Additional side note: I always assume the people with the signs about dogs not peeing on their plants must suck ass. Like I get not wanting dog piss all over your plants (sort of) but the psychology of someone who thinks the sign pre-emptively spelling it out is going to improve the situation always gets me.
My dog is such a weirdo about pooping, he will try to walk as far as he can into a house's front lawn before settling on a place to poop. My wife feels like this is rude, and generally I try to urge him back closer to the sidewalk, but if he's about to shit I'm not going to jerk his leash and drag him. He also does this if he chooses to poop on the lawn between the sidewalk and street - he will literally get as close to the curb to the street as possible before dumping. Guess he likes the wind in his face from the cars whizzing by.
Yeah, that's another thing. When people put that sign up in a suburban neighborhood, they're basically saying "go put that pee and poop in someone else's yard." Like, the animal is going to poop and pee. I get asking me to clean up after it, which I am diligent about doing, but it's not a remote control car.
Addendum to this, which is probably not relevant: my older neighbor across the street who either has leg braces or prosthetics was walking his grandson in a stroller this morning when he fell forward and tipped the stroller backwards. The kid was crying and I had to run across and help them both back up. I felt really, really bad for the guy, I could see how awful he felt for making his grandson cry (kjid wasn't hurt) and it really bummed me out. Anyway, I guess I share this to say that most of my neighbors are pretty and aren't passive aggressively feuding with each other.
That would upset me too but remember you were in a position to help. Hopefully the kid was back to sticking bottle caps in his nose or whatever soon after.
We've got a fun war going on down the street from me and I've been monitoring it for years now. What started with a couple of dueling signs has escalated to massive flags and full on garage door murals.
Meanwhile my "Wu-Tang Forever"* sign remains largely unmolested.
*I don't do signs or bumper stickers but if I did that's the one I'd want.
I miss the days before Nextdoor. I actually got banned from Nextdoor in the summer of 2021. I was working on recycling and thought about how much I enjoyed cold water on a hot summer day. I washed some of the bottles out, refilled them, froze them, and took them to people who were experiencing homelessness living in tents in my neighborhood.
That night I got on Nextdoor to amuse myself and saw a post about me. Someone asked if anyone knew me saying I was “encouraging homelessness in the neighborhood.” In the words of Christopher Titus: “I realized I could be offended… or I could do the offending.”
I wrote a response that said, “I know him very well. I AM him. And I won’t try to appeal to your humanity because you don’t have any. Don’t think of it as me ‘encouraging homelessness’ (though one guy was about to sign a lease until he got a bottle of water and he decided staying in the tent was better) but think of it as me protecting your property value by making sure someone doesn’t die of dehydration you fucking NIMBY ghoul.”
A friend of mine called me yesterday while he was buying some gloves, for the purpose of having to root through his son's shit on account of the kid swallowed a glass bead. I'm counting myself lucky for the shoe yeeting at this point.
I just read an article about the value/worthlessness of political yard signs, and the overall discovery was that yard signs DO help lesser known candidates running for lesser known offices. One of the experiments mentioned in the article was where they put up "for school board" signs for a fictional candidate near a school and then after some time asked parents who they were considering in the election. A good number of them mentioned the fake person. However, when it comes to mainstream candidates, yard signs do nothing but create exactly what you're seeing in your neighborhood. I personally think the teamification of politics is just the goddamn weirdest thing.
It's weird that school boards and stuff like that are actually decided by an election where only the tiniest fraction of the electorate can be expected to have any clue who these people are. It's almost random. Though maybe the randomness is a good thing.
Yeah, I feel like you should have to pass some sort of candidate knowledge test before you can vote for things like school board so we don't end up with some fucking genius like me deciding the election after voting for "that guy whose name always sounds like they're saying tit juice."
Our across-the-street neighbors, who had a personalized Trump sign in 2020 and hung their American flag upside-down for at least a year after Biden got elected, haven't put anything out yet. Our signs went up last week. They're running out of time (literally, they're both so, so old).
Our boring neighborhood beef is with the free ice cream truck, which our HOA has done for the last three summers, and no matter how they do it - a set route at set times, stopping at select locations for everyone to gather, letting it drive around at will - someone complains. My husband and I will get some if we're out walking the dog, but we live with missing it if we miss it. That's what we get for $75 a year.
Friends of mine had a BLM sign in their yard that somebody kept unearthing. They would put it back in the ground and someone would come along and pull it out and throw it near the mailbox. Eventually, they got tired of pulling the sign out and they stole it. About a month later, they found the sign down the road near a dumpster and it had been basically shredded. Someone had like taken a box cutter and just sliced it into 20 pieces. Unchecked yard sign aggression in the suburbs is so real haha.
I saw this post literally right after coming in from a lunch walk having taken a picture of a sign for my former coworker running for a seat in the local muni utility district. She has the stern, humorless temperament of someone that made me look up what a councilor of said district does
Living in a liberal enclave of Central NY (near a university) the sign season for us is usually the Dem primary. It's interesting to see who are the centrist Dems (usually the people with an "In This House We Believe..." sign, natch) vs. the leftist Dems (usually the people with "natural" lawns, natch).
Neighborhood beef is one of my favorites to witness. There was a huge battle at the end of the summer on our neighborhood pool’s WhatsApp group that provided endless entertainment.
It makes me so happy to know that you get to witness this. Feels like you've earned the opportunity to watch something so banally American happen in real time.
Additional side note: I always assume the people with the signs about dogs not peeing on their plants must suck ass. Like I get not wanting dog piss all over your plants (sort of) but the psychology of someone who thinks the sign pre-emptively spelling it out is going to improve the situation always gets me.
