Friday 4 November 2011

Signs and Symbols

More views of - or after - Cambridge Film Festival 2011
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)


4 November

This one is a classic, snapped on a recent visit to London, and full of its own obscurity, intensified by the fact that such pronouncements are usually uttered, a few words at a time, by being on a pillar or flange behind where the driver sits:

Please do not speak to or obscure the driver's vision while the bus is moving


The ill-judged consequence of aiming at brevity is one thing, but a finer is:

Am I, then, free to apply a bandage to the driver that partly occludes one eye when the bus has arrived at a stop - or even to blindfold him or her, prior to carrying out mysterious initiation rites on the lower deck?

Yet nothing quite beats the message on the airport tannoy, effectively telling us, with a circularity of redundancy (or a redundancy of circularity), that smoking is not permitted except where it is permitted...


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