Every now & then you see something on the road that makes you go, "What the
hell was
that?" Not stuff that's just
gross or
disgusting (
roadkill is
ubiquitous), but things that make a serious attempt at
spraining your
mind.
Somebody in my area drives a jacked-up, big-block version of... an Oldsmobile Cutlass. Was this the muscle car of choice twenty years ago for forty-year-olds who couldn't afford a Camaro? This car has the whole bit -- the chopped top, the drag-racer rear wheels, the supercharger hump in the hood... I guess these days anything that's a V-8 counts as a muscle car, really.
Also, on my daily drive home from work, there's a billboard advertising California pistachios. On this billboard is a guy with his hand out, said hand being full of said pistachios. The guy in question is grinning, not like he's enjoying a snack, but like he's having the best sexual experience of his life at that very moment. As if that weren't disturbing enough, the tagline, in feet-high letters, is "Grab a Handful!" When you're on your way home from work, tooling along at 55 in the left lane because the dump trucks are slowing the right lane down to 25 MPH, and you look up and see a grinning man telling you to grab a handful of nuts, that really throws you.
Going the other direction, on the same stretch of highway, is a billboard with a blow-up photo of a baby in a hospital bed hooked up to tubes and wires. The caption says "Shaking a baby shatters lives." This ad was apparently bought by a woman after her babysitter shook her infant and caused all kinds of trauma. This one is disturbing on multiple levels, even besides the "people really do that kind of stuff to kids!" one.
I think of all the things that disturb one on the road, the one I've seen with the most "WTF??" points has to be the VW Beetle that used to (and still does, for all I know) zip around my hometown. The neon purple/fluorescent yellow (said colors separated by a thin white lightning bolt) VW Beetle, with the tailpipe sticking four feet out the rear at a 60-degree angle to the ground, just under the exposed engine. That really messed with my head the first time I glanced out the window at school and saw that thing farting its way down Church Street.