Kinda related -
My dog is such a weirdo about pooping, he will try to walk as far as he can into a house's front lawn before settling on a place to poop. My wife feels like this is rude, and generally I try to urge him back closer to the sidewalk, but if he's about to shit I'm not going to jerk his leash and drag him. He also does this if he chooses to poop on the lawn between the sidewalk and street - he will literally get as close to the curb to the street as possible before dumping. Guess he likes the wind in his face from the cars whizzing by.
Yeah, that's another thing. When people put that sign up in a suburban neighborhood, they're basically saying "go put that pee and poop in someone else's yard." Like, the animal is going to poop and pee. I get asking me to clean up after it, which I am diligent about doing, but it's not a remote control car.
Addendum to this, which is probably not relevant: my older neighbor across the street who either has leg braces or prosthetics was walking his grandson in a stroller this morning when he fell forward and tipped the stroller backwards. The kid was crying and I had to run across and help them both back up. I felt really, really bad for the guy, I could see how awful he felt for making his grandson cry (kjid wasn't hurt) and it really bummed me out. Anyway, I guess I share this to say that most of my neighbors are pretty and aren't passive aggressively feuding with each other.
Vince slipping up and revealing his leg brace fetish...
That would upset me too but remember you were in a position to help. Hopefully the kid was back to sticking bottle caps in his nose or whatever soon after.
We've got a fun war going on down the street from me and I've been monitoring it for years now. What started with a couple of dueling signs has escalated to massive flags and full on garage door murals.
Meanwhile my "Wu-Tang Forever"* sign remains largely unmolested.
*I don't do signs or bumper stickers but if I did that's the one I'd want.
I miss the days before Nextdoor. I actually got banned from Nextdoor in the summer of 2021. I was working on recycling and thought about how much I enjoyed cold water on a hot summer day. I washed some of the bottles out, refilled them, froze them, and took them to people who were experiencing homelessness living in tents in my neighborhood.
That night I got on Nextdoor to amuse myself and saw a post about me. Someone asked if anyone knew me saying I was “encouraging homelessness in the neighborhood.” In the words of Christopher Titus: “I realized I could be offended… or I could do the offending.”
I wrote a response that said, “I know him very well. I AM him. And I won’t try to appeal to your humanity because you don’t have any. Don’t think of it as me ‘encouraging homelessness’ (though one guy was about to sign a lease until he got a bottle of water and he decided staying in the tent was better) but think of it as me protecting your property value by making sure someone doesn’t die of dehydration you fucking NIMBY ghoul.”
Love these domestic tales. Especially the one where your kid yeeted his shoe out the car.
A friend of mine called me yesterday while he was buying some gloves, for the purpose of having to root through his son's shit on account of the kid swallowed a glass bead. I'm counting myself lucky for the shoe yeeting at this point.
I just read an article about the value/worthlessness of political yard signs, and the overall discovery was that yard signs DO help lesser known candidates running for lesser known offices. One of the experiments mentioned in the article was where they put up "for school board" signs for a fictional candidate near a school and then after some time asked parents who they were considering in the election. A good number of them mentioned the fake person. However, when it comes to mainstream candidates, yard signs do nothing but create exactly what you're seeing in your neighborhood. I personally think the teamification of politics is just the goddamn weirdest thing.
It's weird that school boards and stuff like that are actually decided by an election where only the tiniest fraction of the electorate can be expected to have any clue who these people are. It's almost random. Though maybe the randomness is a good thing.
Yeah, I feel like you should have to pass some sort of candidate knowledge test before you can vote for things like school board so we don't end up with some fucking genius like me deciding the election after voting for "that guy whose name always sounds like they're saying tit juice."
Our across-the-street neighbors, who had a personalized Trump sign in 2020 and hung their American flag upside-down for at least a year after Biden got elected, haven't put anything out yet. Our signs went up last week. They're running out of time (literally, they're both so, so old).
Our boring neighborhood beef is with the free ice cream truck, which our HOA has done for the last three summers, and no matter how they do it - a set route at set times, stopping at select locations for everyone to gather, letting it drive around at will - someone complains. My husband and I will get some if we're out walking the dog, but we live with missing it if we miss it. That's what we get for $75 a year.
Friends of mine had a BLM sign in their yard that somebody kept unearthing. They would put it back in the ground and someone would come along and pull it out and throw it near the mailbox. Eventually, they got tired of pulling the sign out and they stole it. About a month later, they found the sign down the road near a dumpster and it had been basically shredded. Someone had like taken a box cutter and just sliced it into 20 pieces. Unchecked yard sign aggression in the suburbs is so real haha.
I saw this post literally right after coming in from a lunch walk having taken a picture of a sign for my former coworker running for a seat in the local muni utility district. She has the stern, humorless temperament of someone that made me look up what a councilor of said district does
Living in a liberal enclave of Central NY (near a university) the sign season for us is usually the Dem primary. It's interesting to see who are the centrist Dems (usually the people with an "In This House We Believe..." sign, natch) vs. the leftist Dems (usually the people with "natural" lawns, natch).
Neighborhood beef is one of my favorites to witness. There was a huge battle at the end of the summer on our neighborhood pool’s WhatsApp group that provided endless entertainment.
It makes me so happy to know that you get to witness this. Feels like you've earned the opportunity to watch something so banally American happen in real time.
I too watch a lot of banal.
I've been watching a lot of canal lately. It's not as skillful, but they work harder because they're still trying to get the call up to banal.