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Help me solve this graffiti mystery

Monday, Apr. 23, 2012 at 11:44 AM | Comments: 0

People often say Brandon's small size is one of the things they love about it: you can drive anywhere in 15 minutes.

But you'd be surprised how far you can walk in 15 minutes, too. Longtime readers will remember my series of print columns from a couple of years ago in which I gave up driving for the month of September, and tried to live in Brandon on foot.

And I miss no opportunity to tout websites like Walkscore, which can show you just how walkable — or not — your neighbourhood is.

So even though it was cool and windy on Sunday, when I had to go halfway across town for some cat-sitting duties, I laced up my sneakers and headed out on foot.

One of the things I like about walking is that it gives you a much more intimate look at what you're passing by. You barely have time in a car to see anything, plus you are insulated by the glass and steel that surrounds you.

Even on a bike, you tend to be whizzing past fairly quickly. And with your attention focused so much on where you are going, there's less time to stop and smell the flowers, so to speak.

Not that I'm big on entering peoples' gardens as I walk past. But I do have a strange fondness for architectural oddities, like spotting where old houses have bricked up doors and replaced them with windows. Or the old roofline of a porch that has been ripped down. Or where garages have been turned into house extensions.

I saw all three of those things on my Sunday walk.

But those were little mysteries I could easily solve. What caught my eye and has wedged itself in my brain is a little mystery I cannot solve.

Check out the graffiti that I spotted on this fire hydrant, near Fifth Street and Lorne Avenue:

Clue?

What is the meaning of this clue?

A couple of blocks further west on Lorne, I spotted another "Clue", this one near Ninth Street:

Although the word is the same, you'll note a couple of differences between the two "Clues". First is that the fire hydrant has a question mark, which the one on the back of the sign does not. Also, the "E" appears to have been written differently, suggesting perhaps that a different person wrote one?

(I'm willing to think that the line at the top of the "C" on the fire hydrant was just an error.)

After I saw two of these in quick succession, I kept my eyes peeled for more clues to the "Clue" graffiti. But I didn't see anything else.

I did see a bunch of graffiti tags that looked like this:

It is just barely possible that this undecipherable scrawl is a very stylized "Clue?" although I'm not sure why there is a dot in that final loop (which would be the loop of the lower-case "e"). I saw this particular tag about a half dozen times in the same area. This example is again on Lorne, just east of Seventh Street.

So, although these caught my eye, I have no idea what they mean.

Is it some gang member's not-very-cool nickname? Is it some kind of city-wide scavenger hunt? Is it an homage to the classic board game? Whodunnit?!

Any readers care to take a crack at it?

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