Chaotic law

You can tell a lot about the health of a civilization by their warningsigns. Places with a lot of dumb folks will have very broad, very dumbwarnings in public. “No feeding the birds," “Stop swimming in thisdrainage pond." That kind of thing.

Advanced civilizations have very precise signs. They've covered thebases of their regular, run-of-the-mil idiots, and now they're workinghard to cover that other end of the bell curve: the talented Idiot. WhenI was in Germany last time, there was a big warning sign thatconsisted of a 76-letter-long word that means "stop bothering thisparticular goose, Sven" I don't know who Sven was, but the gooselooked pretty calm. It worked.

Now, I have a secret to tell you. You can just make your own signs.There's no law against it, except perhaps “littering” and the municipalsign factory doesn't have very good security. If you show up there pastclose and put in the door code that you shoulder-surfed off one of theemployees returning from lunch a week prior, you have all night tofuck around with their sign-printing machine, making the mostofficial-looking placards you can think of.

Is this wrong? I don't think so. Its a public space, and being able to putup an aluminum sign that says wacky crank shit is your right. Forinstance, just last week, I banned pickup trucks from parking by theplayground. The cops figured out something was going on, becausethey didn't get any calls for toddlers getting backed over for a coupleof days and sent a patrol truck to investigate. Took my sign rightdown.

What I discovered after that is that nobody keeps records of whatsigns are supposed to be there. Why would anyone put up a sign forno reason? They cost money, after all. The city is now suing the shitout of that officer for stealing the "no trucks” sign, thanks to ananonymous tipster who called in the theft. Guy wearing a reflectivevest came by and put like four more of them up after the lawsuit modethe news, just out of spite. I'm not entirely sure if he's actually a cityworker; we an into each other at 3am at the sign factory and justgrunted. He was working on some really crazy signs about not feedinga particular swan. Probably German.