The Past Not Being Dead, Nor Even Past, in San Diego

One of the alternate logos used in San Diego for the Padres during their early years showed a monk in a robe swinging the bat:

I like the sandals. You can see in the first example the colors scheme as well, the mustard and brown.

In this next alternate logo, the Padres have brought back the free-swinging monk. Having brought him back just this year, you can see the color scheme change to the current dark blue regime, and the word font on the bat also shows signs of the new script:

They'd used other representations of the bat-wielding "padre" in between these two, but part of the new design ethos is finding the old stuff, the hopefully beloved stuff, and tweak it slightly. The one in between that I'm not showing was less caricature and more human looking.

I never hated the Padres, and find both of these kinda cool.

Tension in Hawai'i

Using the colors of King Kamehameha's personal flag (green, yellow, and red) and the shield design from the Hawaiian seal, this is said to be the Kanaka Maoli flag. Kanaka Maoli is Hawaiian for "true people", and many see this flag as representing the natives:

The main beef they have is kinda obvious, when you see their current flag:

A Union Jack in the canton? Red, white, and blue stripes? Well, that's not exactly a Union Jack, but do you think any other US state has the flag of the UK showing on their own?

One of the main issues is that this flag, with symbols of both the US and UK, represents colonialism, a notion the islands tolerate at best.

It's time for a change, and what better than the Kanaka Maoli flag?

Cool Non-Sports Awesomeness: Atari and Commodore

Not every logo that I talk about must be from the sports universe, a fact highlighted during the logo alphabet journey. But here we get into some of my most nostalgic choices, and one of my all time favorite logos.

This first sits in that lofty spot I mentioned one short half-sentence ago. Some sources have said that it's a stylized "A", while others claim it's a stylized Mt. Fuji, which makes less sense. This is the logo for Atari:

Atari was synonymous with video games from 1977 until, eh, today? Atari, the word, is a play in a Japanese game similar to saying "checkmate". It was chosen by Nolan Bushnell when he founded a computer-game making company in the '70s, back when "computer-game" meant "a game displayed on a screen that could be 'played' with external controls", what we today call video games.

Atari made cabinet consoles for arcades, and were the major player in the industry when they weren't the only player in the industry. They then got to the home console market heavier than their competitors, and ruled that universe until the collapse in 1983, which was caused by the flooding of shitty games for their home console, the Atari 2600.

We had an Atari 2600, and a few games. It was all second hand to us, and the games were okay, but our imagination wasn't so piqued.

For me, hearing the name "Atari" reminds me of just something cool, and I can't really explain why. And then that logo. I'm not the biggest video game guy. I've watched a bunch of the AVGN, and keep up mostly with IGN's website, and even have a Wii....between the websites, I probably know more about games than I've ever liked really interacting with them (except Ocarina of Time, the best video game ever).

But the Atari logo has always ranked very high on my short list for favorite logo ever. Ever.

Today, the name Atari and the logo are intellectual property owned by a French company that's begun producing some video games under the name, and have nothing to do with Bushnell and his LSD taking game designers of the 1970s.

Next along the stroll down amnesia lane is of the highest selling home computer ever. Seriously, in this day and age of cheap compys and lappys, the Commodore 64 remains the home computer that's sold the most units in history, at something like 30 million. We had one; it was our first computer.

Commodore started by making typewriters, and then calculators, and eventually they moved into the home computer market. Through shady business practices (like buying a bunch of supplies, not paying for them and thereby forcing that supply company to fold, then buying that company and forgiving the debt) they were able to pass the savings they'd made onto you, the consumer.

The company made a few different computer consoles that were basically keyboards that plugged into televisions, ad by the Commodore 64, they had a highly powerful machine that could do many things, one of which was play video games.

Ironically, the Commodore 64 and later and to a lesser extant, the 128, kept alive the video game playing world in the US after the crash in 1983. With many good games, the torch was kept alive until Nintendo finally exploded in '86.

I remember fondly many games from our old 64: Save New York, a cartridge; Summer and Winter Games, Olympic simulators; and one of my favorite games ever, especially by sheer number of times played, Space Taxi.

Like Atari, the name "Commodore" and logo seen here are intellectual property owned by a Dutch company getting ready to bring a computer to market (or maybe already have).

All I have to say is:

load "*", 8, 1

More Bizarre Connections: India and NIger

The Indian flag grew from a variation of a protest flag in the 1940s. Before the British showed up, the Indian Subcontinent was a region separated by various kingdoms and languages, with each kingdom flying their own heraldic emblems. Even today the nation has 26 languages that are considered "Official". 

