A Tiny Bit Of Green In Times Square Amidst A Sea Of Carbon

Times Square is known around the world for its theater, outrageously expensive fast-food cuisine and gargantuan amount of brightly lit advertising. Tourists come from all over the globe to take it in and get suckered by GrayLine buses and walking tours. Retailers pay ridiculous sums to rent space here and it is generally well worth it. The same companies also lay out thousands of dollars a day to paste themselves up above the street with no amount of electricity spared to make the biggest splash. However, one billboard about to go up is going to cut against that grain and go completely green.

From Yahoo News:

NEW YORK – This winter, New Year's Eve revelers will have a close-up view of Times Square's first environmentally friendly billboard powered entirely by wind and sun.

But the billboard might not be quite as dazzling as some of its high-powered neighbors along the Great White Way.

Construction on the 35,000-pound sign advertising Ricoh Americas Corp. is to begin this month across the avenue from the building where the ball drops on New Year's Eve.

Powered by 16 wind turbines and 64 solar panels, the sign is expected to save $12,000 to $15,000 per month in electricity costs. Ricoh, an office equipment and document storage supplier, estimates the sign will also keep 18 tons of carbon out of the environment.

The sign is still massive, measuring 126 x 47 feet so it won't look out of place. It'll still be a tremendous step forward in environmentally-sound advertising and a model for the rest of the big boys who spend cash on Times Square space to follow. Of course, that doesn't mean I'll actually head up there to see it, that place is still a complete zoo with or without solar panels and wind turbines.

Limbaugh Gets Face Painted

Someone in Baltimore, Maryland broke the law recently by doing the world some good. A Rush Limbaugh billboard was vandalized by having tons of paint thrown all over that giant blown up face of his. The person that called it in to the Baltimore Sun was none other than a spokesman of the city's vandalism department charged with cleaning that stuff up.

From The Baltimore Sun:

In a town so tough that most murders get just a few paragraphs in the paper, somebody called The Sun about 8 a.m. yesterday with a tip about a vandalized billboard.

By noon, the story was all over the Internet, Rush Limbaugh was kicking off his national radio show with it, and City Hall was fielding calls from as far away as California. By 5 p.m., the story had become one of the three most popular individual articles in the history of the paper's Web site, with nearly 200,000 page views.

There's a reason the story had legs. The paint-splattered billboard featured Limbaugh's mug. And the tipster was a spokesman for a city agency - the one responsible for cleaning up graffiti - who let it be known that he was no "dittohead."

Although graffiti is usually a bad thing to condone, seeing a picture of Rush covered in paint has to one be the funniest things I have seen this weekend, save for Jane Fonda sitting on Colbert's lap and kissing him on his show. The billboard will be cleaned up eventually, but having the opportunity to get photos of the sign while it is still up is good enough for me.