Now I get it
Whenever this photo of "The Patcher" pops up on the town website, I can't help thinking of two things:
(1) The Lopper (for completely unrelated reasons) AND
(2) Why do we have a piece of equipment sporting the sign "Iowa Tax Dollars At Work"?
I figured this was a loaner or demo from Des Moines, or we had just purchased it used from Iowa and were in such a rush to show it off to photographers, we hadn't had time to remove the sign.
However, today I saw the actual vehicle driving down Moraine, and caught a glimpse of the same sign, and it struck me as very stupid that Iowa taxpayers were still supporting our pothole filling efforts, or that we hadn't gotten around to removing the sign UNLESS
Thunderclap: The sign was actually attempting to represent something other than the abbreviation for Iowa.
The first word or abbreviation in the sign, I realized, is an attempt to say "One-A" the first number in the cardinal numbers, and the first letter in the alphabet. "One-A" is the 10-year Spincaster sales tax increase that went to fund the parking deck. It's just that the font selected to represent the "One" looks exactly like the capital letter "I". There are plenty of fonts out there that don't make it hard to distinguish "One" from the capital letter "I", but our town, as usually, didn't choose any of those.
Here is the number "One" represented in 7 different fonts
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
These may not display as well on your browser, but "Georgia" or "Verdana" give perfectly acceptable "One"s that don't look like capital letter "I"s, and "Courier" isn't half bad either, although it resembles typewriter font.
Once again, Spincaster is in way over his head when it comes to signage. I recognize that he is our town historian, our town master gardener, and our town loan officer, but couldn't we at least give him a break and let the public have input on signs? Because this is a small matter, and our 1A tax dollars
should go towards something else than always having to fix badly-vetted and poorly-designed signs, plaques, and sandblasted lettering on the sides of buildings.
(2) Why do we have a piece of equipment sporting the sign "Iowa Tax Dollars At Work"?
I figured this was a loaner or demo from Des Moines, or we had just purchased it used from Iowa and were in such a rush to show it off to photographers, we hadn't had time to remove the sign.
However, today I saw the actual vehicle driving down Moraine, and caught a glimpse of the same sign, and it struck me as very stupid that Iowa taxpayers were still supporting our pothole filling efforts, or that we hadn't gotten around to removing the sign UNLESS
Thunderclap: The sign was actually attempting to represent something other than the abbreviation for Iowa.
The first word or abbreviation in the sign, I realized, is an attempt to say "One-A" the first number in the cardinal numbers, and the first letter in the alphabet. "One-A" is the 10-year Spincaster sales tax increase that went to fund the parking deck. It's just that the font selected to represent the "One" looks exactly like the capital letter "I". There are plenty of fonts out there that don't make it hard to distinguish "One" from the capital letter "I", but our town, as usually, didn't choose any of those.
Here is the number "One" represented in 7 different fonts
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
These may not display as well on your browser, but "Georgia" or "Verdana" give perfectly acceptable "One"s that don't look like capital letter "I"s, and "Courier" isn't half bad either, although it resembles typewriter font.
Once again, Spincaster is in way over his head when it comes to signage. I recognize that he is our town historian, our town master gardener, and our town loan officer, but couldn't we at least give him a break and let the public have input on signs? Because this is a small matter, and our 1A tax dollars
should go towards something else than always having to fix badly-vetted and poorly-designed signs, plaques, and sandblasted lettering on the sides of buildings.
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