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.

New Orleans Pelicans Arrive

I think I like the fake one I posted a while back somewhat better, but it's nice to see some new blood in the nickname universe. Imagine next year, when the Kings no longer exist, the Sonics are back in Seattle, the Hornets are back where they belong in Charlotte, and the Pelicans will be playing in New Orleans.

Here's the new primary:

And here's a set of the new collection, primary and secondaries:

The bird-de-lis is kinda silly, but it grows on you if you have fond feelings for New Orleans and her teams.

Colorful Breakdown of a "Mothership Flag"

My dad sent this flag picture over to me, and I thought it looked cool. It has six other flags shown using just rectangles, which is pretty informative:

I think I've featured each one of the seven of these flags on this blob before, so seeing them all together is right up my alley.

College Football Helmet Study

I'll be covering a few different things here.

Colleges Using Professional Designs

Colleges and high schools use professional helmet designs often, and usually without repercussions. This is mainly for two reasons: the first is that these schools are typically community colleges where football isn't an identity builder. I live in Southern California, and college football down here is USC first, then UCLA. Nobody really identifies their college football identity down here with Cerritos College, a local community college in Cerritos, a town on the border of the counties of LA and Orange. USC and UCLA have easily identifiable helmets and logos, things that they can sell. That's the second reason from above: selling the image for money. Here's Cerritos College's helmet:

This is the old Atlanta Falcons logo. They've moved on to a sleeker, italicized version. This, along with the Eagles wings, Rams horns, and even Vikings horns (as we'll see in a moment) are used with great regularity at the high school and community college level. Basically, this isn't bizarre.

These next few are helmets that use a little more specific and singular logos from the NFL. I think these all may have been changed since they used them, but it's still pretty cool to see them.

The first is from Kentucky State:

They're using the Denver Broncos current horse-head in gold/yellow over green. Yikes.

Next is a close-to-me Orange Coast College, who may have abandoned football altogether (I'll have to get back to you on that):

They use the Tampa Bay Buccaneers flag logo. I do like the use of the navy instead of whatever color the pro team uses as their field--gray, right?

Next is tiny Lewis and Clark from Washing State:

They're using the Patriots guy over orange. Okay...they've since changed the helmet, and then I think they abandoned the football program (not so sure...).

Local Long Beach Gear

This next team uses the Vikings horns, but that's not too out of the ordinary. This team plays Cerritos, which itself is pretty much local for us here in Long Beach. They use a black field instead of Minnesota's purple, Long Beach City College:

Now, we do have a state university here, Long Beach State (CSULB), but they abandoned football in the '90s. Two of their helmets are visible here. The first shows when they still used brown and gold as their color scheme, before switching to black and gold:

Here's another with the brown and gold, but here they're using the team's nickname, the 49ers. Oddly enough, their named not for the gold-miners of the 1849 gold rush, but for the 1949 founding year of the university. Seriously.

Now, that word font and logo is still used by the track team and the volleyball teams, while the newer "the Beach" and the interlocking "LB" are preferred by the higher profile basketball teams. 

To round out a decidedly non-local but mostly relevant discussion, here's a gold helmet with "49ers" on it that does have to do with the gold rush, just not the NFL:

That's the Yuba City College 49ers for you.

1979 Cursive Interstate Rivals

This may seem like a contrived category, but it started when I remembered that Pitt used to use a script writing as their logo, back when Dan Marino went there. Then I noticed that a few other changes had been made, and 1979 seems like a year when these four teams used these four logos. Also, 1979 was the year I was born, which has its own significance for me.

The first is for the state of Pennsylvania, and the rivals are Pitt:

And Pennsylvania University:

The two main Pennsylvania cities are Pittsburgh and Philadelphia, but as far as four letter abbreviations for their main universities? Pitt and Penn. I guess, in reality, that would be Pitt and Penn St, which is a different school from Penn and has had far more success on the football field than Penn. It just doesn't work for this post.

Next state is California, and here we get  the NorCal and SoCal rivalry with UCLA:

And Cal Berkeley:

Today the script UCLA is thicker, and the color scheme for Cal has flip-flopped, but they're otherwise pretty similar. How many schools have done what UCLA has with their logo, the upper-to-lower casing of their normally all upper-case letters? I haven't seen and "Unlv" or "Utep" word mark logos out there.

Panther Studies

I posted a while back about the Carolina Panthers, and how I found a graphic that compared their first and second (very new) logos. I mentioned the USFL Panthers logo as maybe being an inspiration.

Then, later, I found the following Sacramento City College helmet, and had a flashback:

Luckily, my source site had both, and I was able to go back and find the USFL Panthers and compared the two (just for you, my fine readers):

The Awesome and Not-So-Much from the Nerd Colleges

Firs, the Awesome. Below is a local college type city, Claremont, CA. In Claremont are what are known as "the Claremont Colleges". Among others are Scripps, Pitzer, Claremont Mckenna, and my favorite of the bunch, Harvey Mudd.

Harvey Mudd is one of America's top two in Math. It's usually ahead of MIT and behind CalTech. Go Harvey Mudd!

I think they may have stopped playing football, but, again, I'm not sure. What I am sure of, though, is that I haven't seen a helmet idea as cool as this: buck antlers:

And here's MIT's erstwhile football team, the owls or the engineers or something else:

How Many French Were in Kansas?

The following helmet is for Saint Mary of the Plains, a small school in Kansas, and the use of the fleur de lis leads me to believe that there was a French flavor to the founders:

I thought it looked pretty cool, but I like the use of the fleur de lis.

Finally, My Alma Mater

Cal Poly SLO, baby! Go Ramses Barden! Go Asa Jackson, I'll be rooting for you a little in the Super Bowl!