Your Friday Five: Drugs, Projection, and the Loneliest Sign in Canada

Museum featuring American signage has new home The American Sign Museum now has a new, larger home in Cincinnati. At 20,000 square feet, the new space is more than four times as large as the old one and cost about $3.3 million. The new location also gives the museum space to accommodate both new additions and more massive older signage, like a 26-foot tall, 3800-pound sign from a Huntsville, Alabama, McDonalds from 1963. The main purpose of the museum is to show the evolution of American signage, and the new space allows a more complete historical narrative to be developed. The new museum will open on June 23.

Street signs for roads like Stoner Avenue are commonly stolen. 

Stolen Signs Lead to Road Name Changes Throughout Northwest Minnesota, signs relating to “stoner culture” have been frequently stolen. In Bemidji, a town of about 13,000 near the Canadian border, residents chalk up a rash of stolen street signs to pranksters amused by a sign for Stoner Avenue. In nearby Perham, signs for 420th Street and 420th Avenue are continuously stolen, again because of their association with the culture surrounding marijuana use. Both streets have been renamed – the first to Minnesota Street, and the other to Harvest Avenue.

It’s always a bad idea to run a stop sign, but especially so with 55 bags of a class A drug in the backseat (via mydoorsign.com). 

<bPolice: Brooklyn woman had 55 bags of heroin Running a stop sign rarely lands anyone in prison, but for one Brooklyn, Connecticut, woman, that’s all it took. After stopping her for the traffic violation, the police noticed that the woman was also carrying 55 individually packaged bags of heroin in her car. She was arrested and charged with possession of heroin, possession of heroin with intent to sell, and disregarding a stop sign.

This lonely-looking stop sign is thought to be the most useless stop sign in Ontario (via wheels.ca).

The most useless stop sign in Ontario A stop sign about 45 minutes outside of Toronto is thought by some to have the honor of being the most useless stop sign in Ontario. Though it’s clear that a stop sign at a 90-degree curve is probably not so necessary, some accounts indicate that this portion of road used to be an intersection where a stop sign made sense. Perhaps even more oddly, the stop sign, instead of being removed, has been upgraded from a wood post to a metal pole since Google Maps took a picture of the intersection in May 2009.

Projecting signs like this one are another type of 3D sign (via smartsign.com).

3D digital signage reaches out to guests at Atlantic City casino A casino in Atlantic City has begun to use three-dimensional digital signage. These new signs don’t require any sort of special glasses to be seen in all their 3D glory. In the future, the casino’s marketing team might even expand into touch-based signage, as was recently developed by a British tech company. Using a technology known as “touch foil,” which turns nearly any glass surface into a touch screen, the company will soon expand into digital signage.

– T. Caruso