Did a Google tech forget to put away some hardware?

Just in time for St. Patrick’s Day: Drunken pedestrian warning signs.

Alan of the Melbourne Urbanist sends along this link to the original Daily Telegraph dispatch; the sign is in Romania, but was apparently inspired by an unnamed town in Germany.

Interesting idea, though one wonders if the sign distracts drivers from the actual presence of sloshed revelers in the road; it also presume sobriety and attention on the part of the drivers themselves. “We must warn drivers that sometimes people who have little control over their actions can suddenly appear in the road,” the town’s mayor said. It’s just as appropriate to change the word ‘drivers’ to ‘pedestrians,’ to my mind.

I couldn’t help but see the ridiculousness in this caption from a local paper:

A plan to build on this parking lot, which neighbors said would destroy the character of Carroll Gardens, is off.

I’m glad they backed off trying to do a full build-out — but now how about amending the zoning to ban the construction of parking lots on Carroll Garden’s historical courtyards?

There are no hard numbers on annual occurrences of airplane landings on highways or streets, but a troll through the Federal Aviation Administration’s incident database shows that there tend to be more than a dozen such events in any given year (that the FAA knows about, at least). The events range in nature and geography. Mechanical difficulty ranks prominently in the causative universe. But pilots running out of fuel (”fuel starvation,” as investigators put it), whether owing to unforeseen flight complications or actual negligence, is common, too. One FAA report dryly refers to a plane that “landed on a public street to discharge a passenger.” And emergency landings can take place on deserted country roads, residential neighborhoods, or bustling thoroughfares. As the FAA’s Les Dorr, after looking through the database himself, put it to me in an e-mail: “Highway landings are rather more frequent than I would have thought.”

A frail pensioner who lives in a village with no pedestrian crossing has to take a 14-mile bus journey just to cross the road.

The grandmother-of-five then boards a return journey and stops off in Chideock on the opposite side of the road to her house, where she can safely visit the shop.

Not surprisingly, the town ranks rather low on Walk Score (25).

(thanks Peter)

Our pedestrian managers all come from law enforcement backgrounds and bring at least 15 years of experience with them to the job. At any one time there is nearly a century of experience guiding pedestrians across Church St. In addition to their law enforcement and crowd control qualifications, all of our employees have received certification through the American Traffic Safety Services Association (ATSSA).

A woman driver caused a pile-up after becoming distracted while shaving her bikini line.

Barnes was driving to meet her boyfriend in Key West and told police she wanted to be “ready for the visit,” website WJZ.com reported.

This is why I don’t do fiction — you can’t make this stuff up.

(thanks Karl)

Which reminds me of one last point: The curious power (both as narrative and sense-memory) a song can have in the context of a drive. I once almost drove off the road in rural Maine at night when I first heard the plaintive, haunting voice of Townes van Zandt singing Kathleen:

It’s plain to see, the sun won’t shine today
But I ain’t in the mood for sunshine anyway
Maybe I’ll go insane
I got to stop the pain
Or maybe I’ll go down to see Kathleen.

When I hear that song today I still recall a glowing white line, the dark outlines of tall trees lining the road, glittering moose eyes…

The choreography of North Korean traffic control is staggeringly precise, and fascinatingly eerie (and I recommend playing the above clip without sound, to spare yourself the inane commentary). Interesting that the cops are women — could this be an anti-corruption measure, as in Mexico City? There are more cars than one might think (and even Minis!) — are they all party functionaries?

But I just wanted to take a moment to recommend my Slate colleague Julia Turner’s series on signs.

Signage—the kind we see on city streets, in airports, on highways, in hospital corridors—is the most useful thing we pay no attention to. When it works well, it tells us where we are (as when an Interstate marker assures us we’re on the right highway) and it helps us to get where we want to go (as when an airport banner directs us to our gate). When it fails, we miss trains, we’re late to appointments, we spend hours pacing the indistinguishable floors of underground parking garages, muttering to ourselves in mounting frustration and fury. And in some cases, especially where automobiles are involved, the consequences of bad signage can be fatal.