Oh, go ahead. Squish the Tasty Kakes

The one with the big ice cream cone-shaped sign outside. I deeply love those kinds of signs, where the object is writ large in 3-D on top of the building, like that restaurant in Chapel Hill with the pig on top (bless poor little porkie, it’s a barbecue joint), or the shop near here with the large polar bear on top that is evidently selling something extremely related to polar bears but I can never remember what. In fact, if you ever see one of those, I want a picture of it. Love them, love them, love them.

So, we stopped. Tess wanted a pointy cone of cotton candy ice cream and I, my newly vegan self, didn’t want ice cream, but desperately wanted to keep her from screaming up a lung.

This sign near the cash register made me laugh out loud.

One morning at 5:30a.m. years ago, I was driving to work. This was back in the day where I actually put on real shoes and pants every single morning and went to an office to move large piles of papers around, go to meetings that lasted until the boss decided he needed to polish his golf ball collection, and answer members’ questions like, "I’m leaving for Saudi Arabia tomorrow to do our company’s sexual harassment training. Do I need to change anything about the training curriculum?"

Anyway, this one particular morning, a comic from Texas was on the radio. One supposes the radio station knew that any fool driving to work at 5:30a.m. needs some cheering up. The comic was doing a riff on consumer warnings. "Ya know if there’s a warning about it," he drawled, "some damn fool’s done it. On my wife’s hair dryer, there’s a little teeny tag that says, ‘do not use while sleeping.’"

Blink.

"I can’t remember," he said, "the last time I was sleep styling."

And so it went, me laughing hysterically, both at the comic and at my own predicament–I was sleep driving and would soon be sleep working and, most likely, sleep caring.

"And what about Preparation H?" he asked. "On the box it clearly says ‘do not take orally.’ I pity the poor fool that caused that warning. I can just imagine him saying to his doctor: ‘No sir, my hemorroids are exactly the same size, but my mouth is really, really tiny.’"

At that point, I nearly drove off the George Washington Parkway into the Potomac River, I was laughing so hard.

And so, this sign in the ice cream shop down from Tess’ school made me laugh.

Um. Would it be easier to move the Tasty Kakes, you think? When does the exception to the rule become the rule, I wonder? How many Tasty Kakes do you reckon got squished before the owner got irritated enough to make that sign? Can I tell you how much I love the word "squish"? Is that enough questions for a Thursday morning? You think?