Your Daily Photo (Our Public Sector Union Employees Earn Every Penny of Their Gold Plated Benefits Packages Edition)

Someone at CalTrans decided to think 'outside of the box', and rather than going with the boring, old, rhyming admonition to buckle up, "click it, or ticket", decided to throw holiday weekend travellers a little message to ponder, "click it, or diesel". As far as I can tell, this message was on every CalTrans message board that wasn't being used to relay semi-accurate, almost up-to-date traffic information.

I don't see how such well compensated, dedicated, and bright employees of CalTrans could have botched such an easy and cliched phrase, so rather than mere incompetence, I'm going to err on the side of assuming some sort of devious brilliance is behind these non sequitur road signs. After all, with an annual budget of $60,800,000,000, I would expect they'd have the cash lying around to pay for a proofreader to check what they chose to display on every sign they control up and down the state.

Are we supposed to believe drivers of diesel vehicles are exempt from seat-belt laws this holiday weekend?

Are we supposed to speculate on the sexual orientation of any unbelted women we spy?

Are they engaging in some bizarre viral marketing campaign to raise the California motoring public's awareness of the benefits of diesel autos?

I'm expecting for the Independence Day travel period that they throw up on their signs something along the lines of "Don't Drink and Derive" just to make sure folks are paying attention.

Also, just so you know, I did take that shot while driving, but I wasn't operating the camera. I had my camera mounted on a tripod, taking shots at 12 second intervals, and this was the one shot that captured one of those CalTrans signs displaying this weekend's odd message.

I didn't expect the usual holiday traffic jams, what with gas prices, economic woes, Obama chastising folks for going to Vegas and all, but looks like everyone was still trying to get out of L.A., just like on any other long weekend, so instead of a quick afternoon day trip to the desert as planned, I set up my camera to take shots as I drove up I-15 and instead of going deep into the Mojave as the sun set, I circled back and headed up to Big Bear. Below is the rest of the picture I cropped above, the full picture shows you all that early evening get out of town traffic that I had been sitting in all afternoon.