My (current) favorite picture in the world

I was walking through downtown Manchester a couple of weeks ago, and this sign called out to me with its beautiful, terrible siren cry.

(click to blow it up)

If you're going to ask me what's so beautiful about it, you may as well ask me where it all went wrong and where you lost your soul from childhood up to here. It's really the final admonition ("NO ESCORTS") that puts it over the top for me - it displays a remarkable economy of language that I obviously have no facility for. At the very least, it tells the passer-by "we've been asked that goddamned question so many times we have to put it out in front so people don't ask again (and they probably will anyway)."

I love this picture in an inappropriate way. Or appropriate, I don't know.