Every once in awhile I take the time to read our local newspaper.  Actually, read is probably too strong of a word.  It is really more of a scan since most of the content is already old news previously obtained from sources on the net.  The cut and paste from the AP feeds is quite annoying to the point the only sections worth looking at are the opinions page and the city state page.  The latter providing  access to the local crime activities (and to make sure my name didn’t make it there by accident!).  On this particular scan, two things stood out.  One of them was this picture from the AP (rights remains with AP)

There are a number of things that caught my attention here. First off, anyone who thinks the economy is anywhere close to being out of the woods hasn’t been paying attention to the news at all and therefore wouldn’t be reading the paper in the first place – making this entry completely pointless (more filler). Secondly, I share those same initials giving me flashbacks of school ribbing. Third, did someone actually sit down an say to themselves “This would be an awesome name for my establishment”? If so, then this might be the same dude that thought Pen Island would be a great Internet company name for an ink pen wholesaler (hint, write out the obvious URL string – I just checked, it is still accepting http requests, but now has gone dark). Lastly, from the gutter, an image popped into my head with that name that made me shudder.

If that wasn’t enough, this add caught my attention from Illinois Furniture.

This store has been going out of business for at least a year now (likely even longer than that). It has become a local running joke to the point I think the city board is now investigating this store. This was a full page add so I cut it down for easier viewing.

I can’t count the number of times I’ve seen this advertised both in local media and an army of people holding the standard “Going out of Business” placards on the street corners. But this is the part of the advertisement that caused me to burst out laughing.

So, I can save UP to 70%. Typically by all marketing standards I am familiar with, this is the highest amount of saving that can be assumed for the advertised store and this can have all kinds of devious interpretations depending on integrity of the company. But wait, it also says I can save “AND MORE”. What the hell does that mean? If I can save more than 70%, why did they cap my enthusiasm previously by indicating my ceiling of financial thriftiness was 70%? Now they have just confused me so I’ll head to Good’s instead.

Hit the jump to see a few more fails

To be honest, this isn’t really a fail unless their target customer base is a nomography cult or atheists.

I took this shot while we were in Baraboo, Wisconsin for some skiing at Devil’s Head. After a day of pushing in slush and then scraping across the ice later in the day, we headed out to the Pizza Ranch to fuel up again. This reminded me of the Dairy Queen in Colorado we frequented that always had bible verses on their front sign, religious material on the booths and on the walls. While we were feasting on the dessert pizzas, a large family of “Amish-like” (they drove there in a car, but had the long beards, suspenders and dresses similar to those followers) people came in, so they just might be catering to their core customer base.  Ironically, we were there with a couple of which one was an atheist.

Here’s another one that isn’t so much on the fail side as it is an annoyance. This picture was taken at the hotel we were staying at near the Milwaukee Airport in Wisconsin. I checked with Linda and we think it was a Comfort Suites, but we are not overly confident on that.

Linda noticed a sign at the front desk apparently informing their guests about this diabolical mechanism installed in their rooms.  “Noticed” in this particular incident means she saw the sign, noticed it was about something and then apparently got distracted by a shiny object and FAILED to read it!   Normally this would not be a problem, but in this particular case, it took us an excruciating long time to figure out how to turn the lights on in the room.  Turns out, you have to put your room key in the slot next to the light switch to get the lights to come on.  I can envision all the green weenies out there dancing in some circle while laughing maniacally.  So now I have to hunt down our second key whenever I have to go get ice otherwise one of us will be sitting in the dark waiting for the damn card to be put back in the slot.  In response I made sure we got a new set of towels each day.

The last one for this post is going to cost me big time, but this was too funny, at the time, to just let it go.  We were up in the Quad Cities one day and decided to drop by Linda’s favorite ice cream store Whitey’s.  As usual, our two dogs were with us and were patiently waiting for us in the car (probably hoping we would bring some french fries back for them).  After spending time to take in the complete menu I decided on a tasty black cherry malt and turned to Linda to relay my order.  Well, that was the intent, but then I caught sight of this and burst out laughing.

Can you see the source of my humor? The Smugmug site has a larger picture, but if you look close you will see Rizzi’s leash dragging behind Linda’s coat.  It somehow became tangle in her coat as she was putting it on.  I hope the clerks there didn’t see it or they just might come to some very wrong conclusions.

Hope you enjoyed!