I don’t watch much television anymore, but I do try to catch the occasional local newscast. If you do the same, you may have seen ads running for the business portrayed above. They appear to have a regular schedule booked in the 5 o’clock news. Being the curious sort, I often check out local businesses’ websites when I see them advertised somewhere. In the case of this tree service, I guess I’d better bone up on my Thai.
This is a trimmed screen shot of cntree.com. As you can see, there’s nothing about tree services on it. It’s occupied by a squatter who has filled it with spam posts, mostly in Thai. The featured article, according to Google Translate, is “How to choose shoe size”. There are a couple of English ones at the bottom. Oops.
Frankly, part of the responsibility for this snafu lies with whoever produced the ad. I’ve produced hundreds of television commercials in my career, and a plethora of other videos and multimedia products. Nobody’s perfect, most of all yours truly, but I try to always check every URL (website address) I’m asked to put into those products, regardless of who provided it. The last thing you want to do is have the black eye of a wrong website address or contact information on the product. This ad has been running for weeks on local television, but apparently nobody has caught this? I sure hope they can get it rectified…either by securing the domain and getting a website up or by at least getting the doggone ad changed.
So, if you’re looking to find your shoe size, types of alloys, glasses that fit your face, or high back chairs…apparently C&N Tree Service can help. It could be worse: they could be putting out cereal boxes with the number of a phone sex line on them by mistake!
Years ago I spotted this truck along the walking trail on the west side of the Missouri. I started at the trailhead in the Captain’s Landing township and walked past this truck parked in someone’s backyard.
Naturally, something jumped out at me: a serious error in the word “Bismarck”. Since this wasn’t typed, I didn’t really call it a “typo”. I figured someone in the sign shop got a phone call after the first R or something. There obviously was no keyboard or computer on which to blame the error.
I’d often wondered what the other side of the truck looked like, but, not wanting to go rooting around in someone’s back yard, I figured I’d have to find out another day. That day came recently when, on another walk along the trail, I noticed that the truck had been moved out into the open. It was time to “innervestigate”, as Tigger says in my boys’ Winnie the Pooh books.
Both doors are significantly faded, but it’s easy to see that the other one contains Bismarck in its properly spelled form – 
Ladies and gentlemen, I present to you the alternate spelling of McKenzie Drive in southeast Mandan. This is the sign at the intersection just south of Moritz. How in the world did that go unnoticed for so long? I have no idea…I’d like to think strict vigilance to the traffic in my surroundings. Maybe the sign itself is a recent replacement, although the new ones are lowercase. I don’t know, but I spotted it this time.
Driving through Mandan this weekend I was surprised to find this dumpster along 1st Street. That’s a pretty cool tribute to Mandan history! It just goes to show that there’s a never-ending supply of neat stuff to discover around Bismarck-Mandan, no matter how much time one spends poking around with one’s cameras.
