Nov

Clever Uses for Old Campaign Signs

by Janine Boylan on November 12, 2012

Campaign sign placed to attract motorists’ attention
© Janine Boylan

What’s the Life Cycle of a Campaign Sign?

From Planting to Harvest

Just a week ago, when election season was in full swing, brightly colored campaign signs were sprouting hourly along the roadside. By election day, competing candidates’ signs were jostling for each nourishing ray of motorists’ attention.

Then, suddenly, the morning after the election, nearly all the signs had been plucked away. The freeway fields were bare again.

It made me wonder: what is the life cycle of a campaign sign?

The planting season for campaign signs varies, but in California, where I live, there are rules:

It is safe to set signs in the ground no earlier than 90 days prior to an election.
They may not be in the right-of-way of any highway.
Signs have to be maintained by a responsible party who agrees to harvest them within ten days of the election.

So, if you venture out before sunrise on the morning after the election, you may see candidates and their teams out picking signs. “You’ve got to be a responsible citizen and get all the signs you put out, and even some that you didn’t,” Phil Salzer, elected to the Peoria County Board, explained.

One candidate, John Pierre Menvielle, had carefully marked each of his sign placements on a map, and, knowing where they all were, he was able to gather 400 of his signs in one day. Some candidates even make agreements to pick up one another’s signs to make the task a little easier.

Seeds for the Next Stage

Then what’s next in the life cycle of a campaign sign? It may become the seed for a clever use in its next stage:

Some signs are considered collectibles. People think of political signs as historical mementoes, so they tuck them away as souvenirs.
Some signs get replanted next election season. “We try to gather them up and clean them so we can use them in other elections,” campaign manager Dan Pelphrey said. He explained that if candidates don’t go for reelection, they might give the wire stakes to other candidates to use for their signs. (Stakes can cost from around $.25 to $1 each.)
A few signs get recycled. While many recycling centers do not accept political signs because of the various materials they are made of, some centers do collect and recycle them. So this year’s campaign sign may be one ingredient in the next generation of campaign signs.

campaign sign showing a clever use as bicycle parts

Bike sporting parts from recycled campaign signs
© Kent Peterson

Wheel Out a Very Clever Use!

Kent Peterson of Puget Sound, Washington, has a very clever use for the pulled-up signs: he carves them into bike accessories. In the photo above, the saddlebag on the back is made from a repurposed sign.

Look closely at the front and back fenders—they were once signs as well. Brilliant: using mud-slinging politicians’ signs to keep the mud from slinging onto my clothes!

Oh, I see the full life cycle of a campaign sign from planting to the consumer!

Do you know of other good uses for old campaign signs? Leave a comment.

VIA Journal Star and Imperial Valley Press

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Janine Boylan 4 Comments

Clever Ideas

Nov

Life’s Choices in Disasters Like Sandy

by Janine Boylan on November 5, 2012

Clean-up after LA riots showing a life's choice to help

Cleaning Up After the LA Riots
© Janine Boylan

Coming Together to Help

As I see photos of the mess that Sandy left behind, my thoughts go out to all of those who have suffered and lost and to those who have made one of life’s important choices: to help.

From Fear to Action in the LA Riots

During disasters, life choices stare you in the face. I had that Oh, I see moment in 1992 when another kind of disaster struck my hometown, Los Angeles.

Videos of Rodney King being beaten by police sparked riots during which neighbors rose up against neighbors simply because they had different ethnic backgrounds. People made destructive choices: they smashed windows, set fires, and ransacked local small stores.

As the news reporters covered this event in progress, I chose to huddle fearfully in my apartment behind locked doors.

The next morning, I heard that people were gathering in the middle of the city to clean up what had happened the night before. Something had changed. I needed to be there and help, and that’s when I made a bolder, different choice.

I pulled my truck into the gathering area and saw scores of people of all races and ages already there. I didn’t know a single other person, but within a few minutes, my truck bed was filled with people carrying shovels, brooms, garbage bags, and gloves. We drove slowly around the city and searched for places to clean up.

But this city, which only a few hours before had been blaring with fire-truck sirens and filled with shouts and crashing glass, was already quiet and clean. Early in the morning, hundreds of people had come out to clear away the rubble. There were so many of us, in fact, that my group struggled to find anything to clean up. We ended up pulling weeds from a vacant lot in an effort to do something to beautify the city again.

And then, as quickly as we had come together, we went our separate ways, leaving behind a cleaner, more caring community.

It certainly wasn’t the last time disaster struck the city, and the local shopkeepers still had to overcome the devastating loss that the previous night had brought them. But it showed me how, when a community needs help, especially in the darkest times, other people make the tough choice to lend a hand.

For me, participating in this brief LA clean-up was one of life’s choices that I will never forget because I learned, in this OIC moment, that making the choice to help others in my community was the best way to get through tough times: together.

Pitching In After Hurricane Sandy

I know the clean-up from Sandy will take much longer than a few hours. And while some people are taking advantage of the chaos to commit crimes like looting or soliciting money for fraudulent “charities,” there are already many stories of people making choices to stand up, clean up, and lend a hand.

In Hoboken, New Jersey, people who still had power offered fresh coffee and extension cords to their neighbors who needed to recharge themselves and their cell phones.
In several storm-ravaged cities, including New York City, restaurant owners set out tables of food for anyone in need.
The New York Times reports that the volunteer organization New York Cares has about 800 people helping in affected areas right now, and there are 6,000 more who have volunteered and are waiting for assignments.