The yellow/orange color is technically saffron, and the 24-spoke wheel in the center is a representation of the Ashoka Chakra, and the green is called "Indian Green".

The flag of the West African nation of Niger is shrouded in more conjecture, as the country hasn't taken an official stance. It struck me, actually, how many countries have official decrees and constitutional sections outlining everything about the flag, it's proportions and colors and symbols and the reasons behind each.

Not the case for Niger. The main thoughts are that the green is for the soil, the orange is for the minerals and deserts in the north, and the sun in the center shines hope upon the land.

The random connections in the world of national banner design...I love it.

The Blazers of 1974

One of the coolest names in sports, as far as I'm concerned, are the "Blazers".

In the current NBA team from Portland, Blazers is a shortening of Trailblazers, but still, enough history of smoking ganja and playing with fire, any way you get to Blazers is fine with me.

At one point in 1974, there were two different teams in America called the Blazers. The first seems like it was named after a firing of some kind of accelerant or other flammable thing. I'm only guessing from the look of this very cool logo, from a World League Football team from Florida.

In the same year, '74, the Blazers from Portland had this logo, something cool that I can't place what exactly it is, or where it could have come from...maybe a storm? The logo used today is a variation on this design.

The logos from that WLF are fodder for a post of their own, but that may be for later.

Oddly Similar, Red and White: Indonesia and Poland

This first flag is that of Indonesia. It is a banner that hearkens back many centuries to the kingdoms of the Indochinese regions. Red and White are the colors associated with the long banners used during the French occupation, and they chose that exact design when they declared their independence.

Remarkably similar is the Polish flag. The red and white colors are from the Lithuanian/Polish coat of arms, a red shield with a white silhouette of a knight on horseback. While the Lithuanian flag is different, the Polish flag developed into this in the mid 1800s, and has stayed put since.

Seeing the disparate countries together gets the brain to make connections otherwise missed. Like another two flags coming up.

Old Mascots: How Quaint

I rustled up these two old-timey mascots, and it seems like each is a definitive look at a stereotype.

This first is Johnny Canuck:

Doesn't that just scream Canadian? Lumberjack shirt, beard, hockey blades, stick...together that's the unmistakable look of a Canadian stereotype. It was used for a brief period by the Vancouver Canucks NHL team.

How about this next picture?

Just screaming Old Coot, this prospector is one of the old time mascots used by the San Francisco 49ers NFL team. It's like a realistic Yosemite Sam picture.

Both are pretty bizarre and the kinds of things that you can't forget easily.

Sol de Mayo: Inti the Sun God on National Flags

I like this post because I want to show these first two flags together.

The Sol de Mayo, or the May Sun, the sun with a face on it, usually called Inti by the South American locals, made its way onto flags earlier with Uruguay, showcasing it on the canton of that nations flag. While I am a fan of Uruguay and their sports teams, I'll be the first to admit that the likely mroe famous flag with the Sol de Mayo would be their neighbor Argentina.

The Argentinian flag was used by the rebels during their war of independence from Spain and was based around the Argentinian cockade, which is a round target-looking design, using the powder-blue and white. This flag is the basis for many Central American flags, it having been the unifying emblem for their united struggle to free themselves from Spain a decade after Argentina.

What I have here, because I think they look cool together, is an early Peruvian flag. From 1822, the Peruvians, when fighting for their independence, adopted a similar look, but choosing red over powder blue, as was their wont. It's the triband with the Sol de Mayo in the center.

That flag, while cool looking, proved problematic, as the colors from a distance made the flag too easy to mix up for Spain. The Spanish flag is a triband but with a yellow center (that is actually thicker than the red border, but...) flanked by red bars.

Peru quickly changed the orientation and dropped the Sol, and still fly this guy today:

Less exciting, I must say, than either of the last two, but, what can you do?

Baltimore Logos that Sound Violent

Charm City, as she likes to be called, has been the dystopian star of the wonderful television show The Wire, as well as a muse for both John Waters and Barry Levinson. I'm talking about Baltimore.

Over the years, some of the teams that have inhabited Baltimore have been given violent names, or at least violent sounding names, relative to other cities and the times. I've got a few of the logos here.

At one point, both these teams inhabited the city at the same time in the '70s.

The first in a WHA hockey team, the Baltimore Blades. The WHA was an upstart rival to the better known NHL, and was eventually absorbed into the older rival, with a few teams getting added, like the Edmonton Oilers, the Hartford Whalers (now the Carolina Hurricanes), the Winnepeg Jets (now the Phoenix Coyotes) and the Quebec Nordiques (now the Colorado Avalanche).

