Walk­ing around the UW cam­pus, one is con­stantly bom­barded by adver­tise­ments for all sorts of things, rang­ing from the com­mer­cial (new restau­rants, bar drink spe­cials, coupon books) to the social (fra­ter­ni­ties and soror­i­ties, intra­mural sports, stu­dent clubs of all sorts) to the reli­gious (reg­u­lar appear­ances by Men­non­ites, Hasidic Jews, and fire-and-brimstone Bible-thumpers) to the polit­i­cal (Democ­rats, Repub­li­cans, anti-war, pro-China, anti-China). These ads often appear in the form of fly­ers, picket signs, wear­able sandwich-boards, ban­ners, or good old-fashioned soap­box ora­tion. By far the most preva­lent (and least annoy­ing, in my opin­ion) form of adver­tis­ing on cam­pus is chalking.

It is not uncom­mon, as I walk from the library or music build­ing to the bus stop late at night, to see peo­ple car­ry­ing around buck­ets of brightly-colored side­walk chalk, stop­ping every few feet to claim another blank area of pave­ment. These sorts of ads are usu­ally fairly sim­ple, owing to the nec­es­sar­ily one-at-a-time method of cre­ation as well as to the ephemeral nature of chalk — indeed, of most things that are tramped upon by thou­sands of feet through­out the course of a day. Occa­sion­ally the chalk­ing becomes more ambi­tious; a num­ber of 20-foot wide peace sym­bols come to mind.

Near the end of the spring semes­ter, I spot­ted what is def­i­nitely my favorite bit of chalk­ing so far. It was done on the wall of a build­ing, and par­o­dies so well the style and tone of other more seri­ous chalk advertisements:

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