"I paid $21,000 for this?!"

article

It’s not the name; it’s the money.

That was the reaction from readers who thought the $21,000 the state spent on coming up with COSMIX was more offensive than the acronym for the Interstate 25 widening project through Colorado Springs.

Short for Colorado Springs Metro Interstate Expansion, the nickname will be posted on freeway signs and used in print references to the 12-mile, threeyear project.

I guess that ChexMix was taken.

I have an idea, why not have some reputable, local, respectable, home-grown company pay about $21,000, or more, to have the highway named after that company? Streets, for example, are often named after people or companies (or trees, for no apparent reason). The exact same thing is done with stadiums (Enron Stadium is an example, though Enron isn't quite reputable), too.
Or, if the city has a beautification project, name it the Ralph Lauren Highway.

Unlike the people quoted in the article, I find both the name and cost of the name to be bad. I am beginning to doubt the competence of any focus-group. Often, whenever a focus-group is formed to pick an artwork to 'beautify' an area, they pick the worst possible one. At Northern Kentucky University, for example, a giant rectangular prism was purchased for hundreds of thousands of dollars, paid for by the National Endowment for the Arts. Just a rectangular prism (a cube, but stretched so the length may be longer than the width and height, for example). It might be the size of a mobile home; it's very, very big, and made out of stainless steel. The really sad thing is that the prism replaced an artwork that was actually good; the old sculpture depicted a movie scene that was being created, it was actually donated by the director of the depicted movie. The director was moderately popular, or so I hear. The good sculpture was moved because the director, allegedly, had some race issues, though such issues were in no way apparent in the excellent sculpture.