New Batting Practice Caps

It seems like only two baseball teams went crazy with their new batting practice caps. In general I'd have to say these caps are far superior to the last few BP editions. While I like the Rays' sun logo, only the Mets and Reds went with baseball-headed mascots on their caps:

As far as the other teams go, I'd say that a few were okay, but besides the two above, there were the A's and Rays, both of which went outside their normal comfort zones in a successful manor:

With the other teams there just wasn't a whole lot of imagination used. But that's for you to decide for your own team, I suppose.

Archipelago Dynamism

Two and a half times the size of DC, this archipelago nation northeast of Madagascar has one of the most dynamic flags around. Check it out:

This is the Seychelles, with a population of about a fifth of Long Beach's, around 90k, with four angled bands of color to demonstrate the dynamism of a young country. The blue represents the sky and the sea, the gold represents the sun, the red is for the people's determination, the white for social justice, and the green is for the land and natural resources.

This looks almost ripped from a comic book. But it is one of the cooler flags floating around this planet.

Iconic Space Needle and Seattle Logos

Having lived in New York, I got a sense for what buildings or structures people identify with the City: Empire State Building, Statue of Liberty, the Chrysler Building...

New York is too big, though, to really be defined by any one of those buildings in the same way as, say, Seattle is defined by the Space Needle.

Here it is from our hotel in November of 2011:

And here it is as a building's adornment in Seattle proper:

Teams in any cities don't take an image this iconic and made it theirs like the Seattle teams. Here's the original Sounders soccer team from the old NASL:

And the Sonics, of which will ave returned next year:

The Mariners:

And the current Sounders team:

The Space Needle, baby. It's cool and romantic and more isolated than Frasier's balcony matte painting would suggest.

Qatar, Bahrain, and Legends

When I was a kid, one of my favorite things to do with an old dictionary we had was to look at the countries' flags. It really is the basis for half this blog, I guess. One pair I couldn't get over was Qatar and Bahrain. They looked like a kid like me drew them.

Here's Qatar:

And here's Bahrain:

The number of points mean different things to different countries, but the design philosophy can't be too different. One of the legends was that originally Qatar had a similar flag to Bahrain, in that it was red and not maroon:

That flag was official. The legend stated that the sun bleached the red to the maroon they use, but that's not the case; it was voluntarily changed.

You can't make this stuff up...

Jacksonville Updates Look

The Jacksonville Jaguars of the NFL have, for the first time in their team's history, updated their primary logo. This kind of thing doesn't happen very often, but sometimes it does on a quiet level. The Lions went through and added black outline to the helmet decal, and maybe made the lion look angry; and the Carolina Panthers, the Jags twin expansion team of 1995 updated their helmet decal before last season with minor tweaks to give the cat a more fierce look.

Not quite sure about this change...it's much more drastic. Here's the original, in place since 1995:

Definitely stylized in a way to encompass the oval-logo design, but angry too, and in attack mode. I never thought it was great, but I liked it fine enough. I never saw it and said, "Whew...that's an atrocity..."

It also definitely sniffs of the '90s, doesn't it?

Here's the new one:

More photorealistic was my first take, then I started in with, "Ehhh...really?" It seems like this could be an elementary school look. Some folks on the interweb have been saying that it's clip-art. I've never seen any clip-art even remotely close to that, but I don't doubt the validity of the claim.

It took a little time grow on me, and I think it will continue like that until I stop thinking it's the most ridiculous logo I've ever seen.

I showed my wife and she said, "Yeah, those Floridians aren't really known for their fashion sense...remember all those mullets..." referencing the trip we took to Florida and the high values for both the sheer amount of mullets as well as the highest mullet-per-hair-do percentage I may have ever seen.

For another NFL Florida team reference, I pulled out Bucco Bruce for her and asked if it was the most homosexual logo for a major team ever:

She said, "Of course. And he's hot, too! That may be the hottest gay logo for a major team ever!"

I do like the prospective direction in which the Dolphins seem to be headed...

Southern Shore, Mediterranean Style

Alexander the Great, the ancient Macedonian leader who counted Aristotle as a personal tutor, was the last great military general to ride on the front of the charge. He was a pragmatic ruler, trying to not upset the provinces he conquered too much, understanding that the continuity of commerce was the true key.

He also didn't desire to destroy cities as much as build. He founded a great city on the southern Mediterranean coast of present-day Egypt, called it Alexandria, and for more than a thousand years it was the greatest Old World city the world had scene.

The library was the crown jewel of the city, as Alexander considered knowledge was power, and a great city would accumulate knowledge. It's one of the world's great tragedies when the Christians came through and sacked the joint, burning nearly a thousand years of scholarship and study. Ideas collected from all of the world gone in a cloud.

I've read that the destruction of the great library of Alexandria set scientific inquiry back many centuries. One idea I've seen being passed around is that it's conceivable that had the steam engine, which was literally months from discovery, been discovered in that era, ballistic rocketry and splitting the atom could have been accomplished during the 1400-1600s.

Can you imagine how the world might look if flight and other advanced technologies were normal during our Civil War? Would there have even been a Civil War?

Would there even be an America?

Well, here's the flag for the city of Alexandria. On it is the famed Lighthouse, one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, the location of which I believe has been discovered.