Man ends 20-year Llandegley airport sign joke that cost £25k | Hacker News Reader

Man ends 20-year Llandegley airport sign joke that cost £25k

bbc.com

204 pointsljf76 comments

Reminds me a little of the "Welcome to Luton" prank from earlier this year by Max Fosh: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ya_LluCl16k

Some time after a period of my life where I was routinely traveling to and from Cleveland, I woke up from a nap on a plane to Milwaukee and saw this sign, it really got me:

https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/welcome-to-cleveland-sig...

I'm not sure if its that sign, but I have seen one of these before...

This was a much more poignant article than I was expecting

"The sign can come down but the airport is still there. The airport exists in the same way that songs exist. If you set fire to the scrap of paper on which Paul McCartney wrote Yesterday, that wouldn't destroy the song. E

Coincidentally, I was thinking about this example today. The paper in fact is not the song. It becomes a song when it is sang. When it is given voice. In fact it is hard to say what the song is. You can play it with different instruments. You can play it in its recorded form on various media. All these will sound different. I was thinking "reality" is like this too. So I don't think the sign can make the airport.

This is what a meme really is.

The vast majority of our waking hours are spent pondering things that are not in the least bit real like this. Just memes that only humans are aware of and believe in.

This airport is as real as a song, as santa, as a country, a law, the value of money, words.

In fact, an overwhelming majority of things that we generally perceive to be real are only things that exist in the shared consciousness of human beings. The only difference between santa and a law is just how strongly people believe in and how many people willingly support the latter.

But santa and laws are of the exact same category of made up ideas that we choose to believe in and that influence our group behaviour.

Some things do exist, like the combination of materials that make up buildings that we inhabit.

But their meaning and purpose and ownership and the reasons we enter them and the vast majority of what buildings mean to us aren't in the least bit real.

I wouldn't be in the least bit surprised to find out that ant and bee colonies also share their own memes that help structure their societies.

And much of what we percieve as real isn't. Your senses are used as an input to a model rather than being available in a raw form and we percieve the model. For example your brain takes a stream of data from your eyes as they flick in different directions and different focus levels. But what you percieve is a fully rendered model with no edges and an understanding of depth. But it is always an abstraction. The yellow blob at the edge of your field of view may be a lion rather than a wheat field. And the car 100m away could be the size of a mountain.

And even there was a "real" airport - you'd face considerations like "Theseus ship"

Let's go even deeper: "Ship of Theseus" applied to intersubjective phenomena GP described. In one sense, any institution, culture, law or religion that outlives the founding generation is fully Ship-of-Theseus-sed already.

Perhaps every single utterance/communication of any intersubjective phenomena is already ship-of-theseus-sed by the time it leaves the mouth of the speaker.

Probably by the time the brain of the speaker has processed the thought.

The mere passage of time means that the original meme no longer exists in its original form. Communicating a single idea to another individual creates a wholly new slightly mutated copy of the original idea.

I don’t understand how what I wrote is related to meme https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_meme

you changed it to "internet meme"; he meant "meme" https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/meme

Ok. But I still don't get it. I wrote, "The paper in fact is not the song. It becomes a song when it is sang. When it is given voice. In fact it is hard to say what the song is. You can play it with different instruments. You can play it in its recorded form on various media. All these will sound different. I was thinking "reality" is like this too. So I don't think the sign can make the airport."

How is this related to a meme?

> The paper in fact is not the song.

Right. The NFT that claims to be the ownership of the piece of paper is the song...

<sigh>

Reminds me of the legitimate freeway sign in Sacramento that says “Ocean City MD, 3073 Miles”

I never knew the story behind it but apparently they have the same thing there with miles to Sacramento!

https://www.capradio.org/articles/2016/05/06/two-coasts-two-...

Just outside Baltimore, where I-70 begins its journey west, there's a sign listing mileage to Columbus, St Louis, Denver, and... Cove Fort - the unpopulated place in Utah that happens to mark the western terminus of I-70.

From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cove_Fort

> In 2004, the Federal Highway Administration was testing a new typeface, Clearview, designed to have improved readability at night with headlight illumination. One test sign was placed at Baltimore, Maryland – the eastern terminus of Interstate 70 – that listed Cove Fort as a control city with a distance of 2,200 mi (3,500 km). One employee stated with the number of queries the department received about Cove Fort, the test was a success. The sign became so popular that after the test was over, federal authorities made arrangements with Maryland authorities to keep the sign permanently installed. The sign prompted a series of stories about Cove Fort to be published in the Baltimore area. Since that time, a small effort has been made by people in both states to lobby the Utah Department of Transportation to reciprocate by placing a sign at Cove Fort listing the distance to Baltimore.

