There are places where you can indulge your nostalgia by buying a full-size billboard you saw while traveling the roads of your youth. Larger-than-life posters advertising everything from Purina Pig Chow to Burgermeister Beer are yours for a price ranging from $50 to several thousand.

"Put a tiger in your tank." (Exxon).

"Where there's a man . . . Marlboro."

"Something we ladies appreciate." (Texaco featuring its restrooms, which are presumably sparkly clean).

Such fondness for billboards isn't evident lately in Salt Lake County, where the County Council is considering a new sign ordinance for the unincorporated areas. The input it has received — except from the sign companies themselves — has been uniform.

"Salt Lake County has too many billboards," said resident Shawn Johnson.

Bonnie Hill: "Salt Lake City, the Olympic city, should not become one big space for billboards."

Jennifer Christiansen: "I am in advertising, yet I think we need to protect the city from an unlimited number of billboards."

Folks in the Mount Olympus area are particularly exercised about a much-maligned billboard on Wasatch Boulevard. Township councils have urged the County Council to enact an outright billboard ban, which Provo, Draper, Murray and other communities have already done, so their residents can see mountains, the valley, trees and sky without a McDonald's sign in the way.

That, in fact — the thing that makes billboards so objectionable — is what makes them so effective as advertising vehicles: You can't not look at them.

You're driving along, being dutifully alert to your surroundings. You catch the presence of a sign — whether mileage information to the next town or an advertisement for Burpie Cola — from the corner of your eye and naturally glance at it as part of your by-now-innate driving instinct.

You have now been marketed to, like it or not, in that single, short glance. According to the United States Sign Council, drivers need only a second and a half to detect, read and comprehend the meaning of a well-designed billboard.

"The end result is often invisible to the sign viewer . . . however, (it) isn't invisible to the business owner," said Shannon Reinert of SignWeb, an information resource for sign companies.

Small wonder, then, that the outdoor advertising business is such a lucrative one. Or that sign companies like Reagan Outdoor Advertising contribute tens of thousands of dollars to political candidates and parties every election year to get billboard-friendly treatment in the drafting of laws.

They have been remarkably successful. For example, for tax purposes, billboards are assessed strictly according to their physical value of steel beams, wooden board, etc. But for purposes of condemnation, in which case a government would have to reimburse the company for the billboard, they're assessed according to market value — that is, how much they could earn in rents — a much larger sum.