The Golden Raspberry

You would think one raspberry shake stand per block would be an appropriate raspberry-shake-stand-to-block ratio. But you would be wrong, as the locals of Garden City, Utah, home of the Raspberry Days festival and ground zero for that bumpy, hairy, seedy fruit, would tell you. Acting on a tip from the local sheriff (the best tips to act upon, I find), we selected LaBeau's out of the half-dozen choices that were all within a hundred yards. The shake was delicious -- thick and full of raspberries, thereby meeting all raspberry shake requirements. We were hoping to be stopped by the sheriff on the highway later to thank him, but we literally couldn't get arrested.

491 - The Number of the Beast

US Route 666 -- nicknamed "The Devil's Highway" -- running north-south through the Four Corners area of New Mexico, Colorado, and Utah, has been renamed to the far less diabolical-sounding US Route 491. We passed this sign denoting the change in Monticello, Utah, near Moab:

While this is excellent news for hexakosioihexekontahexaphobes, it saddens me. You see, while this spur of Route 66 (the sixth spur, of course) was named one of the "20 Most Dangerous Highways in the US" and believed by many to be cursed, what prompted the government to change the name was less supernatural than financial. People kept stealing the signs.

So my concern is, what will all those highway marker thieves do for entertainment now? If they want to rename Interstate-40 the "Old Scratch Turnpike," they better get a petition going, pronto. The change from 666 to 491 took about 77 years.