Metropolis : Pun City

Although hair salons seem to have a monopoly on puns as business names--Hair It Tis, The Hair’Em, Curl Up n’ Dye, The Head Shop, Headquarters, headcetera--once you begin looking around Los Angeles for roadside double-entendres, they show up in all sorts of places and in all sorts of categories: cinematic, Shakespearean, mythic, artistic, multilingual, sexual, regional and, of course, the purely verbal. Among those that have made my driving happier are Out of the Closet (thrift shop), Sweeping Beauty (carpet cleaner), Friar Tux (formal attire), Nuts Landing (candy and nut emporium), Ciaotime (Italian restaurant), the Blind Spot (window treatments), Van Go (jitney service), Vicious Cycles (bicycle shop) and the Valet Girls (self-explanatory).