Charlottesville safety campaigner used chalk to draw crossing near intersection where woman was fatally hit by car

After officials in Charlottesville, Virginia, reportedly ignored his pleas to implement a pedestrian crosswalk at a dangerous intersection, traffic safety activist Kevin Cox drew a crossing with chalk.

Authorities responded by covering Cox’s handiwork with black paint and charging him with vandalism in a case that evidently demonstrates how acrimonious relations can sometimes get between local government bureaucrats in the US and those who say they are trying to hold them to account.

"Assuming 128 grams a day and a lifetime in the vicinity of seventy-five years, you’ll leave behind around three and a half metric tons of feces when you die. The volume of your urine will be closer to thirty-eight thousand liters, a bit larger than a standard twenty-foot shipping container and about double the accumulated volume of your flatulence. You’ll have made hundreds of liters of tears, though even for the most emotive of individuals, the portion derived from feelings will represent a minuscule fraction of that number. For all the hullabaloo surrounding ejaculation, the total semen production of even the most alacritous masturbator could be contained handily by a shelf of two-liter soda bottles, and though a period sometimes seems as though it will never end, you could only barely paint a closet with the three or so liters of menses produced during a lifetime. You’ll have made a great deal of mucus, though, close to a hundred thousand liters. And when Atropos snips the thread of your life, the hair from your head, measured as a single strand, will stretch more than three and a half million feet. This is what you will leave behind.

Of course, you’ll leave behind another thing: your body itself. It’s uncomfortable to think of the body in this way, in the same category as feces and hair, but despite the desires of countless theologians, the trajectory of your body’s final journey will be less like the fiery passages of the stars and more akin to those meandering pilgrimages taken by your feces and urine, your blood and vomit and tears. It will become something that must be dealt with, something that must be disposed of. We may disagree over the existence and nature of an afterlife, but not about the stench of rotting flesh...

What, if anything, remains? In the most purely physical sense, your body contains about five hundred megajoules of energy, enough to run a sixty-watt light bulb for one hundred days or to drive a midsize sedan a mile, or, to put things in dietary terms, roughly 120,000 calories, the equivalent of a hundred Big Mac combos. This energy, stored in the form of chemical bonds—namely as molecules of glucose, protein, and fatty acids—will remain intact after you die. It needs only to be converted into adenosine triphosphate to continue its chemical journey in the shape of another. Since no single creature will be capable of digesting your body in its entirety, the scavenging of this energy will take the form of a vast buffet. The glucose in your thigh muscle might be catabolized via glycolysis by a rat while a fungus might hydrolyze the proteins in your skin. The real prize at this feast, however, will be those molecules that most efficiently store energy, your fatty acids, so that the caloric orgy reaches its apotheosis in that fattiest of all your organs, that thing which seemed most you: your brain..."