Happy Chef, Uncle Burger, and the Thai Root Bear

TODAY: Random internet stuff, or, how one thing leads to another.

URLs you just can't not click:

http://claycord.com/2012/08/07/the-dead-rotting-dog-in-a-box-in-north-concord-has-been-picked-up/

Most unconvincing use of the first person plural:

Gosh, me too. Ah, but what kind of artist?

Oh. Okay.

This got me thinking about sculpture once enjoyed by families on summer vacations: the popular sculpture of signage. Doesn't make it into museums, because it's intended as straight-forward commercial speech. If it was made as a commentary or ironic juxtaposition of commercial speech, it would be art. But if it's just a statue for a pizza joint, it requires the application of meaning and interpretation by an accredited critic, and then it's either "vernacular art" or "found art" or some other term that makes it easy for the artistic establishment to accept.

Pity they went away. Ugly buggers, but they gave the roadside some pizzazz. There used to be one in Roseville, and as late as 1997, I think. Whether the button that made it talk still worked I can't say - given the margins in the restaurant industry, it's hard to imagine an owner saying "I'll put talking statue functionality right at the top of my list."

Another Chef exists in Princeton, where it shills for a restaurant supply company, and of course there's the last official one in Mankato.

I was thinking about the Chef after reading an article on roadside Pizza statuary. Rare as you might think. Most early pizza places wanted a neon sign with the Cliched European Chef kissing the tips of his fingers to indicate deliciousness. Or an animated neon sign that showed the cook throwing the dough. I prefer the neon to the statues, anyway; old advertising colossi could be creepy to begin with, and the more new paint was added over the years, the odder they looked. But then I came across these guys.

The A&W Burger Family. Can't find a public domain picture - I know, I know, respecting copyright, it's so quaint! I can probably get away with a panel from a Zippy cartoon under "Fair Use." A google image search will show you plenty of

pictures of the gang - a series of smiling happy family members lofting burgers for your delectation. When I was a kid we went to the A&W Drive-in for burger and root beer; ate in the car. They brought the tray to the window. The art on the silver foil around the burgers had a Mad-Men era look; the Burger Family of the statues seems to have been redesigned to look like they had Charlie-Brown DNA.

Teen sauce?

Teen sauce?

The menu has been expanded, and there's now a Grandpa burger, an Uncle Burger, a Grandma Burger, and a Little Buddy Burger, in case you're out with a friend role-playing Skipper and Gilligan.

Not sure anyone really wants to eat an Uncle Burger. Except, of course, that lovable Canadian screw-up, Ryan!

At the bottom of the Wikipedia page was a list of links to A&W in other countries. The Malasian page motto: "More than the Usual." Here, have a Malaysia A&W hot dog commercial:

Nice to see he respects local customs.