Darrell Clarke Wants To Track What You Buy

Hey, know what’d be fun? Having your driver’s license scanned every time you want to purchase cigarettes and beer! That sounds like a gay old time, honestly. Well, if City Councilman Darrell Clarke has his way, that’s what you’ll have to do in Philadelphia! Yes, Clarke wants to track purchases of every can of beer or carton of smokes sold with in city limits.

However, faster than you can say “the lobbying arms of the tobacco and alcohol industries would shut that down in a second” — so, actually, not really all that fast — the plan is kinda dead, since it would require intervention at the state level. But since he can’t pass a law tracking how much we smoke and drink, Clarke came up with a better idea: Tracking purchases of spray paint!

Apparently, graffiti is a out of control here in Philadelphia. Need proof? “Graffiti is out of control in the City of Philadelphia,” said Darrell Clarke. And, so, Clarke has introduced a bill requiring the scan of a driver’s license for anybody purchasing spraypaint, since he says the stores are selling to minors, who are then tagging City Hall and the Comcast Center.

“Unless that information is inserted through the scanner into the register, the product will not register, so therefore there cannot be a transaction,” he told KYW 1060. The problem, of course, is that most of the graffiti done in this city is done by adults. Clarke might just as well have introduced a bill telling kids to get off his lawn.

I can’t wait ’til the regulation of adhesive paper passes, in order to combat El Toro and Bob Will Reign and any of the other cute characters who pop up on the backs of stop signs.

Councilman Wants Stricter Controls on Spray Paint Purchases [KYW 1060]
Attn. City Council: Most Graf Nerds Are Grown Ass Men [Philebrity]

El Toro, Bob Will Reign Protest Bureaucracy

We don’t have too much political graffiti here in the good ol’ US of A, only a couple of anti-war signs and more anti-war signs. But don’t fix a bridge in New Jersey, and somebody in Camden will make a statement!

The “historic” State Street Bridge is “fresh off its latest round of structural damage” and has been out of service since Aug. 20. It also closed during 1999 and 2004. And though residents thought the bridge was important enough to fix right away, nobody seemed to help them. So a resident took his spray can and the Camden Courier-Post infuriatingly didn’t show us the whole message.

“If the State St. Bridge were in Cherry Hill or Haddonfield it would have been fixed in one day. Where are your politicians now?” it read.

Where’s your messiah now, Camden? The graffiti was sadly removed due to “unauthorized use of the pavement,” like those kids from my high school who spray-painted the school’s initials on I-95 a few years back.

Historic city bridge to be fixed [Camden Courier-Post]

This Is Going To Be A Fun Two Days

She writes: “The best social commentary from a mailing sticker since ‘Scarface dies in the end’”

March 1: Milton Street’s American Idol Audition
Archives: Milton Street