WHERE HAVE I SEEN THIS?
Confession time: it hurts. It’s probably our own fault, because it usually is when this happens. But still, it hurts.
For two weeks in a row, the ‘Where’ in-box has sat idle and nearly empty. Not a single entry, not even one wrong guess, came in over the electronic transom regarding last week’s picture.
Was the chosen image too obscure? Too obvious, maybe? Is there not one redbankgreen devotee who recognized that blue winged human form as…
the emblem outside the chiropractor’s office where Branch Avenue meets Spring Street? (Going by our Hagstrom, the property appears to be just to the Little Silver side of the border with Red Bank.)
Perhaps we’ll never know. But we’ll keep trying, and keep posting new ‘Wheres.‘
Why?
(Cue music)
Because we live in a land where any girl or boy, no matter his or her station in life, might some day become a four-door Jeep Wrangler-driving adult, one whose gasoline credit card frees him, or her, to explore every paved hillock in our little patch of Eden. And someday, that boy or girl might catch sight out of the corner of his or her eye a plastic icon attached to the vinyl siding of a chiropractor’s office, and think, “What is that, a cadeuceus?” And think further, “No, wait, a cadeuceus is a thing with snakes, long used as a symbol of medical practitioners, and this one looks sort of like a blue Ken doll with wings. That is too cool! I must take a cellphone picture of that for my MySpace page!” And that young person, while operating the Wrangler at a couple of miles per hour above the posted speed limit, might attempt to take a picture of the strange emblem and not immediately notice the one squirrel chasing the other squirrel across lower Spring Street. And then, suddenly seeing the flash of grey fur just beyond the horizon of his or her vehicle’s hood, he or she might, in an adrenalin-triggered panic, oversteer the Jeep right up the driveway of that medical practice and crash into the vinyl-sided house, not seriously injuring him or herself, and missing the faux caduceus entirely, because it’s at a safe height even from the new Jeep on steroids. But that young person might still require medical attention in the form of chiropractic, as they call it, to treat a soft-tissue injury, the kind that might have been avoided had that young person already been yawningly familiar with the faux caduceus because his Dad had once been the first to correctly identify it in a charming online contest called ‘Where Have I Seen This?’ and had boasted to his children about this triumph at least three times a year, because his life was dull, and winning at ‘Where’ meant something.
In other words, we do it for the children.
Please Email us your guesses about this week’s photo, and tell your kids about it.