Archive for the ‘Logos’ Category

« Older Entries

Tool time: the hose end pressure controller

May 7, 2024

(Warning: this posting will immediately descend to crude jokiness on male genitals and masturbation, so it’s not to everyone’s taste)

To celebrate Masturbation Day, today’s notable occasion (in my household, every day is jack-off day, but the celebratory holiday comes around only once a year): the Zwicky Linemaster hose end pressure controller, from a vintage UK ad for aviation supplies (advertised on eBay), with its language repurposed here to cover the fluid pressure of ejaculation (which varies considerably in the male population, while being largely out of conscious control):


(#1) The ad from eBay, for some Zwicky Limited (of Buckinghamshire in southeast England) aircraft equipment, for controlling hose pressure during fueling

(more…)

Posted in Ambiguity, Furnishings and tools, Gay porn, Language and the body, Language of sex, Logos, Slogans | Leave a Comment »

Juneau homo logo

April 23, 2024

From Alaskan Chris Waigl on Facebook on 4/20, who commented “Great logo” (to which I assent):

SEAGLA (Southeast Alaska LGBTQ+ Alliance: “providing a supportive social network for gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, and queer people in Southeast Alaska”) announcement on 4/18 for Juneau pride week, June 14th – 23rd

Alaskan images, going through the rainbow flag from red to purple, with a few touches of pink. From the SEAGLA site:

We’re so excited to reveal this year’s Pride logo! It’s designed by Lillian Egan (@diamond.lils.art on Instagram) and Mel Izard (@thetoadstoes).

I had hoped to get a detailed inventory of the items in the logo, since they are supposed to characterize (southeast) Alaska, but will be seen by many outsiders (by me in particular, and now by my readers around the world); that is, they convey more than generic allusions to tall trees, wolves, porcupines, crabs, bears, and so on. What jellyfish? What caterpillar? What (two types of) mushrooms?  But no responses so far.

 

 

Posted in Gender and sexuality, Holidays, Logos, Rainbow | Leave a Comment »

Contra mundum

October 19, 2023

Glimpsed on Pinterest a little while back, this MMS (male-male sex) painting, Contra Mundum by Fyodor Pavlov: a pair of young men kissing, seductive male buttocks highlighted, their Edwardian-picnic amour unfolding beneath the point of a potent abstract phallic design, the down-pointing triangular shape of the male genitals (often given physical form as a hanging bunch of grapes, here as a cluster of leaves on the tree that shades the young men’s secret tryst):


(#1) Packed with further details worthy of comment, among them: the dark-light (paired with dominant-submissive) contrast of the two men, the overarching U of the tree’s branches complementing the cupped U of the submissive man’s body, the red of the strawberries against a mostly b&w composition, the stuffed bear, the vibrant green of the men’s sweaters, the neck of the wine bottle poking out from the confines of the picnic hamper, the phallic reeds on the far shore of the lake

Things to comment on: picnics; contra mundum; and the artist. This turns out to be quite a lot.

(more…)

Posted in Art, Books, Homosexuality, Language and religion, Language and the body, Language of sex, Literature, Logos, Male art, Phallicity, Signs and symbols | 3 Comments »

The news for penises: the Buffalo Bills original logo

September 5, 2023

From cartoonist Bob Eckstein’s The Bob newsletter of 9/5 “Back to School BONUS EDITION”, in a section on “The Worst NFL Logos” (published in Run Your Pool), about the original Buffalo Bills logo:


The original Buffalo buffalo

The old water buffalo was so unassuming, so unexpected, you thought, watch out! What are they up to? It was the only sports logo with the outline of genitals. With the understated white dot for an eye, I contend it was sport’s funniest logo … ever. We lost that.

(more…)

Posted in Language and animals, Language and sports, Language and the body, Logos, Phallicity, Signs and symbols | 2 Comments »

The vipers of Santa Clara County

August 19, 2023

I wrote on Facebook a little while ago:

Just heard on a tv public service announcement from Santa Clara County: … Watch for walkers and vipers. (Ah, that must have been: bikers. Fortunately, vipers are sparse in the county.)

Follow-up: there seem to be plenty of Dodge Vipers in the county, also Pit Viper Sunglasses. And we have the Silicon Valley Vipers quadball team. According to the US Quadball site: “quadball is a mixed gender contact sport with a unique mix of elements from rugby, dodgeball, and tag”. (Until 2022 it was known as quidditch. Yes, that quidditch. Players must have a broomstick between their legs at all times. I AM NOT MAKING THIS UP.)


