Healthcare For All

Wisconsin Overpass Light Brigade

Ecopocalypse Now Signs

 "The obscure we see eventually. The completely obvious, it seems, takes longer." - Edward R. Murrow

 (Signs placed around California)

 "Nothing is more damaging to the adventurous spirit within a man than a secure future. The very basic core of a man's living spirit is his passion for adventure. The joy of life comes from our encounters with new experiences, and hence there is no greater joy than to have an endlessly changing horizon, for each day to have a new and different sun." - Chris McCandless

 "A pint of sweat will save a gallon of blood." - Gen. George Patton

 "When I was a kid, I used to pray every night for a new bike. Then I realized, the Lord doesn't work that way... So I just stole one and asked Him to forgive me." - Emo Philips

 "There ain't no man can avoid being born average. But there ain't no man got to be common." - Satchel Paige

 "All that we see or seem

Is but a dream within a dream."

 - Edgar Allen Poe

YTD - 538

Unintentional Googlebomb

 Apparently I've now confused enough motorists to make "smell the permafrost" the first suggestion that comes up when you google "wake up and".

So take that, coffee!  http://www.google.com

Signs above: Sacramento, Berkeley and Los Angeles

 Novato

 Scott's Valley

 Petaluma (this one's been up over a month!)

 Pt. Richmond (three weeks)

 Soquel

 Berkeley

 San Francisco

 Richmond

 Davis

 Oakland

 Los Angeles

 Aptos

Santa Cruz

YTD - 526

How to Get Your Message Out

"The Things to do are: the things that need doing, that you see need to be done, and that no one else seems to see need to be done." - R. Buckminster Fuller

 The cheapest and easiest way to get a message out to a whole lot of people is to paint a bunch of signs and put them up on freeways.

(Signs posted in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Berkeley, Sacramento and Marin)

The Melting North

These signs were made with about a dozen bike boxes, an overhead projector, duct tape, and about thirteen dollars worth of paint.

All of them fit into the back of my Prius.

While large signs on overpasses make for good photographs, they tend to come down much sooner than smaller signs placed along the peripheries. On the plus side, the people who take them down are rarely motivated to move them very far, so you get to reuse them a lot.  The sign above stayed up into the evening, but was down and torn in half when I came by the next morning.

It was torn so neatly though that instead of taping it back together, I just posted the two halves on a different overpass. Posting method: place cardboard against fence, stretch a couple of bungees across, duct-tape top corners, walk away.

Here's how it looked from a distance.

Having signs of different sizes allows you to hit targets of opportunity along the way.  Anything you can see while driving is a place you can put a sign that'll get read. The more difficult it is to reach, the longer it'll stay up. With a hammer, nails, spring clamps and bungee cords, you can hang a sign on pretty much anything in seconds.

Again, it's the signs placed alongside the freeways that do the heavy lifting: they stay up for days or weeks rather than hours.

Signs placed on hillsides next to flyaway ramps stay up forever.

I do love how they look on overpasses though.

The right to post political speech in the public arena is one of the most protected rights we have. Since January 1st I've put 510 signs up on freeways without any hassles from authorities. During the Bush administration I put up something like 5,000 of them. 

I have never been arrested.