This isn’t a hugely emphatic rant, but there isn’t anything else I can do about it, so ranting I am.
Local vandals, you suck. What are you getting out of smashing the bus shelter windows all the freakin’ time? The thrill of breaking a window? The frisson of doing something oh so illegal and dangerous? Just knock it off, okay?
We live in a lovely city, in a great province, in a marvelous country. Do you think you could try to look past your own pain because your mommy didn’t pay you enough attention and appreciate how good we’ve got it here, instead of trying to crap it up?
I second that. We’ve had lots of bus shelter windows around here smashed by turds who have nothing better to do. The city’s response was to stop putting up the windows. Not particularly helpful against wind and horizontal rain.
You can pretty much bet the assholes who do it have never had to wait for a bus in their life. They are either chauferred everywhere or drive themselves everywhere.
I’d also like to add: Vandals, if you’re going to deface something, try to come up with something more creative than “FUCK”. That’s been done already. How about something like, “SCRUMPTIOUS TONGUE MYSTERY HAT”? Not that it’s any less desctructive, but at least it provides mild entertainment.
I’m reminded of the retaining wall that is on the west side of the subway tracks just north of Bloor Station in Toronto. In other words, outside and near the Canadian Tire store.
Anyway, for a number of years in the early 1980s (if memory serves), someone graffitied TABULA RASA on the wall. No matter how many times it was painted over by the subway authorities, somebody always painted it back. It made the papers occasionally, mostly because people wondered what it meant and why it kept reappearing. It turned out be Latin, and to mean simply, “Blank Wall” or somesuch. Most subway riders chuckled at the thought of witty Latin graffiti (yep, it made one’s commute mildly entertaining to see if it was there again today, or gone, or repainted), and it eventually became part of the landscape. I think the repainter gave up after few years though, and it faded away.
But it sure beat the unoriginal profanities that are all too common around here. C’mon vandals, if you have to graffiti, crack open a book and find something interesting to write. And I’ve got to agree–quit with smashing bus shelters too.
The bus shelter by my place is always being hit. I’d guess the glass is broken almost as much as it’s still there. It’s especially annoying with the cold and rain right now, yeah I have a rain jacket but it’s nice to not worry about being completely soaked before work.
Plus there is a lot of younger kids running around here, the glass in the shelters may not shatter but I still don’t want to see little kids playing with it.
Wouldn’t surprise me is it’s some of the teens in this neighborhood. If I saw them doing it I’d say something. Heck, I’ve already got a ‘cranky lady’ reputation from them because I refuse to buy the free papers they grab at the library and yell at them for tossing half full drink cups from the overpass onto the road.
The game here seems to be using the stairway railings and benches on the Riverwalk as skateboard stunt devices. Of course it only takes a few landings before the wooden slats on the benches are broken, but that’s ok! The skateboarders didn’t want to sit on them anyway! And of course the railings are broken and dented, but who cares? But let one of these destructive little vandals fall off his skateboard while trying to balance on a 3 inch wide railing, and Hear Mommie Moan! Watch Mommie Call The Lawyer!
Ooh, Snakey, that reminded me of something I looooove to see - anti-skateboard devices on all target concrete surfaces. Take that, you nice, smooth edge destroying little bastards.
Ugh. Monday night, my family had the privledge of personal attention from one of this hooligans – one of us threw a big rock at the hood of our car, badly denting it. Coming less than six months later after someone did the same thing with a pumpkin.
I have yet to understand why these people have taken a sudden interest in trying to cost us money. Maybe they have a cozy relationship with the local mechanics?
Ooo, you reminded me of a couple of of my own local amusing graffiti stories.
At a convenience store about a block away from me, someone has scrawled on the brick in permanent marker, “THIS STORE EATS POOP!”
Underneath it, someone else had later added in small letters, “No, I eat poop.”
It’s so dumb, but it makes me laugh every time I see it.
Another time, when I was in highschool, I arrived one morning to see that someone had spraypainted onto the front of the school (Catholic, btw, so it’s even funnier), in huge letters:
GOD, MY BALLS ITCH!!
It was very quickly painted over. However, the fresh paint stood out on the brick, so the school was proclaiming its itchy balls to the busy street in front of it for about a month.
Those of us in the woods enjoy the sport of mailbox tag (as receivers). My record is perhaps 6 months. If your box is dented and beat to shit, they let it alone. Dare to sport a new and unblemished mailbox, and the folk who wear sphincters for collars are happy to make sport of it.
They do that on your side of the mountains, too? The small town I grew up in (which wants to think it’s Lake Woebegon) has that happen regularly.
Back when I was living with my folks there and had taken up with the SCA, I used to fantasize about encountering these guys coming back from an event late some night. I can picture it now. "This weird lady in funny clothes got medieval on us! With swords!! :eek: "
There’s one guy in my area that came up with a solution to that. He mounted his mailbox on a yards-long swinging arm, rigged ropes and pulleys, so now the mailbox sits in the normal place by the road, but if anyone driving by whacks it, instead of breaking it just swings away unharmed.
One business located next to the railroad tracks of the line I take into Boston has stopped trying to prevent the vandals from spraypainting its walls. In fact, it’s given the taggers permission to spraypaint their black little hearts out on the wall that faces the tracks.
The result? The nearby businesses rarely show graffiti. The long trackside wall is solidly covered with graffiti tags, cartoon images, even sometimes whole scenes of surprising skill. The show changes over time as new stuff gets sprayed over the old.
[slight hijack]Years ago we were building a bank in West New York, New Jersey-a town which makes Hell look inviting. Across the parking lot was a small supermarket and a middle aged guy was painting the wall with a roller and long handle. Around the corner on the wall he’d just painted, the taggers were at work. We speculated that the guy had been hired as a teenager, and had been painting the outside walls for the last 40 years.[/sh]
