...Just to give you a better idea of how the London 2012 Olympic logo is meant to Move And Shake Its Thing.
Red Herring today goes to... who[m]ever thinks "its," above, should get an apostrophe.
London 2012 promo vid:
...And, just for fun, a little Presidential music video. Because you've earned it:
-Zed
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"I promise you I will listen to what has been said here, even though I wasn't here."
-George W. Bush
The London 2012 Olympics has a new logo.
Revealed on the web today, the logo itself is, of course, perfectly hideous. But the idea is good: a logo that keeps moving (see YouTube for the introductory press conference) and can be used on mobile phones and whatever other multimedia we'll be toting around in '12.
Let us know what you think.
-Zed
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“In silence and movement you can show the reflection of people.”
-Marcel Marceau
Blogging from a Windows interface. This is weird...
And how about a big Red Herring to those with too much time on their hands, and not nearly enough hobbies. Yes, in yet another great example of irony, IBM has made a video game in which the user simulates the making of business software.
Yah.
OK, it actually sounds pretty cool -- it's skill-building, for one, which you can't exactly say about Grand Theft Auto, and (get out those glasses) it's in 3-D.
It also sounds a darn sight more complex than the game we're playing for class, which I dare say is plenty hard enough.
Okay! How 'bout some sports, then!
It seems tech has come to the Olympics -- surely this has happened somewhere before, but this one has rockets. Apparently, in the event of rain, China plans to launch a ground-to-air attack against the offending cloud.
I'm thinking: Thor would have loved the Olympics.
By the way, thanks to all of you new crew for stopping by; it surely is appreciated. Just one question: where the heck is Petaling Jaya?
-Zed
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"The comic book [is] the marijuana of the nursery, the bane of the bassinet, the horror of the home..."
-John Mason Brown
Breaking news:
It seems Chicago's successful (to date) 2016 Olympic bid has violated a simple rule: you can't say "Olympic," you can't show "Olympic," and you can't use any Olympic related imagery, basically ever.
The Oly's are extremely protective of their brand -- the better, of course, to put the squeeze on sponsors every two years -- and have asked Chicago to redo their logo, sans Olympic torch.
Said Chicago: "But I worked all afternoon on that!" No, seriously, do you realize how much design goes into that stuff?
A stanky Red Herring to whatever Chicagoan forgot to dot that 'i.'
Oh well -- for a bid proposing to build, and then tear down, an 80,000-person stadium in a matter of months -- I guess it could be worse.
And, in Tech:
News in the negative, as Apple is not delaying launch on its iPhone and Leopard releases later this year.
Kind of interesting that someone has apparently been able to send actual Apple-looking emails through actual Apple internal channels.
Stay tuned to find out whether iPhone reviews could possibly live up to the hype.
-Zed
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"I am building a fire, and everyday I train, I add more fuel. At just the right moment, I light the match."
-Mia Hamm
http://kcbs.com/pages/400516.php?contentType=4&contentId=452074
An absolute, positive, guaran-goddamn-teed reality.
Oy vey.
-Zed
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"Outside of a dog, a book is man's best friend. Inside of a dog, it's too dark to read."
-Groucho Marx
Around the horn today.
From International:
Chicago has pulled something of an upset, being selected as the USOC's official entrant into the 2016 Summer Olympic bouillabaisse. It just goes to show, the door was wide open for San Francisco.
Will Chicago win the IOC bid? In a word, no. Chicago ain't exactly a breezy slab of beach, and despite an impressive downtown Renaissance, has little of the caché of America's coastal cities. What's more, practically all the major venues will be temporary, which runs contrary to the IOC's goals.
Forced to bet, and given that Rio has practically locked up the '14 World Cup, leaving them uninterested in the '16 Games, where would I place my money? How about Tokyo?
From National:
Bill Clinton came to San Francisco ("I jump at any chance to come back to San Francisco," he intimated; in seven-plus years, his successor has never been.) The former president, in a talk about health care, pointed out that the U.S. spends over $800 billion (a very hard amount to fathom, indeed) more than Canada or Switzerland on health care every year, yet insures fewer of its citizens, and ranks just 37th in the world in overall health care.
Said Clinton, "We are great about treating sickness, but we are lousy at keeping people well." It's an excellent point, and one you Sport Managers would also be wise to heed. Assuming, that is, that "free market" logic, which implies that this need will soon be met, holds true.
From Local:
In another free market battle, the S. F. Chronicle reports that San Francisco MUNI drivers are automatically -- it's in their contract -- the highest or second-highest paid drivers in the nation. Does this handcuff the City, and decrease the drivers' incentives to perform? Their union leader doesn't think so.
It's reminiscent of state-level problems, where decades of voter-approved ballot measures hogtie legislators every year before they even show up for duty. But that's okay. California, like San Francisco, is doing just fine.
And, From Sports:
Live in Oakland, Eric Chavez steals the unstealoffable Andy Pettitte blind. You love seeing stuff like that.
The A's are squaring off in another war against the Yanks... Warriors roaring towards the playoffs!.. Sharkeys already battling in the postseason... And the Giants... snowed-out doubleheader in Pittsburgh. And Barry Zito is said to be dating Hilary Duff.
Which is at least a little ironic, given that his honeymoon in San Francisco is officially over.
By the way, happy Jackie Robinson Day around baseball. There's a great article here, among the glut of Jackie Robinson anniversary pieces. Baseball failing to market its players as well as the other leagues? Absolutely.
You'll notice, every particularly clever or high-end commercial featuring a Derek Jeter, is actually done by Nike, or some such. Meanwhile, if Dontrelle Willis faces C. C. Sabathia in interleague play, there's the slimmest of chances that any black pitcher will start a game anywhere else on the continent.
Let's hope that Inner Cities program you keep hearing about -- in Compton -- is as good as advertised. The next three, so we're told, are already being built.
Percentage of African-American players in MLB in 1975: 27.5%. In 2007: 8.4%.
Let's keep working, folks. That Mays kid could play.
-Zed
"Be careful what you pretend to be, because you are what you pretend to be."
-Kurt Vonnegut
(What year is it today?)
No, not LA 2016.
The Olympics in Tahoe? In 2018?
Hey, it's happened before. Who knows, maybe it will make the food at Kirkwood a little more palatable.
Plate of Pickled Herring all around.
Also...
By the way, for those following this kind of thing, blogger Josh Wolf, who filmed an anarchist rally in San Francisco at which a police officer was bashed in the skull -- has just ended his tenure as the longest-jailed journalist in U.S. history. Wolf has agreed to testify in federal court (which doesn't offer the "shield" protections written into California law) but only after the feds significantly weakened their demands.
Obvious implications from Plame to BALCO here. Oh, and the first... whatsit?... Uh-mendment.
Also...
Did you know Google offers you a whole WiFi kit and service for free? It's okay, they don't need money anyway... just to dominate the world.
I figure, it's my job as a blogger to coolly pass along discoveries like this... but as your friend, I promised to be as amazed and confused by them as you are!
Incidently, another surprise. My new phone, all of $30 from Sprint (yeah, yeah, the two-year contract) is not only super-thin but, among other things, actually acts as a modem whenever you're on the Sprint network. That's right, with nothing more than your phone and the USB cable that comes with it, your laptop (or desktop) now has "free" WiFi -- even without Google -- any time your phone has bars.
It's getting harder and harder to convince people I'm unreachable -- you know, in the event that I want to have a coffee with a friend, watch t.v., bathe...
-Zed
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"The irrationality of a thing is no argument against its existence, rather a condition of it."
-Friedrich Nietzsche