The Blades just didn't survive the merger. Their logo isn't too bad, though. Actually, I like it. maybe go with blue and you've got a cool "B" hockey logo:

Ag that same time the Chicago Zephyrs of the NBA had left Lake Michigan's shore and moved to Baltimore, becoming the Bullets.

They eventually changed the logo, and for those NBA fans from the '80s, you'll probably remember this:

This is what that original changed to, and it stayed like that in Baltimore until they left for Washington DC. That was the DC logo as well, and it stayed that way until the mounting deaths-by-murder in the nation's capital made a mascot of a bullet distasteful.

After a vote, they'd been rebranded as the Washington Wizards, one of the worst nicknames and mascots in major American sports. Fortunately they're currently choosing alternate logos that are hearkening back to a time when the logo wasn't such an embarrassment.

It's a step in the right direction, at least.

Southern Cross

The Southern Cross, like the Nordic Cross, is emblazoned on many flags, but the main national flags on which it appears (Australia, New Zealand, Samoa) are outnumbered by the vast array of provincial flags and naval jacks form those countries. I did leave out two of the other nations flying a banner with a southern cross. One of the two will show up later as part of a larger post.

The other:

Papua New Guinea here, checking in from the warm world of just under the equator.

The red, black, and white are the colors of the German Empire, the Europeans that colonized the island in the late 19th century. This was designed by a fifteen year old girl as part of a contest. The bird is raggiana bird of paradise, and is also on the country's coat of arms.

This is a cool design, certainly, but it wasn't done in a vacuum. Here's the territorial flag, flown as they were gaining independence from Australia in the seventies:

I think I like the colors on this one better, but the diagonal bisection on the other is pretty sweet. It might look a little silly with the black background, but that doesn't stop it from being cool.

Apostrophes and Baseball

I had an idea to line a bunch of copies of the letter "A" up and run with the post, and I might eventually do that, but I felt like I wouldn't be able to use the Oakland Athletics logo because it had the apostrophe and the "S". It was the same issue I had with the alphabet journey I took.

So then I settled on this: an all apostrophe post.

There's not too many, though, and I'm really just interested in seeing them put together.

The first on this short list are the A's. Their logo is the one that's used most regularly of the three here.

The next is an alternate logo, used with some regularity, of the Baltimore Orioles, referred to as the O's.

This last one is from an era that ended in 1992 in Seattle. It really only lasted three years, but that first year, 1989, signaled the beginning of the New Modern era in baseball: Ken Griffey Jr, still a teenager, came along wearing the bright blue with the big golden "S", and baseball transcended sports for an entire generation of kids.

This, like the previous logo, was only an alternate, and never worn on a cap like the "O's" apostrophe logo.

Punctuation and logos...I sucker and a nerd.

Caribbean Similarities: Cuba and Puerto Rico

I've always wondered if the one of the flags of either Cuba or Puerto Rico inspired the other, considering the similarities.

It turns out that's correct. Cuba had their flag designed during their fight for independence against the Spanish, as they were one of the last nations to gain their independence from Spain. It had been floating around the island since 1849, and was adopted in 1902.

Here it is:

Puerto Rico had a different flag they associated with themselves, even though they've never really gained any significant independence. It resembled today's Dominican Republic flag. In 1892, they designed one that was based on Cuba's, but with the colors switched. It was adopted and made their official flag of their Commonwealth in 1952.

The quickest way to tell the difference: Puerto Rico, still a territory of the US, has, like the US red and white stripes with the blue hoist triangle, and Cuba's the opposite.

Some Sacramento Football History

While I grew up in Sacramento, we had, at two different times, two football leagues station teams in our fair city.

The first was the WLAF, which was pronounced in Sac as "we-laugh", but it stands for World League American Football, and the Sacramento team was one of the charter members. The league eventually became NFL Europe after the remaining teams in America folded.

The Sacramento team was called the Surge. They lasted just one season.

Here's the helmet:

Jeeze. It screams 1991 design cue. The teal, bright yellow...wow. I still have, somewhere, a set of trading cards of the entire team. It was a big deal...for a while. Then when the quality of the product was suspect (like any first year start-up league), people in Sac stopped caring. I guess, I was 12.

The next team we got in Sacramento came in 1993, when the CFL expanded into America. That's right: the Canadian Football League. Who remembers that in Sac? Since the field in CFL is larger (110 yards) and the ball is a slightly different size and shape, we had to endure a whole slew of obnoxious advertisements. Trying to drum up support for a team named the Gold Miners with ads that blasted in large typeset "Our Balls are Bigger" may not have been the best idea. Again, the team only lasted one year.

