Creative direct action ideas

[Moorlock]

BoingBoing reports on a prankster's clever tweaking of the drug company Express Scripts, which is "being sued for [U.S.] $100 million by New York State Attorney General Eliot Spitzer":

    Express Scripts was throwing a dance party at the Phoenix Hard Rock Cafe as part of a drug company conference. Between songs, someone handed the lead singer of the Starlight Band a note. "I have an announcement. It's someone's birthday today, Eliot Spitzer," the clueless frontman said... [then they] launched into a version of "Happy birthday, dear Eliot." One witness said, "It was the funniest thing I ever saw."

http://www.boingboing.net/2005/03/10/drug_company_gets_pr.html

[Moorlock]

One Shizzy Joyce impersonated the President and CEO of the coffee chain Starbucks in emails to a new assistant in the company's human resources department. After a few fairly generic welcome messages, the impostor managed to convince the newcomer to shave his beard, spy on his fellow employees, fire a random employee from a nearby franchise, and purchase and annotate a book on business ethics so the CEO could skim it to give a lecture on the subject.

http://www.bobfromaccounting.com/shizzypage40.html

[Moorlock]

You know those hackneyed publicity moments where the mayors of two cities whose sports teams are facing off in the championships will make a friendly wager on the outcome? Well, when Ottawa and Buffalo were fighting for the Stanley Cup, a prankster called up Buffalo's mayor, pretending to be Ottawa's, and proposed that they wager a night with each other's wife.

Next, the same prankster switched roles and called up Ottawa's mayor, posing as Buffalo's, and offered to throw the game — for a price:

    "I never imagined the call would go any farther than my suggesting such a deal before Chiarelli either laughed it off or chewed me out and hung up. Instead, I was faced with the stunning fact that he was actually going for it. I hadn't planned for that, and now I was grasping for words."

http://www.buffalobeast.com/99/chiarelli2.htm

[Moorlock]

In Nazi-occupied Poland, a group of Warsaw youths known as the "Little Wolves" painted the slogan "Poland Fights On" on buildings, vehicles and even personnel of the invaders — on a regular basis. They also made mimics of the "For Germans Only" signs that the Nazis used to enforce their privileges — and attached them to lamp posts and other potential gallows-sites.

A protest group in Zimbabwe calling itself "zvakwana" ("enough") is using graffiti to make its presence felt:

    A black Z on a bright yellow handprint is appearing mysteriously on the walls of bus stations, on busy streets and over billboards across Harare and other cities. Thousands of "revolutionary condoms" have been distributed, emblazoned with the letter Z and the double-entendre message "Get up! Stand Up!"...

    Zvakwana carried out one of its trademark "non-violent civic actions" in Harare just before Zimbabwe's Independence Day events on 18 April. Activists spray-painted lampposts and the large pipes next to the main Tongogara Avenue, used by Mugabe's 27-vehicle motorcade when he travels to the National Sports Stadium, and "Get UP Stand UP" appeared on stadium turnstiles and walls. "There was so much graffiti," crows the group, "the regime couldn't repaint it before Mugabe's trip, so he had to take a different route."

http://observer.guardian.co.uk/international/story/0,6903,1243066,00.html

[Moorlock]

In Berlin in the early years of the 21st century, pranksters have been sticking miniature American flags  into random piles of dog shit  found around the city.

http://www.iol.co.za/index.php?set_id=1&click_id=29&art_id=iol110603149553A551
http://www.madeyouthink.org/

[Moorlock]

Check out these delightful "Chickenhawk Roosting Area" signs  posted on lamp posts near the White House.

http://images.google.com/images?um=1&tab=wi&client=firefox-a&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&rls=org.mozilla%3Aen-US%3Aofficial&q=chickenhawk%20roosting

In Seattle, official-looking signs appeared announcing that the city parks department was planning on constructing a habitat-restoration project for the sewer rat.

http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/localnews/2002519172_rats25m.html

[Moorlock]

In San Francisco, 65 volunteers changed the street signs all along Bush street to read Puppet Street.

http://sniggle.net/vandalism.php

[Moorlock]

The folks at the Institute for Applied Autonomy  have created a cargo van that works like the head of a dot-matrix printer — applying huge block-letter graffiti to the road as it drives along.

Joshua Kinberg ran with that idea and created a bicycle-mounted version that is able to have paintable-messages beamed to it over a wireless connection as he rides along. He gave it a field test in a Bikes Against Bush action at the 2004 Republican Convention in New York and set up a web page where people could submit slogans to him as he rode along.

http://www.appliedautonomy.com/
http://web.archive.org/web/20041009222440/http://www.wired.com/news/print/0,1294,64419,00.html

[Moorlock]

In the United States, potential draft dodgers can try to take advantage of the official superstition that bans open homosexuals from the military — in South Korea, the taboo to exploit is the tattoo. At least until the crackdown. South Korea has arrested about 170 men who have been charged with "willfully tampering with their bodies to avoid military duty."

[Moorlock]

Residents of a Rio de Janeiro slum painted all of the buildings in their neighborhood a uniform pale green, perhaps to confuse police.

A similar stunt was pulled by residents of Prague, Czechoslovakia during the Soviet occupation of 1968. Vandals tore up or painted over street signs and highway markers so that only locals could find their way around.

[Moorlock]

In 1982, during the USSR-supported anti-Solidarity crackdown by the government in Poland, someone changed all of the signs at the "Stalingrad" metro station in Paris to read, instead, "Gdansk" (the city where the Solidarity movement was founded).

In August of 1968, when troops from the Soviet Union and other Warsaw Pact nations occupied Czechoslovakia, the destination signs on city buses in Prague were changed to read "U.N.: S.O.S."

Protesters in Vienna, Austria symbolized their opinion that the Soviets should go away and leave them alone by affixing a suitcase to the hand of a statue of Stalin.

http://sniggle.net/vandalism.php

[Moorlock]

Self-vandalism? Pete Wagner reports that in the sixties, student anti-war protesters in the United States used to write the word "FUCK" on their foreheads so that they wouldn't be photographed for the news media. Protesters were in danger of being suspended if they appeared in the papers as campus radicals.

[Moorlock]

A group calling itself The Ministry of Reshelving  took it upon itself to raid bookstores and move all copies of George Orwell's 1984 from the "Fiction" section to sections like "Current Affairs" or "True Crime".

http://www.boingboing.net/2005/08/17/ministry_of_reshelvi.html

[Moorlock]

One way of getting some eyeballs for your graffiti is to put it on money. Americans are reminded every day that the father of their country was once a cannabis farmer by a thought balloon on the one dollar bill coming from the bust of George Washington that says "I Grew Hemp."

http://www.cruelty.com/money/

[Moorlock]

Billboard Liberation:

• http://sniggle.net/Billboard/index.php?whichpage=3
• http://sniggle.net/Billboard/index.php?whichpage=4
• http://sniggle.net/Billboard/index.php?whichpage=16
• http://sniggle.net/Billboard/index.php?whichpage=17
• http://sniggle.net/Billboard/index.php?whichpage=20
• http://sniggle.net/Billboard/index.php?whichpage=40
• http://sniggle.net/Billboard/index.php?whichpage=42
• http://sniggle.net/Billboard/index.php?whichpage=56