Seattle Pig 1

Everyone agrees: The Pigs are an abomination. The Pigs are the worst thing to happen anywhere, ever, equaled only by similar infestations in Zurich, Toronto, Cincinnati, etc. Neither art nor bacon, the Pigs affront the eyeballs and the spirit. With their jaunty hats, encrustations of small timepieces, and mermaid tails, the Pigs represent, in three dimensions, the triumph of whimsy over all that is right and good. The Pigs: A recurring blight upon Seattle's landscape since the turn of the century.

Seattle Pig 2

The Pigs ruin lives. At the fabricator's shop in Spokane, several employees quit this past winter due to the unimaginable stress of the production of the Pigs. Unemployed in Spokane: Think about that.

Seattle Pig 3

The Pigs are made of 1/8th-inch-thick fiberglass with a gel-coat finish. Those in the know say it wouldn't take much to penetrate the carapace. Inside—as with Satan's heart—is nothingness.

Seattle Pig 4

People are reluctant to tell you how to blow things up these days. The internet, however, with its pneumatic tubes chock-full of helpful instruction, knows how to blow things up. The internet wants you to blow things up. The internet is blowing things up right now.

Seattle Pig 5

Pipe bombs, being made with a shell of pipe, may produce additional hurtful or even deadly shrapnel. Every solution has its drawbacks.

Seattle Pig 6

Once a Pig has a hole in it, one could put anything in there—a banana, a pencil, an amount of gunpowder. They say gunpowder is readily available. As are fuses.

Seattle Pig 7

The mold that's used to form the Pigs is pentapartite. Blowing a Pig into its five pieces shouldn't be difficult. With a more forceful explosion: smithereens. On the internet, at the Uniform Resource Locator www.pigsonparade.org, is a Portable Document Format map—the "Swine Finder"—that reveals the location of each and every Pig.

Illustrations by Kathryn Rathke