jill
Time: December 19, 2008, 12:13 am

I had the most delish brownie today; whatever bakery baked it sprinkled coarsely chopped walnuts on top of the batter, so they kinda set into the crust as it baked. They flipped it so the top became the bottom, and then frosted it with creamy milk chocolate buttercream, topped with finely ground walnuts.

It was teh awesome.


Comment from QuasiModo
Time: December 19, 2008, 12:23 am

I suspect that the reason the British cave in to people like Ms Calvert without a second thought is because if they actually did give it a thought, they’d be compelled to kill her and go to jail for murder, so it’s best not to think about it.


Comment from Gabriel Malor
Time: December 19, 2008, 12:55 am

So you can understand, when the vicar came at me waving a page of Miz Calvert’s best work and asking me to choose which three best typified my future life, I was like…

Gabe sez: “Whut, whut?” And then I kept scrolling and everything became clear.

Stoat, you have got a talent for more than graphic designage. I can’t read this place from work anymore because my co-workers want to know why I’m laughing and crying.


Comment from porknbean
Time: December 19, 2008, 1:27 am

You know, the abomination sign could happen if the car brought it’s tootsies together. Yeah…it’s teh ghey.


Comment from Allen
Time: December 19, 2008, 2:41 am

Is it just me or does the swervy thing look like a curvy swastika?

Oh dear. Eva in birkenstocks…


Comment from JuliaM
Time: December 19, 2008, 3:18 am

“…I didn’t want it to have a social class feel.”

I think it’d take a much, much better illustrator than her to suggest that, hampered as she was by the tiny space, 2 dimensions and two shades allowed for the project.

I wonder what she’d have thought of the new ‘Home Zone’ sign, with its absent mother (barefoot and pregnant in the kitchen?) and its ‘children crossing’ graphic cunningly flipped?


Comment from Enas Yorl
Time: December 19, 2008, 3:54 am

Sorry Stoaty, but you’re wrong when it comes your analysis of the skidmarks on the sign. That is actually what happens to the treadmarks of the two back wheels when a car swerves and then spins 180 degrees. One side or the other serves as a sliding swivel point while the other does the wild direction change. And that’s exactly what you see in that sign’s end result. The profile of the car in the sign you see after the swerve marks is NOT the back of the car but the front!


Comment from JuliaM
Time: December 19, 2008, 5:21 am

O/T (and I bet this earns me another trip to the spam filter!), but….

weather predicting stoats!


Comment from porknbean
Time: December 19, 2008, 8:44 am

Never did get what was so wrong with being barefoot and pregnant. New life is a good thing and bare feet on top of it is more comfortable and helps you stick to the floor.


Comment from Farmer Joe
Time: December 19, 2008, 10:44 am

I love how the British ruling classes are carefully removing everything that makes people love British culture from British culture.

Indeed. I was watching Top Gear a while back, and James May was extolling the fact that the new Jaguar doesn’t look like a Jaguar, and that this would irritate Americans because it didn’t hold to the American idea of what a British car should look like.

Okay, I can get the desire to tweak us, but why give up the one thing that made those cars cool? Why take all the British-ness out of them? If I want an expensive, non-descript, well performing car, I can buy a BMW or a Mercedes. Why suck all the cool out of it, just because it might be perceived as… British?


Comment from Princess Bernie
Time: December 19, 2008, 2:26 pm

That’s not a slick road sign, it’s a sign for a tire rotation shop. Weaz, do you and Uncle B get much business from it?


Comment from Michael
Time: December 19, 2008, 2:48 pm

Hey thanks! Now that Ted Kennedy is seriously ill, I needed someone new to hate with a passion.


Comment from Dawn
Time: December 19, 2008, 4:49 pm

Is it just me or does Maggie look like she needs a good shave?


Comment from Mr. Moebius
Time: December 25, 2008, 9:50 am

Don’t know what you’re talking about. Those tire tracks look fine to me.


Comment from FU
Time: August 16, 2012, 1:25 pm

She’s not a kiwi you dick. And what Enas Yorl said.


Comment from Mr Mandela
Time: February 6, 2013, 1:35 pm

Hey cunt weasel, she’s south african, get that wrong again and I’ll personally fly over to great butfuckain and skull fuck you. what a tool.


Comment from S. Weasel
Time: February 6, 2013, 2:00 pm

Well, I’ll be. I just looked it up. You’re right, she is South African.

Cunt weasel it is…!


Comment from redd
Time: February 6, 2013, 4:36 pm

I think he’s flirting with you, stoaty.


Comment from S. Weasel
Time: February 6, 2013, 7:28 pm

My favorite commenter in ages. Uncle B has been calling me “cuntweasel” all day.

Oh, I say — of the Berkshire Cuntweasels? Why, surely you must know my old friend Bunny Cuntweasel.


Comment from Anonymous
Time: April 29, 2014, 8:51 am

wtf u nut job


Comment from S. Weasel
Time: April 29, 2014, 12:04 pm

^^^That is a real comment. Not, apparently, a bot of any kind. Isn’t it adorable?


Comment from Anonymous
Time: August 24, 2015, 8:33 am

lol ur weird

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