A while back I posted a blog item about an unsightly habit some people have developed, that of leaving piles of their discarded junk out on the street with a hand-written "FREE!" sign on them, as if that's supposed to make it OK for them to dump their cast-off crud in public. Since then, I've been noticing something worse: piles of discarded junk on the street that the owners aren't trying to give away.

I enjoy walking around the streets of Half Moon Bay and the surrounding environs, and I've begun to take note of what I call "hillbilly houses" -- usually nice (or semi-nice) residences which the owners have decided look really sharp with randomly-placed displays of everything from old clothes washers to stacks of weathered plywood. Like exhibits of some kind of bizarre "found" suburban sculpture.

If this stuff was hanging around for a couple of weekends or even a month while, say, some kind of interior remodeling effort was making its exterior storage necessary, that'd be one thing. But some of the junk I've seen has been piled up for years with not only no sign of going away soon, but actually breeding as more jetsam keeps appearing.

The accompanying photo was taken in El Granada, and depicts several wooden palettes which have apparently taken up residence outside this otherwise very nice home. I pass this corner quite often and these wooden monstrosities have been moldering here for well over a year. I think I've hit on a solution to this problem, however -- if these things don't vanish soon, I'm just going to go by in the middle of the night and slap a "FREE!" sign on 'em.