INSIDE INFORMATION

While Sunday is the fun day, church signs are out there 24 / 7 to keep members on point, passers by alert and the curious, curious. But, for those most restrictive residential areas where even divine self promotion by signage is disallowed, they're everywhere. These marquee signs are the ammunition with which the battle for motorists' souls is waged.

We love these things and never fail to read one on our back road travels. Perhaps the copy reflects the sentiments of the congregation or the passion of the pastor. They run the gamut from the early stages of mouth breathing to the upper room of wit. Our favorite to date, however, is the Anti-Sign sign, perhaps the End of Signs or at least a sign of the end of sign wars courtesy of the First Baptist Church of North Charleston (SC).

Our favorite suggestion for church sign copy is a quotation from Oscar Wilde. “Every saint has a past and every sinner has a future.”

There are church sign generators on the internet with which you can make your own gag church signs. We wanted to do something goofy, but the one we tried ( http://www.says-it.com/churchsigns/sign01.php ) says that they just got a Cease and Desist Order from a from a firm in Florida accusing them of fraud and intellectual property infringement. Apparently, the business of church sings is pretty much the rough trade rather than the happy glow of faithful mom and pop shops. You could lose your soul by buggering around with these signs. Even worse you could get sued.

No More Mr. Nice Car

We tread on no one and nothing, but the road which our rubber meets. We love nothing so much as rolling past green cultivated fields on the vacant country roads which we ply with care and caution. As a general rule the smell of death wafts into the car roughly every fifteen minutes. There's always some dead thing decomposing just off the road, but today we smell it in urban areas as well.

We pulled into Santee, SC, this weekend with high hopes, but found low living and decay. When I-95 effectively closed all business activity on Hwy. 301, Santee simply shifted a few hundred yards east to the new interstate highway. Now, even that Superior Vena Cava cannot sustain life in Santee. The happy images promoting golf, seafood and oversized Bass have been replaced with a grim graphics. During an economy in which only guns and booze show growth, it pays to see what sort of art is imitating life

That's our new mascot, our new flag. The old Gadsden Flag's warning: " Don't 'Tread on Me " seems redundant for our new standard. The recession has pulled many teeth, but this seems like a perfectly fitted set of new dentures. That old social fabric has begun to rot like those unsold towels down at Santee's Outlet Hell. We saw this stunning mural painted upon a run of the mill juke joint just past a burned down motel. We found it captivating much as the werewolf is charmed by his new hair. Old Zevon fans will remember how " Patty Hurst heard the burst of Roland's Thompson's gun...and bought it. So have we. We like it, love, it, yes we do.