"Branding the US Presidents."

"I was kind of hoping that they were real brands, because I'd love to see that logo scorched into the skin on Nixon's flanks."

"Amazed nobody at Obama HQ noticed this, especially with all the hand-stuff."

Yes, but... pointing it out...

Too far?

ADDED: I got a few emails this morning pushing me to do a Drudgtaposition post based on the bloody handmark photograph and the Obama flag graphic. But Drudge didn't put up the handprint photograph next to the flag graphic. Not that I saw. He put up that flag graphic with the text "OBAMA SELLS 'OUR STRIPES' FLAG...", linking to the campaign's merchandise page.

ALSO: It seems to be widely believed that the red stripes on the American flag are red to represent blood (the "blood of patriots"). 

UPDATE: I'm sorry. It was too subtle for me even with multiple emails pointing me to it. Drudge did have the handprint next to the flag. Here's the screen grab:

"I am not ashamed of the Gospel because it is the power of God...."

Somewhere in America, I stopped to take a photograph of a collection of signs...



I wanted to take a photograph of the café itself, and I needed to ask this man if it was okay if I included his motorcycle in the picture, and he was happy to pose for the picture...



... to display his vest for closeup photography...



... and to tell me he is not ashamed of the gospel.

Here's the website for the Black Sheep, a Christian ministry to bikers.

"What happens when all the things we based our icons on don't exist anymore?"

"Do they just become, ahem, iconic glyphs whose origins are shrouded in mystery?"

"When is the last time you stared at an hourglass while waiting for something?"

ADDED: A commenter, at the second link, answers the question: "Last time I played Boggle (real-life, shake-up-the-cube Boggle, not some online facsimile)."

I would have said: Last time I watched "The Wizard of Oz," and the "something" I was waiting for was: Dorothy to die.

"I leave it in your capable hands to do whatever you want..."

"... and please write back saying how much money you want."

Question for normal readers: The idealized working relationship?

Question for first year law students: Is that a contract?

ADDED: Compare the story about Steve Jobs dealing with the master of the corporate logo, Paul Rand:

The [Next] computer would be a cube, Jobs pronounced. He loved that shape. It was perfect and simple. So Rand decided that the logo should be a cube as well, one that was tilted at a 28° angle. When Jobs asked for a number of options to consider, Rand declared that he did not create different options for clients. “I will solve your problem, and you will pay me,” he told Jobs. “You can use what I produce, or not, but I will not do options, and either way you will pay me.” 

Jobs admired that kind of thinking, so he made what was quite a gamble. The company would pay an astonishing $100,000 flat fee to get one design. “There was a clarity in our relationship,” Jobs said. “He had a purity as an artist, but he was astute at solving business problems. He had a tough exterior, and had perfected the image of a curmudgeon, but he was a teddy bear inside.” It was one of Jobs’s highest praises: purity as an artist.

"Steve Jobs," by Walter Isaacson (Kindle Location 3941).

The image of Wisconsin as a clenched fist.

Lots of Facebook folk actually use this in the spot where most people put a picture of their own faces, so it's not just that the state is turned into a fist. People are willingly replacing their own faces with a fist.

By the way, if Door County were included the fist would have an extended pinky. That would be more polite.

IN THE COMMENTS: Phil 3:14 says:

And appropriately Madison lies over the "capitate" bone.

(And stretching this a bit, and assuming Milwaukee is Democratic, they're "pissed" over the pisiform.)

Paul Zrimsek says:

Alternative caption: BEND OVER, ONTARIO.

A very cool Google logo today.

Do you get it?



It's Jules Verne's birthday.

Begin reading:

The year 1866 was signalised by a remarkable incident, a mysterious and puzzling phenomenon, which doubtless no one has yet forgotten. Not to mention rumours which agitated the maritime population and excited the public mind, even in the interior of continents, seafaring men were particularly excited. Merchants, common sailors, captains of vessels, skippers, both of Europe and America, naval officers of all countries, and the Governments of several States on the two continents, were deeply interested in the matter.

For some time past vessels had been met by "an enormous thing," a long object, spindle-shaped, occasionally phosphorescent, and infinitely larger and more rapid in its movements than a whale....

"I bet that you, like me, reasonably assumed the the 'G' on the Green Bay Packers' helmets..."

"... stood for 'Green Bay.'"

Starbucks, beyond words.

Image alone.

95 things kids are afraid of, including the PBS logo...

... and lots of things that might crawl up out of the toilet.

Holbrooke's last words: "You've got to stop this war in Afghanistan."

As noted in the Daily Kos "morning warm-up," along with scoffing at No Labels ("the latest political insider group that pretends to be above politics") and a kicks at Michael Steele ("lesbian-bondage-strippers everywhere cheer") and 3 other Republicans.

Man, No Labels can't catch a break. And it's not just that they're so non-partisan that all the partisans disapprove. They're surpassingly lame too. And they stole their logo! And hilariously lamely tried to deny that they stole it: "Conceptually, what I was trying to figure out was how to get away from the elephant and how to get away from the donkey... I’m sure his thought process was similar."

