New Year's Eve with the smoking deaths billboard

Playwright and screenwriter Gideon Brower says if you live in West LA, you know the Santa Monica Boulevard billboard that counts up the (estimated) deaths from smoking each year. He and others watched it turn over to zero on New Year's Eve and start counting again. "It's modest, and a bit on the morbid side, but as the centerpiece of an end-of-year ritual, it really works," he writes in an LA Times op-ed piece.