Thread: Much Ado About Doo-Doo

Our local rag, the Tallahassee Demagogue (Oops! Sorry! The Tallahassee Democrat), has a daily featurette called "Zing!" with brief anonymous posts of a pithy nature on just about any subject. My response to one of them was actually printed as a LTE a few days later. The editors did yeoman service in creating a snappy headline, doing some confirming research, and massaging my original submittal into better form. Here's the online version: http://www.tallahassee.com/apps/pbcs...=2008808080308

No pictures in the online version, but the paper copy had a cropped piece of pic 2, with the advisory to "use your imagination." This is why radio and print are more powerful media than television and film.

My submittal was quite ham-handed. My first draft had only pic 1 attached, but before submitting, I found pics 2 & 3 on a CD, and just piggy-backed them without seriously amending the original text, which follows now:
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A recent (TD, July 30, 2008) Zing!er requested a yard sign to regulate neighbors' dogs. This one has proven effective over the past several years, but used only after-the-fact to discourage theft of the sign.

It's derived from some pavement tiles in Brussells' Grand Platz (sp?), which I photographed about 10 years ago. Those tiles are for permission, though, without the diagonal bar. They're located next to sewer drains in the pavement. If I recall correctly, the Belgian tiles are mirrored from mine, because I considered the diagonal bar as I show it more effective. For some reason, the Belgians are too squeamish to include the micro-t**d, even though the famous statue of the little boy pizzing is only a block or two away.

A zipper bag protects the sign from the elements. The just-passed pet waste ordinance provides no protection for private property, so something like this is still needed for moral suasion. There are similar signs available on the internet; (naturally) I like mine better. I may have a better rendition of my original drawing around someplace, but I'll search for it only on request, with no guarantee of success. (My computer went off the rails a few years ago.)

Belay that last. Wasn't lost after all.

Joe Greiner