Desperate Planters

It's been a relatively busy Fourth of July Weekend (and it continues clean through till Wednesday!) but the most notable thing that's happened is that I finally seem to have figured out how to post pictures on this site without making an enormous timewasting procedure out of it. (Apparently, while you can import files by uploading photos to the web, finding their unique url, then going to Blogger and typing in the filename, there's also--ahem--a button you can click.)

As a result, you may see more pictures of stuff I've found amusing from around the city. And for this first such official post (the mailbox was unofficial), I think I'll try for a double post from the "desperate planter" genre of New York reading.

See, there are a gazillion planters in the naked city---little islands of greenery in the middle of sidewalks, mostly (I suspect) maintained by the city. But, as with subway stations, just because the city maintains them doesn't mean there aren't squatters, and often the locals try to grow their own flowers in these spaces. The problem, however, is that there are also a gazillion dogs in the city (any apartment complex contains a dozen or so, stacked nine stories high), and of course they'll piss on anything that dares to sit upright. So people put notices on their planters of the "Please Curb Your Dog" variety. And some of them are pretty funny.

Here are two. The first was taken at night not far from a northern-end-of-the-West-Village dog spa (which I'll post pics of later). As a result, it probably sees more than its fair share of action, and every time I read this sign I imagine it being spoken in a shaken, whispery voice that is threatening to burst to flinders under the stress of its hundred daily indignities:

The second is more straightforward. As a word guy, I'm always thrilled when I meet a new portmanteau: