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
Nice: FIFA doesn't consult Bolivia, Ecuador, Peru, or Mexico before banning higher-altitude sites for FIFA qualifiers. No word about them banning heat, or cold, or bad refereeing for that matter.
These are sites that have held such matches since time out of mind. On the other hand, their GDP are fractions, respectively, of Germany or South Africa (sites of the last and the next World Cup.)
In Tech, authorities say that their arrest of one man may produce noticibly less Spam in your inbox. Red Herring to one Robert Alan Soloway, since it's too late to get Karl Rove for his direct mail fodder.
Politics, politics, and soccer. Where's an Italian man crying for his mama when you need one?
The thing about Michael Vick and dog fighting is, the NFL recruits brutes, and turns them into animals. Ray Lewis? Pacman Jones? Bill Romanowski?
Bruce Jenkins suggests that these guys play together on the Bad News Bearz. I just hope Papa Sheffield can keep them away from Elijah Dukes.
And Mark Cuban and a Google exec want to challenge the NFL's supremacy? Iiinteresting...
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"No thought, no idea, can possibly be conveyed as an idea from one person to another."
-John Dewey
What you didn't know:
Justin.tv is a huge hit, one of those things you think you've heard about before, where a guy straps a camera to his head and airs it 24/7.
What sets Justin apart appears to be that he's a (1) interesting, bright (2) webby nerdy. I'm sure my roommate's a groupie.
What else you didn't know:
This girl -- aptly named Justine, the graphic designer daughter of, apparently, a gym teacher and a coal miner in Pittsburgh -- is the heir apparent star Justin Kan has been looking for (launching today, under the name "iJustine.") Yes, the ball cap has a camera on it.
Hey, after double-checking the photo, I might stop in for a few peeks.
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"Television has proved that people will look at anything rather than each other."
-Ann Landers
Hummer Bummer?
The first private citizen to own a Hummer? My Governor and yours, Arnold Schwazenegger. (Dead Red Fish to that man.) And now there's word that someone, perhaps on his way to the dealership right now, will soon be the last.
Yes, you do remember me publishing a piece on this. Now it seems there were finally enough protests about the actual illegality of them on California roads, the immorality of their environmental impact, and-
...What?
Apparently that wasn't it.
Apparently, sales were down.
Oh, well. To borrow the title of the Giants' 1987 team video: Humm Baby, It Was Fun.
Virgin Airs:
It looks like Virgin America is finally American enough for American lobbyists -- I mean, lawmakers.
Will non-American Richard Branson topple another industry?
Meanwhile, here I am, blogging to you (shh!) from the Giants press box. I'm actually watching two of the greatest centerfielders of all time -- Willie Mays and Condoleezza Rice -- chat each other up in owner Peter Magowan's box.
The presscateers all wanted to know whether the a crowd would boo Condi (line of the night: Condi is the woman Bush always hoped Colin Powell would become.) They never got the chance; she stayed safely off the JumboTron and in Willie's lap.
[Editor's note: they did get their chance when she left the game, escorted up Aisle 121 by her Secret Service detail, in the 8th inning -- to beat parking, presumably. The lefties did not disappoint, booing her roundly.]
Politics make strange bedfellows.
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"I loved the game. I loved the competition. But I never had any fun."
-Carl Yastrzemski
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?
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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
For those of you cribbing for Mrs. Williams' 6th grade English, a few examples of what's ironic:
The fact that Alanis Morissette's song Ironic is not ironic... is ironic.
The fact that Gmail has a spell-check function, which does not recognize the word "internet"... is ironic.
(A rare Red Herring Today to Google, who should bloody well know better.)
In Good Will Hunting, Robin Williams' character offers to buy Prof. Lambeau a drink at an upcoming reunion, and Lambeau retorts that drinks are free at such events. Williams responds, "I was being ironical."
By the way, if you for some reason (don't like horsey-faced women? Sheryl Crow will be angry) did not click on that Alanis link above, I'd really recommend reconsidering. Here's a consolation click.
Don't thank me now, with cake. Thank me later.
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"If it's a big record, that's the frosting on the cake, but music's the main meal."
-Ray Charles
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.
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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
Thoughts over my Cheerios (no relation to Moons Over My Hammy)...
No real surprise: MySpace launches a dozen video channels...
Good company, bad company: in hindsight, Oracle got an absolute bargain on naming the Warriors' arena. For all the mentions of Oracle over national air in recent weeks, the Warriors actually see less than $2 mil a year...
And, just for the heck of it: Bill Clinton is making campaign ads for Hillary, while not bothering to hide his new squeeze. There's hope yet for Newsom.
Rest easy.
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"If a woman has to choose between catching a fly ball and saving an infant's life, she will choose to save the infant's life without even considering if there are men on base."
-Dave Barry
Okay, so some of you know that I've been fighting Mac-based battles against a PC-based simulation game assigned for my class. I've finally managed to bridge the famed gap -- because the new Macs (you remember, with the Intel processors) can actually run Windows without a hitch.
Just one more thing that Mr. Mac can do, that Mr. PC cannot do in reverse.
You weekend techies can get this done one of (at least) two ways; both involve "partitioning" your hard drive. That's what it sounds like: you reserve some disk space (a minimum of 5 GB, up to half the drive or more; you control how much) to run the second platform, while your friendly, well-loved, vastly superior Mac OSX patiently snoozes.
Here's how:
Way 1: Download Mac's Boot Camp and install it. Once you've done this, you can hold down the Option key as your computer boots, and get a prompt asking if you'd like to run the Mac OS, or Windows.