Robert Downey Jr. is Mr. Peanut.

Great! I've always loved Robert Downey Jr. and Mr. Peanut:



But why is the nutcracker named "Richard"?

Background on Mr. Peanut:"Mr. Peanut was created in 1916 after Planters Peanuts held a contest to create a logo and a 14-year-old boy drew a nut with human features." I'd really like to see the original drawing. According to Wikipedia, the boy (Antonio Gentile) just drew a some sort of man-peanut — and "an artist later added spats, a top hat, a monocle, and a cane." So... did the boy's drawing have the gloves? The unfailingly optimistic smile?

John Lennon is 70.

There's a nice tribute to Lennon in today's Google logo. An animated line drawing, with exactly what you'd expect in the audio track. Must it always be "Imagine"?

Imagine no "Imagine"
What song would they use
For every Lennon tribute
In the annual Lennon news
Imagine all the people
Freed from that old song...

You may say I'm a dreamer
Like some crazy peacenik dove
I hope someday you'll join me
And the new song would be Love.

"Folks at the Wisconsin Tourism Federation couldn't possibly have seen how the Internet would change the lingo when it was established in 1979...."

WTF? Stop laughing at Wisconsin!

Today, Google redoes its logo to celebrate...

... no, not Teddy Kennedy — how would you do that? — Michael Jackson!



It's his birthday, you know.

He was murdered.

Teddy wasn't murdered. Teddy Kennedy died of cancer at the age of 77.

Who/what is Google honoring today?

Here's the logo running over there:



Pause the cursor over it long enough and you'll see it's Hans Christian Ørsted. And who was he and what is that logo supposed to be:

... Google's Doodle logo illustrates his key discovery. That is, if you run a current through a wire – in this case, from the battery at the front – then the electricity creates a magnetic field, which will deflect a compass needle.

Thus the study of electromagnetism was born, and it's the basis of a lot of modern life: it led to the development of electricity generators and transformers....

As with many great discoveries, it happened by accident. In 1820, Ørsted, a professor of natural philosophy at the University of Copenhagen, was preparing an evening lecture when he noticed that a compass needle moved away from magnetic north and pointed to the wire whenever current flowed from the battery....

To honour Ørsted, the scientific community named the unit of magnetic induction after him, in what we now call the CGS (centimetre-gram-second) system. Sadly for him, people no longer measure things in oersteds, because nowadays we use an international metric system (SI) that honours people such as Ampere, Ohm, Hertz, James Prescott Joule, James Watt and Michael Faraday instead.

Poor Ørsted. But if he only discovered it by accident, he's lucky he got as much glory as he did. And now he's got a new jolt of fame, from Google.

By the way, there was no Mr. Google. These days, we name things with words with think sound fun and exciting — Google, Yahoo, etc. — not after fusty old professors. But thanks to the old professor, nonetheless.

Have you ever noticed the arrow hidden in the FedEx logo?

Things hidden in logos.

Via Metafilter, where somebody inevitably links to that famous accidental image.

ADDED: A Metafilter commenter detects plagiarism.

That orange with a straw stuck in it.

It meant a lot to people. They liked that thing. Probably because it was a sex symbol. So Pepsico had to go back to the old symbolic genitalia for the Tropicana carton.

For Sputnik, Ben Blank used a golf ball on a wire attached to a globe, with glitter on a black background.

Ben Blank, who just died at age 87, was the guy who innovated the use of graphic images behind the talking head on the TV news.

For most of the 1950s, television news broadcasts, in black and white, were visually austere. Anchors sat at small desks with a simple clock or map hanging on the wall behind them; often the name of a sponsor was displayed in front. Mr. Blank, a cartoonist for four years in the Air Force who was hired by CBS as a graphic designer in 1953, believed that to pique and retain the viewer’s interest, it was necessary to provide a visual mnemonic that would serve as a logo for the story. This was especially useful when a photograph or film was difficult to obtain on deadline. The image, known in TV news-speak as the “over-the-shoulder” graphic, could be repeated as needed to show narrative continuity from day to day. Mr. Blank also called it the “think-quick visual.”

We take these graphics for granted, but somebody had to think of the idea of filling in the screen around the head with something related to the story, something more interesting than a damn clock. Here's something that is such an integral part of our visual world, and I love hearing the details of the particular man who first got the idea. Surely, if he hadn't thought of this, someone else would have, but perhaps the images would have evolved quite differently if they hadn't originated with one particular man.

Do you think that the fact that his name was Blank had something to do with his being first to perceive the problem/potential of the blank space around the news anchor's head?

"Sleeping at Starbucks. That takes some will power, huh?"

Says Crackskull Bob, thinking about all that caffeine, drawing furiously.

In fact, every time I go to Starbucks -- almost never in Madison, but frequently in less well café'd cities -- there's a guy sleeping in one of the chairs. I've seen men sleeping in those upholstered chairs for hours -- undisturbed. Seriously, it's as if that Starbucks logo is a hobo symbol for "nice place to sleep."


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