It’s pothole patching season. But some people in North America aren’t waiting for the road crews to take care of these road cavities, as I like to refer to them, so they are being filled in unconventional ways.
A March 29, Chicago Tribune article pointed out these, uh, funny ways to fill them–from the DIY method, to filling them with lettuce and posting in the buff for a calendar to raise money.
According to the report, here are some of the more interesting ways potholes have been filled:
•A band of Canadian residents in the Leader, Saskatchewan, area protested a pockmarked strip of highway by posing nude inside some of the worst potholes and featuring the images in a 2007 calendar. The provincial government ultimately agreed to fix the crumbling roadway. And the calendar sold 3,000 copies at $20 each, according to the Canadian Press.
•A New York highway supervisor who filled potholes for a living began photographing them as art in the early 1990s. One example: A black-and-white print of a pothole filled with lettuce and serving utensils — with pepper, oil and vinegar beside it on the roadway — was featured in his 1993 show at a SoHo gallery, the Associated Press reported.
•About 50 fed-up neighbors on the West Side of Chicago grabbed shovels, purchased sacks of asphalt and paved potholes near their homes as a protest of poor street conditions in summer 1979. They sent a bill to then-Mayor Jane Byrne.
•Fast-food chicken chain KFC last year spent thousands of dollars to help fix potholes in Kansas, Kentucky, Tennessee and Ohio. In exchange, more than 1,500 patched potholes were marked “Re-Freshed by KFC” in temporary chalk, according to the Associated Press, the Chicago Tribune reported.
