It is a fact of my life that strange things follow me around. Beth and I, together, seem to attract odd phenomena at a rate ten times my individual oddity rate. Presented for your pleasure is a gallery of the odd. Click each photo for a larger view. Remember, I am not making this up.
 

Beth noticed this sign as we were traveling through Pennsylvania (home of the Stupidest Truck Drivers in the World) on our way to the Poconos. Quality restaurants almost always have a service station attached to them. If you can find an eatery with a service station and a public reference to sodomy, so much the better.

As I was taking this picture, a fat man exited the restaurant and accosted me. "I he'p you wit' sumptin'?" he asked suspiciously.

"I'm just taking a picture of the sign," I told him. "It struck me as funny."

"Oh, yeah. 'Lube in rear.' Haw haw haw." As he left he was still chuckling.

"They're going to be telling stories about the tourist who took a picture of the sign," Beth predicted.

"For months," I agreed.

 

Not long ago, I was sitting at my desk at work when my boss began laughing hysterically. Tears in his eyes, he handed me a circled paragraph from an article in the Wall Street Journal.

My only comment on this article: "Are there no copy editors at the Journal who saw this coming?"

 

The eye doctor I see in Syracuse has a fancy camera, and he took pictures of my eyes. He took pictures of my retinas. He took pictures of the glands in my eyelids. He even annotated the eyelid pictures and, at my request, e-mailed them all to me.

Technology is both cool and really, really unnerving. Gaze upon my meibomian glands, I command you!

 

Beth and I noticed the Vietnam War Memorial GI Joe at Toys R Us not long ago. What has happened to war toys? The black and white of good versus evil? The jingoistic righteousness?

What's next? Regrets She Had An Abortion As A Teenager Barbie? Mid-Life Crisis Darth Maul?