Logo of the Silicon Valley Vipers quadball team

(more…)

Posted in Books, Errors, Language and animals, Language and sports, Logos, Mishearings | 2 Comments »

No more bunny helmets

August 2, 2023

Dan Piraro’s Bizarro from Sunday 7/30, in which Vikings with bunny-eared helmets demand horned helmets:


(#1) No more eating grasses, it’s time for Viking pillaging and plundering in an appropriately fierce costume (if you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 10 in this strip — see this Page)

Now, you’re thinking, I’m going to tell you that actual Vikings didn’t wear ornamental horned helmets, just to look fearsome; that instead they wore more effectively protective helmets of thick leather; and that the horned helmet thing is totally an invention of artists — or some disappointing shit like that. And I am.

It’s a good story, and it makes for amazingly impressive operatic scenes and a totally menacing muscle-hunk Marvel comics superhero (among other things), but all that horns stuff is fanciful.

(more…)

Posted in Clothing, History, Linguistics in the comics, Logos, Music | 3 Comments »

Our multifaceted undergraduates

May 16, 2023

From today’s (5/16) Stanford Report, a feature on the outgoing Stanford Tree, Grayson Armour, who cavorted on the football field of Stanford Stadium as the team’s mascot, the Tree, a costumed figure representing El Palo Alto, the redwood tree featured on the university’s logo; meanwhile, Armour was preparing himself for “a career in human spaceflight”.  Kids these days!

From the Stanford Report:


(#1) Armour in Stanford Stadium

Meet Grayson Armour, ’23: The former Stanford Tree grew up on a dairy farm in Illinois, where nightly views of the Milky Way inspired a fascination with distant horizons. He graduates in June with a bachelor’s degree in aerospace computational engineering and a master’s degree in aeronautics and astronautics, and plans to pursue a career in human spaceflight.

(more…)

Posted in Academic life, Logos, Mascots, Palo Alto, Stanford | Leave a Comment »

Abraham Lincoln hosts two festivals of pleasure

February 13, 2023

(#1)

Thanks to this year’s alignment of the Gregorian and Roman Catholic church calendars and the schedule of official US holidays, the month of February 2023 has two periods of presidential pleasure in it — festivals of Lincoln and license (food and sex) embracing first 2/12 (Lincoln Darwin Day), 2/13 (today, LDV Day), and 2/14 (Valentine’s Day), and then 2/20 ((US) Presidents Day) and 2/21 (Mardi Gras).

(more…)

Posted in Compounds, Gender and sexuality, Holidays, Language and food, Language of sex, Logos, Mascots, Phallicity, Poetic form, Semantics of compounds, Signs and symbols, Underwear | 1 Comment »

The Norman door

January 8, 2023

This is supremely a Mary, Queen of Scots, Not Dead Yet posting: a brief posting that I hope you’ll find both entertaining and informative, while showing that I’m Still Standing, despite a run of extremely unpleasant days, taken up almost entirely with writhing in pain and with sleep, the sleep of exhaustion and scary narcoleptic sleep. But here, a moment of sunshine.

Supplied by Mike Pope a few hours ago with this photo from real life:


(#1) MP writes: Documentation solves another design issue … An interesting variant on the Norman door

(MP is a regular source of material for this blog; WordPress tells me I have cited him in 30 postings so far. He is also — and this is  absolutely relevant to his comment — a technical editor at Google. Explanation and documentation are his business.)

(more…)

Posted in Design, Logos, My life, Signs and symbols | 1 Comment »

Zwicky logos

November 3, 2022

Return with me now to the middle of June, when I was impelled into the world of Zwicky logos, including not only ones for prominent Swiss commercial enterprises in grain, sewing thread, and real estate (the grain company is where it all started on 6/14), but also for beer (in Colorado), hair styling (also in Colorado), car repair (in Canton Aargau in Switzerland), and astronomical surveys (in California).

The original impulse came from Kyle Wohlmut, posting on Facebook on 6/14 “at Zwicky Areal”, with this photo taken from his commuter train:


(#1) KW > AZ (about the gnome in the logo): I don’t think that’s a very good likeness…

The logo in question:


(#2) The gnome is indeed not a good likeness of me

There ensued a confusion that turned out to have to do with the word Areal, but eventually it was established that the gnomic logo in #1 and #2 is for the Zwicky grain company (Schweizerische Schälmühle E. Zwicky AG), headquartered in a corner of Canton Thurgau; while the Zwicky sewing-thread company (now merged into the German company A&E Gütermann) and the real-estate company (Zwicky & Co AG, headquartered in the Zürich suburb of Wallisellen) base their logos on the Donald Brun silk-cat poster of the 1950s (which I’ve posted about repeatedly).

But Kyle’s note sent me on a search for Zwicky logos, which took me immediately to the 4 Noses Brewing Company in Broomfield CO, makers of Zwicky P (a Pilsner-style lager) and on to all the rest.

(more…)

Posted in Art, Language and food, Logos, Mascots, Signs and symbols, Zwickys | Leave a Comment »

« Older Entries