So I heard this on the news last night as I was falling asleep and wanted to get up and blog about it right away before all of my creativity left me.  Unfortunately my husband had confiscated our home computer for his own personal (read: work) use.  He has a company laptop for this.  But I digress.  I will attempt now to recreate the magic that was going on inside my head eleven hours ago.
    Apparently KFC offered the city of Louisville, Kentucky (where the company is based) $3,000 to fill potholes with-- provided they were then stenciled with a KFC advertisement.  PETA fired back by offering twice as much to have freshly filled potholes carry their message about KFC.  You can read a story full of facts here:  http://thelede.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/03/31/kfc-and-peta-vie-to-fix-potholes/?hp.
    I like facts.  I just don't like to retype them.  I run an opinion blog here.  Plenty of bias for everyone with no annoying claims against it!  But once again I find the obvious biased comments that could be discussed here to be the boring part of the story.  I have plenty of robust political and moral views that could easily be expressed about this particular situation:  Who am I in favor of?  Was that small amount of money on the grand scale of public works projects even worth a news mention?  Should public property be for sale to advertisers?  If it should, then should the city be allowed to pick and choose who they like best, regardless of funding?
    But, no.  I plan to avoid answering any of those questions.  Not that they are invalid; they just didn't make it to the coveted spot of 'first thing to pop into my head when I heard about this'.  The winner in that arena was, "How on earth is that even remotely safe?"  I am no hypocrite in this particular area.  I hate advertising anywhere in the vicinity of a driver's line of sight.  I allow for the actual road signs that state only (occasionally outdated) facts about the existence of gas or food in relative proximity to a particular exit.  But billboards are dangerously distracting.  The better they are, the worse they are.  The best ones cause you to stare at them until you're looking at the back of them.  Some of them either flash or change!  Some of them are rather verbose-- I mean, how much do they expect you to read while traveling 70 mph or so?  And while we're on the subject of excessive verbosity:  I hate bumper stickers!  I say this unilaterally because some people read faster than others, so to establish a word limit would be discriminatory.  Some people have nearly a dozen on the rear of their vehicle.  I unfortunately suffer from a compulsion to read all of them.  That's what they're there for, after all.  But it's not the best idea while operating a motor vehicle, especially when some of those stickers are half-disintegrated.
    I fear I may have gone a bit too far down the rabbit hole here, but you can see my point:  it's bad enough to have advertising at eye-level on our roadways.  Now we can even look DOWN?!?!?  I can't even stand when they print the corresponding interchange on each lane.  That's what the GIANT GREEN SIGNS are for!  If somebody rear-ends me because they're reading a KFC ad on a pothole, they're going to get a 10-piece bucket on their head!  And, well, if I'm the one doing the rear-ending, ummm.... could I buy you some Original Recipe to apologize?