At first glance, I thought it said “R & Nails” with some sort of weird ampersand, but a second look reveals that it actually says “Red Nails.”

I wouldn’t recommend hiring a graphic designer to do a manicure, either.

Seen in Saint Paul, Minnesota on March 22, 2008.

I spent the last few days at a family reunion in Wisconsin Dells (you’ll find it listed in the dictionary definition for “tourist trap”). One of the stranger things I saw there was an attraction called “Top Secret,” shown in the photo above. It looks exactly like the White House was dropped from the sky. Upside down.

What it is, I don’t know. We were not quite curious enough to pay the hefty admission fee to find out. Supposedly, you have to promise not to tell anyone what’s inside so as not to spoil the surprise (or the disappointment, possibly). Among the typical themes in the Dells (lumberjacks, pirates, Mount Olympus, the Carribean, etc.) it was disconcertingly Dada-esque, and therefore kind of cool. It almost doesn’t matter what’s inside.

Bizarre ceramic flower pot seen in an antique store in Wisconsin Dells, July 31, 2004.

While traveling east through South Dakota in the summer of 1990, I stopped to snap a picture of this strange looking cloud. The flatness of the landscape and the emptiness of the sky gave it an eerie prominence.

Not long after this, we ran into a swarm of insects so thick we had to turn on the windshield wipers.

That evening, as we continued to drive, a cluster of lights zipped unnaturally fast across the sky just after dusk. It was the only time I’ve ever seen anything I would describe as a UFO. By a strange coincidence, we had just visited Devil’s Tower in Wyoming that morning. I don’t believe in such things as flying saucers and alien visitors, but the effect was unnerving.

We stopped at Chamberlain and checked into a motel. In the middle of the night, my partner woke up screaming that there were green and yellow bugs boiling out of the ceiling. As I fumbled to turn on the light (it was pitch black in the room), I happened to put my hand on her face, which she took to be a fox and screamed all the more. I finally found the light and, after a little while, we managed to get some sleep.

It turned out that the UFO we saw was a Russian rocket body breaking up and burning in the upper atmosphere. It was visible all over North America. No explanation for the bugs, except that they clearly fueled my partner’s hallucination. In fact, she had been overdosing on aspirin, which she was taking in massive quantities to overcome the pain of a toothache which started during our trip. Too much aspirin, it turns out, can cause hallucinations, especially of bugs.

And the cloud? They just look like that sometimes.

A few weeks ago, I went with my family to the Minneapolis Institute of Arts (a.k.a. MIA) to see the Delacroix show. While we were there, we took in another exhibit about Japanese woodcuts from the 20th century. The Delacroix show was pretty great, but the woodcut exhibit made more of an impression on me.

It was a rather small exhibit and not a lot of people were there. Part of what I liked about it was that they had Japanese popular music from the twenties and thirties playing in the background. It wasn’t traditional Japanese music, more like western jazz music with a Japanese flavor. It felt like stepping into another world, giving a bit of context to the prints.

One print in particular caught my eye.

This was “Woman Coming Her Hair”, a print from 1920 that many will recognize as an image Apple used in early promotional materials for the Macintosh. Here’s the MacPaint manual (which I still have) that came with my first Mac in 1984:

Susan Kare, the artist who created graphics and fonts for the original Macintosh, gave a talk at the Layers Design Conference last year and the video of it was made available recently. Among other things, she tells the story of how that Japanese woodcut was chosen and recreated in MacPaint.

Oh, and—what do you know?—today is the 32nd anniversary of the Macintosh. Happy birthday, Mac!