No wonder I can’t get “My City Was Gone” out of my head. Driving down I-78 and I-81 this weekend to my college reunion left me thinking I’ve been spending far too much quality time assessing bad agency Web sites, when I should have been devoting more time to the worthier cause of stopping billboard pollution. As these are roads I travel extremely infrequently, the comparison to what driving them was like years ago, as opposed to today, was stark and depressing. While I seem to recall long, uninterrupted stretches where all drivers could see were rolling hills and the occasional barn with a hex sign, there were now billboards, like ones advertising this, and this, every 200 feet or so. Most of the billboards in the area are owned by Lamar, so if I were to complain—which I guess I am by posting this—it would be my target. What makes billboard pollution worse than some advertising clutter is that there's a victim beyond homo sapiens here, which is the cluttered landscape. And last time I checked, farmland wasn't able to talk back.

—Posted by Catharine P. Taylor