Way 2: There's another program called Parallels that actually lets you run the enemy's OS from your desktop, as if it were a regular program.
And if you have one of the very newest Apples, the ones with the dual core processors, it will also wash, wax, and detail your car.
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"Design is not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works."
-Steve Jobs
Why would I read about a revolutionary new technology, said to be every bit as good as hybrids, and lament, "You know the oil industry is behind this?"
Because, quite simply, the "intelligent" (telematic) car is based on conventional fuel.
[Sure enough, I revisit the article for more details, and am delayed by a Shell banner ad!]
The way telematics work: they "look ahead" to predict and avoid traffic slow-downs and restarts. And of course, the more of these telematic cars are on the road doing this, according to Their calculations, the better they will work, until they've actually surpassed hybrids, although they look ahead only a few seconds.
It just goes to show you, They produce the bare minimum to consumers, until a competetive alternative comes up.
Again, more on this to come.
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“I like men who have a future and women who have a past.”
-Oscar Wilde
It seems Apple, who normally gets practically a free pass on security, is having major issues with QuickTime, its media player. It's bad enough that experts are worried that experts could use the company's recent fix of a gaping QuickTime-Javascript error to reverse engineer hacks, putting millions of iPod users at risk.
The U.S.-CERT gave the vulnerability a 10 out of 10 points in its risk-rating scale. That's before the fix/hack issue.
In Sports, Red Herring to a twenty-year-old hamstring. The 'string belongs to uber-prospect Phillip Hughes, who defied recent Yankee tradition by holding the Rangers scoreless and even hitless into the seventh inning, before succumbing to another recent Yankee trend, and leaving with the injury.
Yanks GM Brian Cashman: "We seem to be getting hit every day." Hughes could be out a month or more. This is part of why there was internal pressure not to summon the talented Hughes in the first place.
Meanwhile, improbable opening day starter Carl Pavano, languishing on the DL, continues to have credibility problems.
Chien-Meng Wang is the best thing they have going, not only from a baseball standpoint, but for international public relations. MLB continues to develop its Taiwanese interests, including a new website that doubles as a dry run for China. Stay tuned on this one; using Taiwan's western-friendlier enterprise to sidle up to the Chinese economy looks like a major strategy.
As for China itself: everyone's chasing the NBA on this one.
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"My dear boy, if God had intended for us to walk, he wouldn't have invented roller skates."
-Willy Wonka
Pretty sweet: a trussed-up Red Herring with the trimmings to Alec Holden, from Epsom in Surrey, England. (Why is it most places in England sounds like Hobbit lairs? Could it be that J.R.R. Tolkien was British?)
It seems Holden, born April 24, 1907, beat the system by betting with a bookmaker ten years ago that he would reach his hundredth birthday.
Says a rep for the bookie: "These age wagers are starting to cost us a fortune, and from now on we are going to push out the age to 110." (Yes, they've lost this bet before.)
Meanwhile, in Tech, a little company called Fon (backed by a bigger company called Time Warner) is spreading a new model to America.
It seems Fon's product, a little gizmo called La Fonera, allows users not only to log on, but to share their own bandwidth -- as much or as little of it as they like -- with passersby, neighbors, and so on, creating almost-free wireless hotspots anywhere.
The plan is an interesting response by Time Warner (and Skype/EBay, among other investors) to the phenomenon of cities (San Francisco has long discussed this) offering up free wi-fi to anyone within city limits.
Meanwhile, Fon actually took the liberty of distributing 6,000-odd devices to anyone who lived right by a Starbucks.
Far out, Daddy-O.
Also, more on the Pat Tillman investigation in CNN's headline story, here. Tillman's brother was a fellow Ranger, also deployed, but not on site when Pat went down.
And finally, a nice political cartoon today, in the Examiner, which is good to read sometimes, because people think you're smart if you have ink on your hands.
There's a big truck outside the White House, labelled "January 20, 2009." A voice from the White House says, "I hate artificial timetables."
Double half-caf latte with cinnamon soy sprinkles: $4.50.
Legal use of someone else's wireless (24 hours): $2.
Getting PA-AID for turning 100: Priceless.
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"I try not to break the rules but merely to test their elasticity."
-Bill Veeck
(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...
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"The irrationality of a thing is no argument against its existence, rather a condition of it."
-Friedrich Nietzsche
If a Red Herring is a bad thing, what would be the good equivalent? Some tartar sauce?
Whatever it is, today's unquestionably goes to the MIT coalition that has pioneered and built the $100 laptop. Much more than even a revolutionary marketing/pricing idea, this hi-def windup gizmo is meant to deliver First World know-how to Third World brains.
"OLPC" stands for One Laptop Per Child, which is like No Child Left Behind, except that it's about laptops, and it's not a wheelbarrow of horse dung. My roommate has actually toyed around with one of these things, so they're out there, if only in prototype form. It's the kind of idea that's so revolutionary, it should be absconded and polluted by corporate interests in no time.
Seriously, this is the kind of thing that could upend the entire retail industry -- even though it's intended for non-commercial distribution and use. (Remember the four kilobytes of storage space you used to get in your hotmail account? No matter whether you've switched to Gmail or not -- and you should, clearly -- Google's done you the favor of way ramping up industry standards for space.)
Check back on this one. Hopefully it's the one idea in the haystack... that really catches fire.
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"You can't imagine how wonderful it feels to have written this score and not have to search all over the globe for that drunken little fag."
-Richard Rogers, on writing for No Strings without Oscar Hammerstein
