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Honest panhandler

  • Thread starter pearldiver
  • Start date
On Sunday I was driving about in an area called Balcones Heights. Normally I avoid it like the plague, as they have red light cameras, but I was in a safe part, passing through. By a bus stop I see a fellow
with a sign (someone in the know said it is called "flying a sign") that said, "Why Lie?" "I Want A Beer." I slowly pull up to the light, and look in my rearview mirror. A car some distance behind me pulled over to the curb and handed a guy their last beer, or at least it looked that way, it had a plastic ring thingie attached to it. Last I saw he was off to enjoy his ill gotten booty.:)
 
My favorite was the guy in Harvard Square in Cambridge that used to hold up a sign that said "Ninjas killed my family. Need money for kung-fu lessons." Or even better, the guy I used to see in the China Town/South Station area who's sign said "Give me a dollar or a crazy homeless man will kill you.".
 
Those are great. Our town had for a long time " the aliens wont take me unless i have gas money"
 
A friend and I joke about the ones that have not been made yet. Example, "Please help, Civil War Veteran."
 
I saw one in Vegas that said "Please donate to marijuana research"
 
We used to have a panhandler who staked out the sidewalk outside of a store I worked in. He sat there all day with his crutches and would tell anyone who asked about how he was crippled in Vietnam. One day when he reported for "duty" there was another panhandler there already. He charged the "trespasser" like a mad bull, swinging his crutches like windmills.
 
A middle school friend who was an artist once did a project where he paid homeless folks for their signs, and then used them in a montage. During that or a similar venture he was stabbed, reasons unknown. He has since perished, the circumstances are unclear. Sometimes at exhibitions he would hand out beer and cigarettes. He did a ceramic piece about a friend who supposedly was pulled over and got a DWI for having consumed at or somewhere near a case of beer. https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct...=JeVSx0YODtwhkPM9jfEtDw&bvm=bv.66330100,d.aWw in under 8 hours.
 
  • #10
There was a bar I used to go to in Stroudsburg PA that had what they called "The Hall of Foam" They had 25 beers on tap, and drinking one of each in what I believe was 8 hours would get your name on a plaque. The first time I went there I was determined to do it, and would have if someone hadn't done it a few weeks prior, gotten into an accident and proudly proclaimed to the responding officer about getting in!
A middle school friend who was an artist once did a project where he paid homeless folks for their signs, and then used them in a montage. During that or a similar venture he was stabbed, reasons unknown. He has since perished, the circumstances are unclear. Sometimes at exhibitions he would hand out beer and cigarettes. He did a ceramic piece about a friend who supposedly was pulled over and got a DWI for having consumed at or somewhere near a case of beer. https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct...=JeVSx0YODtwhkPM9jfEtDw&bvm=bv.66330100,d.aWw in under 8 hours.
 
  • #11
We have a lot of those "witty" beggar signs here, but I've come to find they all simply trade the signs around and "work" different locations with them. If anything, the attempts at humor bother me the most, especially when you see some of them with infants or malnourished dogs that almost serve as props. I will only help the elderly or people with obvious mental illness, not able-bodied libertines. If they just cut out the BS and made signs that read, "Need heroin, don't want diarrhea," and I may throw them a buck. Otherwise, there are plenty of resources here to get the people without serious mental illness off the streets. They just have to make the decision to stop their drug-induced, permanent vacation.
 
  • #12
Just the curiosity aspect of things, when something occurs that you don't expect. Back in the 80's some friends and I were shooting off fireworks on a hillside near a highway. Some silly fool thought we were shooting at him, exited the highway, got to where we were and started ranting. It all cleared up quickly, and he realized in his haste to get out of his car and start blabbering, he had locked his keys in his car. We even went home to get a coathanger so he could break into his car and be on his way.
 
  • #13
Of course you could always go the Caddyshack way and say, "On your deathbed you will recieve total conciousness."
 
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