06 November, 2007

On some distant wavelength

This past summer, we fulfilled a long-standing dream of my husband, and took our kids to Disneyland. He's been planning it in his head for years; he wanted them to be old enough to remember the trip, and young enough to still be enchanted by the place. Truthfully, I'm not sure I really expected such a lofty dream to come to fruition, but I guess I underestimated the powers of high hopes and frequent flyer miles.

Anyway, we weren't in the park long before I saw this painted on a trash can:

Now, granted, I haven't lived in America for over eleven years, and so it's likely that culturally I'm just out of sync, but somehow this struck me as really silly. It seemed obvious that although perhaps it was trying to convey "give me your waste, please," it instead implied "don't eat that apple - waste, please, and put it in here." What a ridiculous typo - didn't they realize what they'd written? Until a minute later, when I saw another, and another, and realized that apparently that's just how you say "trash can" in American, or at least in Californian. Oops, silly, out of sync me.

But then, later in the day, I saw these two juxtaposed next to each other, and it was just too much:

So tell, me, please, is it just me? Does no one else see any potential irony here? Because I'm telling you, it was tearing me apart - what to do with our empty bottles? They're both asking so politely... but I suppose it's fitting for Disney to give us an angel on one shoulder and a devil on the other.


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