Here're the Miners look:

Uh...did they have a bunch of white helmets with teal facemasks laying around? Did they think that the fine folks of Sacramento couldn't understand a football team is they didn't have a white-and-teal-and-gold look? Here they made the gold more of a gold color, instead of yellow, but damn. Creativity on the wane. Maybe they were trying to pay homage to the Surge. Usually you pay homage to things that were great or beloved, not things that quickly faded...

Wait! This just in: it turns out that the after the WLAF suspended operations in 1992, the Surge rebranded themselves as the Miners and worked their own way into the CFL expansion. Well now, that I can follow and respect.

It's that kind of information that I would have been able to follow if I at the time I hadn't been just a kid. Now the entire design similarity makes sense. The story is complete...

Flags with Canton Jazz

I'm using the term "jazz" to signify the object in the upper right corner area of national banners. The stars in the upper hoist corner of our flag would be considered "canton jazz".

Technically, any quadrant is considered a canton, but in practice, the upper right is the one used most often.

As per my earlier comments, if I were to design a flag, I wouldn't use a canton-jazz design. Not my thing.

These are some of the most well known canton-festooned flags around:

The first is Uruguay. Uruguay is fun because it uses the colors of the South (and Central) American independence movement along with a Sol de Mayo. This is the only flag from South America that uses a canton-jazz national flag design.

Next we have Samoa. Seen in the canton is the Southern Cross, which implies that the island nation is below the equator. I have mixed feelings about the Southern Cross: on the one hand, I'm all for constellations being used for national symbol identities; but the fact that it's a constellation of a religious symbol is what gets me.

Out of all the designs of our own national flag, I like the old-school Betsy Ross one the best. Something about the circle of stars just feels right.

Next is the only canton-festooned national flag from Europe: Greece. I like to think of the colors as the blue sky and ocean and the white villages perched on cliffs stuck between the sky and ocean.

Then we get to the Chinese pair. The first is the current Chinese flag, with the stars in the canton, and you can get a look of what having things in the canto cam be like without the area clearly delineated.

And then we have Taiwan. I read that this flag used to fly over mainland china before the revolution, and is being flown currently in Taiwan. I'm still looking into that. They use a sun, like Uruguay, but not a Sol de Mayo.

And lastly we have the menacing flag from my childhood, the USSR. The red star and sickle & hammer are the symbols for socialist revolution, and this flag was used as a symbol for just that by leftist rebels around the world as well as an evil boogeyman back here in the US.

Dynamo Kiev and the Death Match

There is the legend of the Death Match, a soccer game between Nazis and Ukrainian POWs, where the winner, the Ukrainians, were all shot and killed right afterward as a result of their great play and high level of humiliation levied out upon their Nazi captors.

The truth behind the legend is, of course, more complicated. The Nazis who ran the POW camp did have the prisoners form a team to play against the guards. The Ukrainian team was made up of retired and/or former players from the best team in the Ukrainian pro leagues, Dynamo Kiev. With their professional background, they won all the games against the guards they played, even beating teams of guards from other camps.

Which is pretty cool.

They weren't, though, all taken out and shot for such good play. Sure, over the course of the remaining time in the camp, a number of them were killed, but it was for other, more Nazi-like reasons. I guess "making your guards look bad" seems Nazi-like enough, doesn't it?

So, if you ever see this logo, from Dynamo Kiev, you'll know the whole story:

English Speaking in Oceania

I have two flags here that show off two concepts that I'll be touching on again later: 1) the Southern Cross; and 2) an object in the canton.

This is neither a Southern Cross post, nor is it a canton post specifically, but they're both here.

And, these flags represent the two nations in Oceania that speak English:

That first one: Australia.

This second one: New Zealand.

One way to easy tell the difference, if you see only one, would be the colors of the stars. Australia uses seven-point stars to represent the seven provinces, and the large single star that isn't part of the constellation represents the federal government. New Zealand uses five-point stars, and doesn't have the tiny Epsilon Cru star in the constellation.

That constellation is called the Southern Cross. It's visible in the southern hemisphere, and as a constellation, appears on many flags. In fact, if you see that constellation in a flag, you can be sure it lives under the equator, or mostly.

The UK flag sitting in the corner is in a position called the canton. There are plenty of flags with things in the canton. Ours is the main flag that comes to mind. Actually, any one of the four quadrants is called a canton, but most flags simple use the upper left canton as the main spot for adornments.

Personally, I'm not a fan of national flags that have canton jazz. It's irrational, but I mostly prefer non-canton flags. I'll have a post on that later.

I picked this topic because it would let me introduce the canton, the Southern Cross, and it would let me put Australia and New Zealand right next to each other on a blog. Sweet.

