Here's a note to the folks at that new Burger King and Kum & Go on 13th Street.

You might want to get a copy of the Municipal Code and read Section 5.214.

Then you might want to hire a guy with a really tall ladder and unscrew those two lightbulbs atop your sign.

Because they're not just annoying.

They're illegal.

You can be excused, of course, for not knowing that the flashing lightbulbs violate the code. Ames does, after all, devote nine pages of the code to the regulation of signs, defining 17 types of signs and regulating everything from size to location, from lighting to materials. You can't, for instance, put up a sign with a "whirligig" - whatever a whirligig is - and you can't put a sign on a tree.

At any rate, section 5.214, subsection 3, bans signs that "employ flashing, blinking, or rotating lights, except time and temperature signs."

So those two strobe-like lights atop the Burger King and Kum & Go sign - lights than can be seen for four or five miles - are clearly illegal. Unless you add the time and temperature to the sign, you'd better unscrew them.

We wouldn't make a big deal of this but for two things:
First, the lights really are annoying and distracting and could be considered a traffic hazard.

Second, we're the folks who went to bat for you after the Zoning Board of Adjustment told you you couldn't put any sign on that big empty pole that was sitting on the site of your new store. The law, as you'll recall, limits the height of signs in this town to 50 feet, and it's 107 feet from the top of your burger bun to the bottom of the pole. That's a silly rule for signs at Interstate exits, whose businesses need signs high enough to inform speeding drivers and lure them off for a burger or a tank of gas.

We said that that sign wasn't going to screw up life in Ames, and we urged the powers that be to grant you a variance. And, ultimately, they did.

So we're glad you got your sign, and we hope it attracts all kinds of motorists and lets you sell zillions of Whoppers and tanker-loads of gasoline and carloads of Twinkies and all that other stuff that fills your shelves.

But we think it would be nice if you'd unscrew those lightbulbs.

Oh, another thing:

Don't go putting any signs on rocks in this town.

That's illegal, too.