Ah, my readers are too good. Several of you gave me the answer I was looking for.
Of course, the picture shown in Picture quest was meant to show "smelly code". The presentation it was used in was on refactoring. With refactoring we can go from smelly code to something like this:
I received a very good guess that I hadn't been expecting, namely that the picture was about stale data. So I guess I can use it to demonstrate problems with certain caching solutions as well...
Thanks to Kjell Warnquist for letting me publish the pictures here.