Kibo's Virtual Reality Tour

The Big Dig

Kibo says:

The Big Dig is Boston's ambitious plan to waste billions of dollars digging up the entire city to replace it with a maze of propaganda billboards about how great it'll be when they put the highways back twenty years later. Here are some of the sights, sounds, smells, and stupidities from the largest civil engineering project that anyone could jam into a city this small.

By the way, I am not kidding when I say that the Big Dig will be completed in the year 2020. Tuh-wenty-tuh-wenty. I think they're hoping that, by then, we'll all have flying cars and won't notice when they give up on rebuilding the roads around 2003.

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Why does the Big Dig need so many cranes? To keep its pants up!

Okay, I admit it, I couldn't think of a caption.

(Chinatown, looking towards the wharf.)

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But won't it block the view of the present site of propaganda?

Note the carefully-airbrushed white splotches on the letters to give them a faux sloppy-stencil look. Some designer presumably got paid a thousand bucks for this.

(Construction barricade. It's not a billboard, it's a construction barricade that just looks like a billboard. It's there because they know you'd rather look at propaganda for twenty years than construction that might occasionally change.)

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Face curb, place hands on head, have brains blown out, be paved over by Big Dig crew.

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Your tax dollars at work ensuring that quote marks are perfectly straight, even within slanty italic fonts.

Can you spot the two other typographic horrors in this sign? Hint: one's a "D" and the other's in, or rather not in, an "i".

("Temporary" signage near South Station.)

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Thanks to the Big Dig, in the future, traffic congestion will appear to be vastly reduced by the low-level smog.

(Someone came up with the brilliant idea of saving money on the beautiful construction barricades by letting little kids doodle pictures to beautify them, I presume the kids didn't get paid.)

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An amusement park! Yay! Let's ride the telephone cord past the sharpened lollipop!

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Okay, so they're allowed to carve big holes where the middle of the city used to be, but they're not smart enough to notice the clouds have beaks and the ponds have windows?

I swear this picture was nailed to the wall in this orientation. Honest.

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Well, they're certainly smarter than the guy who nailed the previous picture to the wall.

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One of the existing tunnels which will be supplanted by the new Central Artery Tunnel (part of the Big Dig.) The Callahan Tunnel isn't all that useful because they keep it indoors. But at least it's bigger than:

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We've sawn the Central Artery Tunnel in half and locked it in these boxes. Can it escape?