I think Clearview ended up not being optimal but they found this out in the middle or after the nationwide rollout?

Sister City program?

Opposite ends of a major highway.

Oooh. Right.

Exactly. They are telling you just how far you can get on that particular strip.

Next Exit: 1m

Last Exit: 3,073m

bounds testing is important!

"First gas for 3073 miles" would be a funny road sign as well.

It would be funny if a particular [COMPANY/GAS STATION] put a sign up, whereby say, they are in baltimore, but bought a sign in SF advertising a super cheap gas price if you just come on by, and gas is FREE - we are conveniently located of HWY X, 3,015 miles east, then take a left"

EDIT: I think I just reiterated what you just said. though you were more succinct.

Somehow reminds me of those "free beer tomorrow" signs.

You might be able to do something with a chain or restaurant that is on both ends, a little coin they can take from one to the other if they're driving all the way.

There's a bar I walked passed at some point that had a sandwich board out front that said something like: we are known for friendly women, free beer, and false advertising.

Semi-related, I sometimes see a photo of some bar advertising (IIRC) discount for bringing your spouse XOR lover, and free drinks if you bring both at the same time.

we need more prankster (gentle and funny) culture in this world...

Like how the Swedes have a prank whereby on a bachelor party they glue a fake beard to the groom... but they make the beard out of all the groomsmens shaved pubes...

This kind of thing should be done at the beginning and end of every interstate, in my opinion.

Lends a bit of flavor, though San Diego, CA may have more of them than most cities.

That's US route 50. There is indeed a similar 3000+ mile sign on the other end in Ocean City.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/US_Route_50

In the 1980s when Reagan sent wheat to the USSR, a sign appeared in Kansas proclaiming "Kansas: Breadbasket of the Soviet Union".

my favorite highway sign prank was when Harvey Mudd students changed a sign on the 210 which read:

  California Institute of Technology 
  Pasadena City College
  Next Exit

to:

  California Institute of Technology 
  (Pasadena City College)
  Next Exit

They could have fixed the one in the other direction that incorrectly said Cal Tech until recently.

But more into easier is probably the guerrilla freeway sign heist adding an I-5 NORTH indication on the 110 north by Dodger Stadium before the tunnels

I remember seeing that one and thinking it looked a tiny bit wonkey but what can you expect from a last minute patch job.

I thought it was official and it was very useful.

A couple years back a sign memorializing the Emperor Norton Memorial Bridge was placed at the onramp around 5th and Bryant in San Francisco. Unfortunately it was taken down fairly quickly.

(The history is, some wag called the Bay Bridge the Willie L Brown Jr. Bridge, for some reason people started calling it that, and others who don't know any better perpetuate it. But real San Franciscans know it was and will always be Emperor Norton's bridge, and occasionally reminders of that fact go up.)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Francisco–Oakland_Bay_Brid...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emperor_Norton

There's an official sign in Boston that advises drivers they need only travel 3,365 more miles to reach Newport, Oregon:

https://twitter.com/MassDOT/status/806867577112854529

I remember seeing this one[0] when I was younger. There was a counterpart sign in North Carolina[1], but apparently it was stolen too often, and is no longer being replaced.

[0] https://old.reddit.com/r/NorthCarolina/comments/bz6ath

[1] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d1/Wilmingt...

That leads to an article about the 420 mile marker sign getting stolen so often that they replaced it with a 419.99 mile marker sign.

https://www.denverpost.com/2014/01/10/colorado-hopes-a-mile-...

Once in a while I'll see someone talking about Portland and get very confused as I slowly work out that they're talking about Portland, Maine.

Why would people in <New England State> give a shit about what's going on in Oreg... oh.

Probably the Boston sign is having a jab at Newport Rhode Island.

Oddly enough Portland, Oregon is named for Portland, Maine. If the coin toss had gone the other way it'd be named after Boston.

In this parallel universe I wonder if Fred Armisen still makes a show but calls it 'Bostonia'. Same number of syllables so the song still works.

Which itself has been renamed a few times. Until the British fired incendiary cannonballs to burn it down just before a blizzard. This demonstration of force helped unite the colonists in their support for revolution. When rebuilding, Falmouth became Portland.

Is this the longest highway in the US?

It is. The next two longest also start around there: US6 in Boston and I90 which starts at the tip of Cape Cod.

I-90 ends in East Boston.

Some highways are measured in the thousands of miles. Others are measured in feet:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indiana_State_Road_520

Should say Newport Oregon, 3,365 miles. Proceed at own risk.

