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....
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."
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?
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.
What entitles a website to be perceived as important from Day 1? Arianna Huffington pulled it off, though I certainly resisted it at first. The success of HuffPo presumably created the opening for a conservative counterpart, but who can simply announce that they've got it? And didn't Pajamas Media already do that?
[Carlson's] $3 million in funding comes from Wyoming financier Foster Friess, a big-time GOP donor.
But Carlson insists this won't be a right-wing site: "I don't feel guilty about or ashamed in any way of saying we'll cover the people in power," he says, dismissing the capital's Republicans as "totally powerless."
"Our goal is not to get Republicans elected. Our goal is to explain what your government is doing. We're not going to suck up to people in power, the way so many have. There's been an enormous amount of throne-sniffing," he says, a sly grin beneath the mop of brown hair. It's disgusting."...
The focus will be on the White House and Congress; early stories will examine Medicare fraud and wasteful stimulus projects, along with a Carlson piece on the latest White House party-crasher, Carlos Allen....
So I go to the website and here's the teaser for the top story:
That's what you decided to throw in my face on the morning of your first day?! I guess I'm way out of your target audience. Jeesh. That's lurid. And Carlos Allen means nothing to me. You've got an unknown black man posing with 3 breast-wielders, for no obviously apparent reason, making me reflexively assume you're trying to attract childish men and... uh... racists?
And the whole look of the place is old-fashioned and tabloid. HuffPo had a really great aesthetic from the start. Why did they make it look like that? Everyone on the staff must be design-blind. Or there's just something impossible about using Wyoming financier money to hire a great graphic designer.
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.
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 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?
