Thought for the Day

Stencil graffiti at Vondelpark, Amsterdam, taken by Flickr:Kirja-addikti

Life without Love

Where? Near the lighthouse cliffs of Kannur in the southern state of Kerala, India

Quote of the Day

[Source: Photographed on the closed shutters of a store on 116th Street in Harlem section of New York City]

Hallo Mittelalter’06

Flickr user mmike has uploaded this stencil graffiti that has popped up on some street corners of Hamburg. The translation basically goes “Hello Middleage 2006”. The headshot is obviously from the controversial Danish cartoon. This image was randomly ranked by Flickr for interestingness on Feb 11th.

A lot of mumbo jumbo conrtoversy has been raging accross the world about the blasphemous cartoons. I’m not interested in giving my 20 cents worth of argument here. That’s not the purpose of this blog.

What’s quite interesting to me as a planner is how fast this image has trickled down to mainstream culture in the form of graffiti. Graffiti is a form of self expression of the youth of various cities accross the world. In the information age things do move pretty fast as is evidenced by this image on a Hamburg street.

I do wonder what the tag Hello Middleage means. Is it you’ve reached middle age and the life clock is ticking faster? Does it have a German connotation to its huge middle age population?? Wish I knew…