Since I took up the hobby (which as you may have noticed I've been extremely lazy about) several websites and newspaper articles have come to my attention that shed light and poke fun of the fad. No site or article of course would be complete without the "God Answers Knee-Mail" or "Give Satan an Inch and he'll be your ruler" entries. Ship of Fools actually has a posting of the latter one with a submitted by Matthew Ralph of Annville, PA in italics below.

Just recently, one of those more popular sites, A Boy and His Computer clearly separated itself from the pack in a similar way that the British website Ship of Fools has for several years now in the arena of religious satire and humor. Like Ship of Fools' Biblical Curse Generator where you can type in words and get an instant Biblical curse, the site's operator Ryland Sanders took all of the time to fiddle around with Photoshop and PHP to create his very own Church Sign Generator.

Sanders, who lives in the Bible Belt's largest state (Texas), said the idea originated out of the urge to rearrange letters on church signs, something I'm almost ashamed I've never even given a thought.

"I played around with a couple of church signs that way," he said. "And that made me think it would be interesting if you could rearrange the letters without having to do it in Adobe Photoshop. And I knew it was possible to manipulate images with PHP (the scripting language I use for my website), so I did a little experimenting and the church sign generator was the result."

Sanders said he was first attracted to church signs because of the puns and added them to his site, which features an array of web-related humor - sections for web pet peeves, bad websites, IM hijinks, and more. He currently has a few dozen posted on the site dating back to 2000, but it's the sign generator that has attracted him an intense influx of visitors.

As he explains in a recent update to the site, "it's gotten over 210,000 visits from over 151,000 unique visitors - 493,000 page views! - since the beginning of November, and lots of great compliments." As often is the case with sites that attract an overwhelming stream of visitors in a short period of time, his bandwidth bills are starting to grow (What do you say we drop a dime in the bucket, folks?).

"Part of it is that I'm (hopefully gently) poking fun at them, because sometimes the humor is definitely unintentional," Sanders said. "They are sometimes very topical, as well, they can be one of the indicators that a meme has gone as far as it can go. "God Answers Knee-Mail", for instance; you know the internet is mainstream now if that's on a church sign."

Self-described in his short bio on the site as "not religious," Sanders said both the hobby of collecting photographs of humorous signs and his new site feature that you can imagine is being used to make plenty of objectionable material - heck, it's like the modern version of the repeater parrot - haven't gotten him in the door of any churches.

"I don't think church signs have much to do with religion per se anyway, and I doubt that anyone was ever convinced to go to church by the sign out front," Sanders said. "I just think the signs are funny."

So do we Ryland. So do we.

[ posted 11-15-03 ]