I like bad taste. Taste always tasted like another Anglo conspiracy to keep me from having fun. Comic books, bright colors, science fiction, short skirts... whatever I liked was always wrong.

refers to ads common before World War II: the Burma Shave company mounted sets of five small signs a quarter mile apart on lonely highways. The first four signs each had one line of a comic poem (not all about shaving); the last was signed Burma Shave, as if the can of goo itself was some graffiti-poet. A few of these ad-poems survived on desert roads when I was a kid. I liked the wait between signs. As in haiku or comics, the real action was in the gaps!

Burma Chavez is a slightly more political pun that it looks. In San Francisco, the southern border of the Mission district was called Army Street. When resident Latinos tried to rename it for labor leader Cesar Chavez, a lot of local ignoramuses felt this insulted fallen soldiers (actually it once led to Army barracks; long gone). Big fuss. Streetsigns waffled back and forth for years, baffling tourists, annoying locals.

Good old schizoid Mission!

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