Leslie Davis, Sign Spammer

Post and photo by the Hawthorne Hawkman.

I've only met perennial candidate Leslie Davis a handful of times.  His "Earth Protector" ideas range from possibly interesting to laughable to downright financially disastrous.  But the guy does know how to make a spectacle of himself at public meetings.  He's got chutzpah, and there's no denying that he can be entertaining.

That brazen attitude led to his placement of campaign signs on Hennepin County property.  The former Kowalski's site at 44th and Humboldt, now owned by the county, was sporting some Davis for Commissioner campaign signs.  That takes a special kind of guts.  Running for Hennepin County Commissioner and illegally placing your campaign paraphernalia on county property is a pretty brazen act.

Well others can be brazen too.  Since there was a polling place a half a block away, I took the liberty of removing the signs so that people wouldn't be influenced by them in any way.  On my bike ride home, I saw quite a few more Davis for Commissioner signs on telephone poles where they had no business being.  But I couldn't remove them because there was no trash bin nearby and the signs were too large to carry around on a bicycle.

Leslie Davis, you are a sign spammer.

More Fun with Sign Spammers

Post, photos, and image by the Hawthorne Hawkman.

I've not been as diligent in my removal of sign spam as I'd like, but there's a reason.  A while ago I lent my stepladder to a friend of mine so she could finish remodeling her living room.  Without all the weapons in my sign-removal arsenal, it didn't make strategic sense for me to make a sweep like the one pictured above.  On the plus side, I learned how to put in crown molding and got a few good meals out of it when I went over to help her.

With the remodeling done, my ladder was returned, and I set out with the broom handle and pruning shears to take on more snipe signs.  My first encounter was with...

Borrowing Other Strategies in the Fight Against Sign Spam

Post and photos by the Hawthorne Hawkman

Ed Kohler at the Deets had an excellent post about combating sign spam.  In that post, various exchanges between the Hardest Working Lazy Guy blog and a sign spammer were documented, and elevated almost to an art form.  So when I came across the RCK Soul Food sign spam that was littered across NoMi this week, I looked to see if they had any online media that would allow for a similar exchange.

Yes, they do.

I posted a comment about having removed their litter ("Your illegally placed sign spam at the corner of Broadway and 94 has been removed. Please take down any other items."), and since my Facebook and Youtube accounts are linked, several friends saw the comment and removed even more sign spam.  The author of the video responded to my statement by saying..

Sign Spammers Get Crafty, Still Can't Stop the Hawkman

Post and photos by the Hawthorne Hawkman

After Hawthorne finished our clean sweep, I gave a call over to the Irving Inquisition to see how Jordan might be doing with theirs.  He bragged that the good neighbors over at JACC turned out more volunteers, were working longer, and would be more thorough than Hawthorne.  Well, he may have beaten me at racquetball, but I wouldn't let even good-natured trash talk to go unanswered.  So I decided to make a round and take down more of the sign spam that had cropped up like a bad rash.

The first sign right next to my house was felled with a solitary blow.  But although the signs were all for the same slimy investor, that was the only one that came down so easily.  All the rest were bolted on and wouldn't come off with just a hit or two from a broomstick.

If this were just one or two signs, I might have just let things slide.  But when there's upwards of twenty, then something has to be done.  Undaunted, I went to North End Hardware and asked them...