Mom and I took a trip to Dallas this weekend. And the excitement started before we even left Oklahoma (!!). At a gas station in Ardmore, I went in the Loves to buy a snack, and what did I find? Only the largest rose rock cluster in the world. This brought up some questions. Actually, pretty much just one question: how did this chunk of rock end up in a mini-mart? As usual, Google provided the answer: Tom Redwine, the finder, sold the chunk to Loves for $8000 because he needed money. The articles that I found don't explain why Loves wanted the rock, but I did find this little ode, written by Nancy Stine of the Timberlake Rose Rock Museum:
Within the Garber sandstone,
A barite crystal grew,
The Oklahoma sand
Gave it a reddish hue.
Seawater bathed it; and,
As a flower grows,
God formed its shape
Into a lovely rose.
In a momentary lapse of judgement, we paid $21 to get into the Arboretum. It's a beautiful place, but the weather was cold and there aren't a lot of flowers blooming in January. So we kind of did an almost-running loop of the gardens and decided to find something in Dallas that we could do indoors. I did get a picture of this sculpture that I found amusing.
Something I've been noticing the past month or so that is increasingly getting on my nerves (although it really shouldn't be) is all of these "Support Our Troops" magnets stuck sideways on cars. Is this a nationwide phenomenon? My first theory was that the people with sideways magnets have never paid attention to red ribbon or pink ribbon campaigns, and just decided to position the magnets so that the lettering was horizontal. But then I started to think, no, surely all of these people must have a better reason for their crooked ribbons. There must be some special meaning, like sideways=I have a kid in the military. So I Googled it. I found a couple of people who claim that the sideways magnets mean that the car owner supports the troops, but not the president. But the other reasoning that I found is that the writing is more legible. Given the number of sideways magnets between Norman and Dallas, I'm inclined to believe the second theory. But the bigger question is why the magnets have text on them at all. Yellow ribbons have always meant "support for the troops." Bleh. I'm feeling intolerant of "patriotic" bumper displays in general. The other day my dad pointed out a flag sticker that said "these colors don't run," and we found some dark humor in the fact that the red stripes had all faded out of the sticker. Come on, how much respect does that show for the flag? It's just so cheapened when it's plastered everywhere.
Comments
I've been noticing that cars that tend to have them upright have more flat vertical space. 90% of the ones I've seen sideways are on smaller cars, where a wrinkle in the panel or the trunk crack would prevent putting the ribbon vertically.
So, you go, buy yourself this big ribbon sticker, go to put it on your bumper, and descover it's too tall to go on flat. So you put it on sideways. Sooner or later, it becames a trend, and everyone's doing it.
Just more evidence that the Bush supporters who designed the sticker all drove SUVs.