And then this weekend, according to the Associated Press, hundreds of runners made a life choice: instead of being disappointed and leaving when the New York City Marathon was cancelled, they decided to stay in the city and help.

In Queens, one group ran up and down stairs in buildings that still are without power. These runners delivered water, blankets, and food to people who could not get out on their own.

Another group put on backpacks brimming with supplies and ran through devastated Staten Island neighborhoods where they delivered batteries, clothing, food, and more to the people there who have lost so much.

As New York resident Esther Pan Sloane donated supplies to a relief center, she told The New York Times, “It feels like we all had the same impulse: This is my city and I want to do something to help it.”

There’s so much more to do, but it’s heartening to see so many who have decided to help. It’s one of life’s most important choices.

If you wish to help the victims of Sandy, learn more here.

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Janine Boylan Comments

Making a Difference

Oct

Creative Ideas in a Cornfield

by Janine Boylan on October 29, 2012

Corn maze in Lodi, Wisconsin, designed as a modernized Vitruvian Man
© Treinen Farm

Get Lost in a Wisconsin Corn Maze

Angie and Alan Treinen’s corn maze in Lodi, Wisconsin, is, well, aMAZing. I had to find out how they make a field of stalks into the perfect canvas for their creative ideas.

The Kernel of the Corn Maze Idea

About twelve years ago, the Treinens wanted to expand their third-generation farming business. Families already came to their 200-acre property in the fall for hay rides and a pumpkin patch, but the Treinens considered adding a corn maze to draw more teens and young adults.

They visited other corn mazes and attended the corn maze convention (yes, there is a convention for corn mazes, and all corn maze creators know one another!). Then they decided to make their own maze.

With their decision in place, Angie was determined to make their maze a destination in Wisconsin. At first, the family worked with a designer to plot out their ideas, but they quickly learned that Angie had the talent to make the design herself. So she turned away from her veterinary practice to devote her time to the maze.

Designing a Corn Maze

Every May since then, when Alan plants the seeds, Angie sits down and works through design ideas. In past years, she found inspiration in stained glass—the lead between the colored glass is a little like the paths in a corn maze. That yielded corn mazes with mermaids and Tiffany-style dragonflies.

Angie talks about the pattern:

“It really needs to be a striking and beautiful maze.”

“It needs to be instantly recognizable.”

“You can’t have any dead ends. People get really angry and frustrated.”

The trails are usually about five feet wide; the main design has ten-foot wide trails. The Treinens have also learned to keep ten feet or more between trails so that visitors can’t see from one path through the corn to the next—otherwise, people tend to crash through the corn rather than follow the trail.

For this year’s design, Angie chose da Vinci’s Vitruvian man as inspiration simply because she finds it interesting. She modernized the figure in several ways:

She added a ray gun in one hand and a mechanical wing.
She surrounded him by a hypercube.
She included gears (a nod to steampunk) and a knotted carbon nanotube.

Angie and Alan worked through the details of the design together, as they always do. Nevertheless, his first reaction to the pattern was, “Are you kidding me? You’re going to make me cut this?”

Planting and Cutting the Corn to Match the Design

After the maze is designed, Angie prints it out on a grid. The corn is planted in a similar, much larger grid with very distinct rows. Alan starts cutting after the seedlings are fully emerged but before the stalks are about knee high—high enough to see where the plants are, but not so high that he would get lost in his own maze.

Alan marks the field with stakes. He flags and counts the rows to transfer Angie’s design to the field (each grid on the plan is fifteen rows in the field). Then he works with a crew to cut the field accurate to within a few inches of the design. This process takes three to four days.

The Treinen maze is unusually intricate and precise because Alan cuts it by hand. Angie says one year, when the field was over-planted and the seedlings were too thick to see the rows, they tried using GPS tracking to cut the design into the field.

That year’s design was a gecko with a mathematically-precise curved tail. But the GPS wasn’t accurate enough, so the tail came out as a series of straight lines! Alan has cut the field by hand ever since.

Capturing the Creativity in a Photo

Another unique thing about the Treinen’s maze is, quite frankly, the photo. Every year, Alan goes up in a plane early in the morning or late in the day to capture the perfect image. Sometimes it takes more than one trip.

Often farmers don’t go to this extreme to photo their mazes—they simply photoshop the design on an aerial photograph of their field. The Treinen images are real.

So, What’s It Like to Go Through the Treinen Maze?

Cell service isn’t reliable in their field so, while other corn mazes use QR codes or texting to provide clues along the pathways, the Treinens take a more traditional approach. When visitors arrive, they receive a map that shows the entrances and about 1/8 of the field. If they can stay focused and follow the map precisely, they will get to the first mailbox and get a map to the next mailbox.

On the first day that their first maze was open, Angie visited the maze and learned that there was a very distinct trail of footprints from one mailbox to the next. She didn’t want the path to be so obvious.

To encourage people to explore different paths, she added ten secret locations within the maze where visitors can collect paper punches. The more punches they collect, the bigger prize they can receive when they emerge. One prize is a compass, which Angie laughingly admits, is a bit after the fact.

Oh, I see so many creative ideas in this cornfield. I can’t wait to get to Lodi, Wisconsin, and get lost in the creativity!

For more about the Treinen maze, visit Angie’s blog.