As long as we're talking Welsh road sign stories, there's this classic:

E-mail error ends up on road sign - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=350186 - Oct 2008 (12 comments)

That's a gem.

I have a copy of volume 2 of "Signs of the Times" from the 1970s, which is a catalogue of similarly amusing signs sent in by readers of The Times newspaper. My personal favourite is "Please do not throw sticks, stones, or this sign over the edge" from a cliff edge in South Africa :)

Enough fun and games, time to pull down the joke and put the space to good use.

Advertising.

I fear your obvious sarcasm will still be missed... or overflown as one might say.

> “I remember, after Boulder approved same sex marriage certificates (back in 1975 or earlier!) someone doctored a photo of the sign to say something along the lines of 'Welcome to Lesbian Homoville' (I think it was quoting testimony from a city council meeting.)”

https://at.tumblr.com/thefuckingflatirons/boulder-welcome-to...

how does it cost $1,500 a year to maintain it?

Looks like a rented billboard

Sign Hacking in the LA Freeway Dystopia - https://thelandmag.com/richard-ankrom-guerrilla-public-servi...

Note that the article doesn't say that the town has put up the money to keep it going. If it is driving tourism, they might try to organize a bit and raise the funds.

Feels like nowadays you can just put up a GoFundMe and the money will show up, providing the subject "went viral".

> driving tourism

I see what you did there

It is the terminals that make the joke right? Airports comes in all sizes.

The UK doesn't do that much domestic flying, only cities tend to have airports.

Way cheaper than a social media giant.

Wholesome.

This reads like a justification for trolling. "Nobody's hurt and it's all in good fun. My fun and my friends' fun, that is."

Putting up a fake sign is like dropping a single piece of litter. It's not going to do much by itself, it's just a tiny bit of pollution which makes signs a tiny bit less useful to the general public.

I'm sure nobody will try to drive to an Airport to which they are unable to buy tickets.

Yeah, I'm trying to come up with a scenario in which someone will be harmed by this.

It's not like there's an airport and the sign is pointing to the wrong one. I don't arbitrarily visit airports.

The worst thing I can think of is to tell someone that I'd be landing at the Llandegley airport and that I need a ride. Then they ride out to a field and I'm not there. But that's just plain old lying. I can say I'd be landing at Heathrow and the effect is the same. Even worse because Heathrow is an actual airport and they'd probably spend a bit looking for me. At least with Llandegley, the bit is up as soon as they pull into the field.

You can spend many hours at Heathrow waiting for someone to show up. And that's if they are arriving on a flight.

FWIW, the UK is full of disused airports. Like if you search Google Maps for the nearest airport thinking "I'll have my jet pick me up there" it's probably now an industrial park built on top of a crumbling WWII airstrip. They built a lot of airstrips during the war, so the Luftwaffe couldn't bomb them all.

A chunk of the M8 motorway just west of Glasgow runs along what used to be the runway of the old Renfrew Airport. It was only open for 12 years and sat derelict after closing in 1966 for about another ten years.

A bit of a shame really because it really was a stunning building.

https://www.glasgowarchitecture.co.uk/renfrew-airport

Much like stonehenge.

Imagine having to justify a joke as anodyne as this.

FTA : "Mr Whitehead added "as a journalist, whatever you do, someone, somewhere, is going to get upset about it".
However, this particular joke has seemingly been popular among locals and tourists alike.
"In 20 years, I haven't had a single complaint about Llandegley International," he said.

"Loads of people love it, some people might not get it. But as far as I know, nobody is upset or angry about it. That's a first for me."

Guess, we found the one person upset...

If you live in a country where there are arbitrary signs almost everywhere, like the US, I could see the argument. In the UK, however, this sign very clearly stands out as unusual and a joke. We don't tend to have large, independent signs and billboards on 60mph roads, especially not on the Welsh borders, so the sign's mere presence is curious enough and unlikely to detract from any other signs in the area.

As long as Google doesn't mistakenly add the nonexistent airport to their maps, it is harmless to some and amusing to others.

I do get your point related to litter, but there are times when - like with intentional misspellings or intentional wrong grammar - jokes can be made which are harmless to most but recognized as fun to a few.

I think the cost solves this issue. It would be annoying if there were lots of fake street signs. Many people must get the idea to put up a random sign for something that doesn't exist, and more would upon seeing such signs, but very few people are willing to pay a thousand dollars a year for the joke.

> Putting up a fake sign is like dropping a single piece of litter. It's not going to do much by itself, it's just a tiny bit of pollution which makes signs a tiny bit less useful to the general public.

FWIW, this applies even better to advertising.

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