Anyone who’s spent much time in the rural Midwest knows the ubiquitous old-time general-store signs offering “fishworms and cottage cheese.”
Having grown up in that area, I never thought much about those signs until meeting a guy named Tom David, who’d moved from California to marry a Wisconsinite.
“Are the fishworms in the cottage cheese?” he’d ask. “How do you feel about them even cohabiting the same refrigerator?”
Once alerted to the humor of it, I soon picked up Tom’s habit of calling any and all stuff incongruously grouped together, “fishworms and cottage cheese.”
Tom would have appreciated the pictured naturopathic health store sign we encountered several years ago in rural Pima, Arizona. As another friend, Russ, notes, “it brings new meaning to to the expression, ‘hanging out a shingle.'” Click on the image to see it full-size. ©2010 Gregory N. Brown