The Braindead Bakery and the Scary Laundry

The Braindead, er, Brended Bakery

In front of the Baluyot and Lt. J. Francisco corner in Krus na Ligas is a small bakery – and I do mean small bakery. The store personnel (there are 2 at a time) only have to take around 3 steps to move from one end of the store to another. They also have to take these steps really slowly lest they do bodily harm to each other.

Anyway, the remarkable thing about this bakery is not its size or its bread, which is good enough but not at all outstanding.  What piqued my interest is its name.

The sign above the bakery said BREND ED.  Again, that’s BREND space ED.  If you’re in a hurry, you’ll say the bakery’s name is BRENDED, which sounds very much like BRAINDEAD, don’t you think?

When I first noticed this, I thought I was mistaken.  I assumed a letter A belongs to the space between BREND and ED.  That makes sense, I thought.  Brenda and Ed are probably the owners of the bakery.   However, when I checked again (prior to writing this post), I noticed that the sign does indeed say BREND ED and nothing else.  How can I be so sure?  Simple.  The bakery now has two big signs – the old one and a much newer one – and both of them say BREND ED.

[Edit:  Now there are 3 BRENDED signs in all.  That bakery really is popular among advertisers.  Good for them.]

The Scary Laundry Shop

After jogging one morning, I took the De Los Reyes route that would take me directly to KNL from the UP Acad Oval.  One of the homes I passed caught my attention.  On one side of the gate was a sign that indicated the shop’s name (which I won’t mention) and its tag line “Guaranteed Fresh and Clean.”    The laundry service apparently costs P20/kilo, and that’s a fairly good price.  It’s worth checking out, I thought.

I started to walk on and leave the house behind when I noticed that there was another sign at the other side of the gate.  On a piece of brown, corrugated cardboard was written in big, bold and black letters, “UKAY”.

Now I’m sure I won’t be bringing my laundry there.  I will always be apprehensive about my clothes ending up in the wrong pile.

[note:  when I passed the shop again after a few days, I saw that the UKAY sign was gone.  Perhaps the ukay was a one-time thing.  A customer might have defaulted and failed to come back for his or her clothes, and the laundry shop sold them to recoup its losses. ]