Geoff Duncan

I can't believe I let this one slide so long: up in Woodinville, there's an Army/Navy surplus store located right next to a Marine Corps recruiting office. (Convenient, that.) Like all Army/Navy Surplus stores, it tends to cater to the outdoorsy, rugged-guy, shoot-anything-that-moves types, and has an appropriate wall-filling mural of a gun-toting, smiling Great White Hunter in camouflage festooned and bandoliers laden with shotgun shells and what could be some grenades, smoke bombs, flares, and anti-tank weaponry just in case. (The mural seems kinda blurry on those details, probably to appease those limp-wristed ACLU types.) And it's right next to one of those intersections where you inevitably wait a couple minutes for the light, so you spend some time staring at people in the cars around you, the kids playing with the window squeegees at the gas station, and the signs on the storefronts.

So I have to give the proprietors of this Army/Navy place credit, because their signs are usually a couple cuts above what's you'd expect from the carpet-bomb-first-and-ask-questions-later crowd. My personal recent favorite:

Happy Mothers Day!
Combat Boots 20% Off

Heh. Sir, yes, sir!

Of course, I can't let the eco-veggie-crunchie crowd off the hook very easily either. About a half mile away is a blender-running health-concerned juice joint which will happily sell you a "smoothie" packing a whopping 600+ calories. Kinda wonder how that compares to a Big Mac...

Update Jun 05: Oh, wait, google can probably tell me. A Big Mac reportedly as 570 calories, 55 percent from fat. The smoothie above has 680 calories, a whopping 20 of which (just under 3 percent) are from fat. The Big Mac also sports 590 mg of sodium, compared to 270 mg in the smoothie. But I bet the smoothie doesn't dribble thousand island dressing down your front.