I just watched “the Oh in Ohio” and was reminded that while I hadn’t gone inside this store, I did have this picture of the window display 🙂
And since a picture is worth a 1,000 words and there’s plenty of quirky objets d’art here to keep you busy, I’ll shut up.
graffiti in Amsterdam near Central Station.
It’s like Peter Gabriel’s Milgram’s 37 song, which, has the sum lyric of “We do what we’re told”. The lyric refers, of course, to Milgram’s experiment on how authority can make people torture other people (mob mentality for violence //nazis, religionist/casteist/racist/genderists). And this link taught me something I didn’t know: When he performed this in concert, Gabriel got the crowd chanting “We do what we’re told.” Since the song was not yet released and the crowd did not know its meaning, they were ironically aping the results of the experiment by doing just as Gabriel told them.
While I was in Germany and the Netherlands, I took a couple of walking tours and the English guides in both Amsterdam and Berlin made the same jokes about how creative the natives were when it came to naming things. The national monument is called “The National Monument,” the concert hall is “The Concert Hall,” etc. etc. etc. Well, we have our Mahatma Gandhi Margs and our Chhatrapati Shivaji everythings to counter it.
Still, some of it was amusing to me. Like this shop. Perfectly named, who could ask for more? 🙂
This one is tops in my list of unbelievable kitsch. What you see is a man selling hot coffee, tea, and cocoa from the back of a tempo with a chandelier in it 🙂 Yes, look again, peer into that interior – it’s a full blown chandelier! I loved it!
This was taken at the Rijksmuseum as I waited in the freezing cold drizzle to buy a ticket around 5pm. I think our well decorated coffee vendor’s sell-rate was close to 100 percent. And which Amsterdammer or tourist wouldn’t want a hot cuppa from a man with such good taste in interior design and a fetchingly homey little ‘coffee shop’ even it’s really the back of a three-wheeler? 😀 The warm yellow glow, the aromas – he truly outdid himself, no? 🙂
and in Mumbai 😉 But not in Amsterdam, even if you’re Batman 🙂
This charming mime was on Damrak around the corner from Dam Square where Darth Vader, the Joker, a mummy, and a robot were all posing.
But Batman‘s always been my favorite and he bowed to me ever so courteously, I was charmed.
So I dropped a few cents into his bowl and then we blew kisses at each other. And I walked away smiling. Or not. Maybe that just happened in my head. 😉
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