More Old School Soccer: Cosmos and Aztecs

The two largest metropolitan centers in America definitely had teams during the NASL era, and one was the most famous soccer team in the country for a long time.

The New York Cosmos was the team that most Americans associated with American pro-soccer, and this is because the Brazilian great Pele played for them in the twilight of his playing days after retiring from the Brazilian leagues. I mention that because much had changed by the time Maradona went and played for Napoli, and the bickering between the two, Pele and Maradona, sometimes centers on how Pele never played in Europe. It just wasn't like that back then, that South America's best players went and played their primes in the top European leagues (Maradona in the '80s, Messi, Forlan, Suarez today).

So...here's a look at the Cosmos logo:

With soccer's popularity on the rise in the States, as well as the growth of the organized minor soccer leagues, the NASL has been reformed, and one of their charter teams is to reform the Cosmos, and use the old logo as the basis for the new team.

This next logo is the new Cosmos team playing in the new NASL:

In the second largest metro-zone in the US, the name of the team represented the heritage of who they figured would make up the bulk of the fan base:

You still see shirts around here with the following orange logo; it seemed to be used fora longer time than the navy and yellow. Personally, I prefer the navy and yellow, but that shows more of my own beliefs about the core California color scheme.

A cool name and cool design. I almost wish the MLS had gone with Aztecs for their LA franchise, but you get the idea they're trying to broaden the horizon of whom can identify with the team.

And, for no other reason than I have them, here are the two NASL logos themselves.

Here's the original:

And here's the new and current logo, with obvious design cues taken from the original:

Alternating Stripes: Thailand and Costa Rica

For some reason these flags are so easy to mix up, because they are almost the same.

First, Thailand:

This flag was adopted in 1917, when the king, after declaring war on Germany and before sending troops to Europe, seriously, changed the center stripe to blue from red. The past flags were variation of white elephants on red backgrounds, until the red striped emblem.

Today, they say the colors are for nation-religion-king (red-white-blue), which is also their motto.

Now, here's Costa Rica:

This is officially the civil ensign, but they show it as the national flag because it is an accepted variant. It was adopted in 1906, and up until then, Costa Rica had used variations on the same powder blue and white that's associated with Central American independence and still used by most of those countries (we'll see them later)(Argentina and Uruguay also use those colors).

The Pacific Northwest and Soccer

Even today, the Pacific Northwest is a little different. Seattle feels like California mixed with Canada. Individualistic and very polite. The region has, on more than one occasion, discussed secession, and the resulting country, Cascadia, would encompass Canada's British Columbia, Washington State, Oregon, and sections of Idaho and Northern California. Financially, Cascadia would dwarf the economies of many African and South American countries.

Their attitude is such that they celebrate DB Sweeney Day, named for the bank robber who parachuted out the plane he hijacked. He, nor his remains, have ever been recovered.

The region is also very active in the soccer world. Large cities like Seattle, Portland, and Vancouver have a fan-base that has been woefully under-represented with major professional teams. Between the three, we have one football, one baseball, and one basketball. Fans feel slighted. And you better not mention the OKC Thunder in Seattle, lest you have an effigy of Clay Bennett ready to ignite.

Soccer, while being overlooked in many places, had been enjoying quite the fan-frenzy in the Pacific Northwest. The current major league American soccer, aptly named Major League Soccer, has placed franchises in each of the three cities, Seattle, Portland, and Vancouver, and each remain in the running for wildest soccer venue in the league.

One of the first major leagues for soccer in America, NASL (North American Soccer League), also had teams in each of the cities. I've written before about how cities pick the names of their expansion teams, and here is no different. Each franchise kept the same name from the NASL era through to the MLS era. NASL ended in 1984, and the MLS began in 1996, with the teams in the Northwest coming a few years later.

Here's each logo, the first being the NASL, and the second coming from the current MLS teams.

The first MLS team in the region were the Sounders from Seattle. Their current color scheme uses the usual Seattle colors: blue and green. The older logo from the NASL days has the same color scheme as both of Vancouver's logos. While the color schemes are different, like any good Seattle team, both logos retain the Space Needle:

Portland was the next city in the region to get an MLS franchise, and we can see that both the name and logo are pretty much identical between the two incarnations:

Vancouver's current MLS team is older than only Montreal's squad, who're going through their first year right now. While the logo is has changed, the color scheme has remained the same:

Some differences between watching soccer in person in America versus in Europe: one location has as fans all men who are all drinking; the other is a family affair with moms and daughters among the picnicking masses.

I like to imagine the craziness during a Timbers and Sounders game in Portland resembles the other type of watching soccer in person.