Citizens of Oak Lawn, IL have a history of coasting through stop signs and in response the city installed smaller signs below their larger, legal counterparts to get motorists attention while providing them a tongue in cheek appeal to their conscience. The extra signs mimicked the red octagon shape only 1/3rd the size with slogans including “and smell the roses,” “right there pilgrim” and “means you’re not moving.” instead of the word STOP.

The town’s mayor and citizens found them funny, but there is a Local vs State conflict inherint in the act. The Illinois Department of Transportation claims that the signs violated the Federal Manual on Uniform Traffic Control Devices. Threatening to put federal funding for projects in the city on gold till they were removed. $1,700 worth of signs are now pulled down.

From the New York Times:

MILAN — The two friends, both performance artists, hatched the idea about a year ago: wearing white wedding dresses, they would hitchhike from Italy to the Balkans to the Middle East to send a message of peace and “marriage between different peoples and nations.”

But the message delivered by their performance piece was mostly sad and raw. After just three weeks on the road, one of the two Italian artists, Pippa Bacca, 33, was killed by a driver who offered her a ride.

Her naked body was found on April 11 in some bushes near a Turkish village after a suspect led investigators to the site. Although an official cause of death has not been given, local Turkish authorities said Ms. Bacca had been raped and strangled.

The killing has stirred broad public anger and grief in Turkey and Italy. Still, what Ms. Bacca would have wanted, her family and friends said, was her message of peace to live on.

“She thought that in the world there were more positive than negative people, and that it was right to be trusting,” said Rosalia Pasqualino, a sister of Ms. Bacca, whose real name was Giuseppina Pasqualino di Marineo. “Trust is a very human factor, and she believed that to understand people, you had to get to know them.”
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Improv Everywhere, Richards favorite performance artists are at it again and this time they take the best day ever theme they did a year so so back for a small struggling rock band (that didn’t turn out so well) and apply it to a little league game.

Not wanting to ruin the surprise for anyone but they really pulled out the stops for this event. So much so I am expecting a press statement that this event is the pilot for their new network television show starting in the fall of 2008.

Take a look, enjoy and check out some of their other hits which include the now infamous “Best Buy” event which was held at the Best Buy in lower Manhattan which I was recently in to get a video cable and is surprisingly cramped and dark to pull something like this off.
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