Nov 19, 2003 - Sticker Shock

Congratulations to Shell (93455 - that’s Orcutt!) who was the best at predicting what kinds of bumper stickers we would find in Goleta yesterday. Shell is the lucky winner of 2 movie tickets. Apparently, the key to winning the contest was to select UCSB as one of the guesses. The hard working staff of edhat.com saw a wide variety of stickers, but UCSB stickers were by far the most prevalent adorning 12 bumpers. Second place was for Goleta Valley Hospital which only showed up three times.

If you were in the Costco parking lot yesterday just after lunchtime, you might have noticed a green car stealth-fully roving through the lot, methodically journeying up one row and down the next, occasionally stopping in back of a car to write something down, occasionally having a near-miss with another cars and several pedestrians because we were looking the other way.

Luckily, no one got hurt and voila, we made it through the whole lot from Costco to Home Depot, across to Chili’s, past the movie theaters and the food court, around the CompUSA parking lot and back to Costco.  At the end of our 1-hour tour, we found ourselves lost on an Island with a bunch of castaways.  No one bumper sticker dominated. No one message cried out to be read by the car in the rear view mirror.

They were funny (“If I wanted to hear an asshole, I’d fart”).  They were serious (long quotes by St. Francis of Assisi). They identified places that people had been (eight, led by “IRE”), schools that people go to (eighteen - led by UCSB), sports that people play (ten – fishing, parachuting and soccer were the leaders), teams that people root for (two – Steelers and Raiders), radio stations that people listen to (seven - only Star 98.7 showed up more than once), music groups that people like (two), brand names that people associate with (twelve - only Radius and Momentum showed up twice), political views that people hold (thirteen - mostly liberal), and deep seated philosophical beliefs that people hold (“Evolution takes no Prisoners” and “Mullets Rock”).

Alas, the very stickers that we had excluded from the contest would have been the runaway winners! There were twenty-five American flags (interestingly, most found near Costco), and numerous AAA and State Farm stickers.