I’ve been in Vienna over the weekend, not for work though, and on a wall, among graffiti, I found this poster. Most likely it was attached without permission, probably advertising something that could loosely be considered “underground”, maybe even something illegal. I liked the pattern, took the photograph and that was that.
Home again I began wondering what it could mean though. If I print a poster, if I put it up on a wall, I probably expect to deliver a message, at least to those who have enough information to put it in context.
What do we have here? A red poster with what I see as the head of a stylized zebra, framed with a stylized frame, on a background pattern consisting of the letters “DBS”. Obviously that must be the clue.
“DBS” is not a word, most likely in no language spoken (although the same could be frivolously expected of “SMRT” by the ignorant in Slavic languages), therefore I conclude it to be an acronym.
The only question is: what for??? Searching on various acronym lists didn’t reveal anything convincing. I’ve got some chemicals, but none used in drug synthesis or anything else “shady”. One of them is a common ingredient in ice cream.
Data base systems come to mind (certainly to mine), but their appeal in underground youth culture may be low. Internet slang defines it as “Don’t Be Stupid”, “Don’t Be Sad” or “Don’t Be Scared” and I’d add “Don’t Be Silly” to that list, but if that were the case here, I’d expect those phrases to give me at least one hit with that zebra head logo in Google image search. Nothing though, even if filtering for explicit content is disabled. Other sites gave me longer lists, but again I found neither convincing meanings nor hits with the logo. I even extracted the logo in Photoshop, carefully restored the borders and used that as input for Google’s image search. Nothing again.
And that’s it. So far did I get, and therefore, unless you have a good explanation, I declare this poster free of any meaning 🙂
The Song of the Day is “It Don’t Mean A Thing (If It Ain’t Got That Swing)”. I’ve already had the Ellington / Armstrong version from “The Great Summit” more than two years ago, but there’s no reason to not hear it once every couple of years. YouTube is your friend and if you don’t already own the record, buying it is a great idea as well.