Human directionals

Human directionals? That would be the people that hold up advertising signs on street corners.

"Street corner advertising on human billboards has existed for centuries, but Southern California — where the weather allows sign spinners to work year-round — has endowed the job with style.

Local spinners have cooked up hundreds of moves. There's the Helicopter, in which a spinner does a backbend on one hand while spinning a sign above his head. In the Blender, a spinner twirls the sign behind his back. Spanking the Horse gets the most attention. The spinner puts the sign between his legs, slaps his own behind and giddy-ups...

Aarrow keeps dozens of moves in a "trick-tionary," which only a handful of people have seen, said co-founder Mike Kenny. The company records spinners' movements and sends them in batches to the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. "We have to take our intellectual property pretty seriously," he said."

Get that? The way the guy on the street corner holds his advertising sign is now intellectual property.