Five Random Photos

In a recent post about those stick figures often seen on cars these days, I mentioned another type of bumper sticker, one that labels the car as a Swim Taxi. I confess that I had never seen one of these until yesterday:

Note the Capitol Hill sticker that accompanies it. That's the gifted-and-talented K-6 school in St. Paul, known for its over-involved parents.

While driving through Pennsylvania a few weeks ago, I managed to snap this shot of a highway sign:


I bet they wish the founders had made that "u" an "o." Imagine the merchandising.

This is one of those things that couldn't make sense in any other culture (and barely makes sense in ours):


Seen on a box at a movie theater entrance, where it was being used to collect the torn tickets.

Ezra Klein of the Washington Post's Wonkblog was sitting in for Chris Hayes last week:


Freeze-framing his face is almost like a new art.

Finally, these plastic pumpkins from outside a Michael's craft store:


Each pumpkin -- a few ounces of plastic, full of air, shipped from China (I assume) -- costs $14.99. I guess this is part of the reason why Americans spend $6 billion a year on Halloween. That's more than the cost of the last presidential election, the most expensive one on record.