International symbols for successful brands don't change a lot, but they do change. The point of a fast food logo is to make a known brand recognizable at a distance for those who are new to the neighborhood. Here are the histories of some restaurant logos you'll recognize anywhere.
McDonalds
Dick and Mac McDonald made a good living selling 15 cent hamburgers in California in the 1940s. They began to branch out in the 1950s, and wanted a distinctive look for the franchised hamburger stands. A building design by architect Stanley Clark Meston incorporated several of Dick McDonald's ideas, including the two golden arches that framed the building. Meston hated the idea, until years later when McDonalds became an American icon. The first such building went up in Phoenix, Arizona in 1953. Many buildings also used one golden arch to support the sign out front. As more McDonalds opened, the arches became recognizable to travelers all over the country. Meanwhile, the McDonald's symbol was a chef named SpeeDee until he was officially replaced as a logo in 1962 and as mascot by Ronald McDonald in 1967. Speedee was nice, but it was the arches that everyone recognized. In 1962 Jim Schindler, the head of engineering and design for the company, sketched a logo that incorporated both the arches and the buildings' slanted roof. The genius of the design was that the arches formed an "M". The simplified modern double arch design was trademarked in 1968 and is still in use today.
Burger King
The Burger King chain began in 1954 in Miami as an Insta Burger King outlet. James McLamore and David R. Edgerton, Jr. changed some Insta Burger King ideas and added some of their own, such as the flame-broiling that became Burger King's signature technique. The logo was developed in 1967 to resemble a hamburger, with bun halves surrounding the name. It was in use chain-wide by 1969. The design was updated in 1994 to add a blue swirl to the now slightly-tilted burger.
KFC
Kentucky Fried Chicken has always included its founder Colonel Harland Sanders in its logo. Sanders was a restauranteur since 1930 and franchised his chicken recipe in 1952. The original logo design was created by consultants Lippincott and Margulies in 1952 and updated in 1978. Schechter and Luth created the red logo in 1991, with the chain name shortened in order to get away from the connotations of the word "fried". The 1997 update by Landor put a smile on the Colonel's face. Tesser redrew the Colonel again for the 2006 logo, which put the Colonel in the kitchen, so to speak, as he is now wearing an apron. He's also noticeably slimmer than he ever was in real life.
Taco Bell
Glen Bell opened the first Taco Bell restaurant in 1962 as a spin-off of his Taco-Tia restaurants in California. The first franchise logo resembled someone asleep wearing a sombrero. PepsiCo bought Taco Bell in 1978 and immediately replaced the logo with a simpler and less controversial bell symbol. The even simpler purple and pink logo was introduced in 1995, inspired by the color treatment of the logo as it appeared in the 1993 movieDemolition Man. See also: The Stories Behind Ten Famous Food Logos, Evolution of Car Logos, and The Evolution of Tech Companies' Logos.
It's time for another Fill in the Bubble Frenzy with boy genius Mal and his talking dog Chad! Fill in the empty speech bubble and win any T-shirt available in the NeatoShop -take a look around, pick one out and tell us what shirt you’d like with your submission in the comments. If you don't specify a t-shirt with your entry, you forfeit the prize. Your entry must be text- no pictures this week, please. Enter as many times as you like, but leave only one entry per comment. Even if you have no idea what he's saying, check out the other entries! Also check out Mal and Chad’s comic strip adventures by Stephen McCranie at malandchad.com.
Update: We have a winner! Congratulations to schm3cky who gave us:
"It's just a note that says, 'Duh nunt, duh nunt, du nunt, duh nunt.'"
Deviant Art member Joep Gerrits created 100 simplified but clever renderings of movie characters from 68 classic films. Can you name them? See all 100 and a list of movies at the gallery. http://joepgerrits.deviantart.com/gallery/#/dneo76 -via Gorilla Mask
Neatorama and mental_floss have teamed up for another chance for you to win prizes! The latest How Did You Know contest starts today at mental_floss. Every day this week, you'll get two challenges at noon and another at 8PM. Every day, someone who solves the Level 3 challenge will win a prize from the NeatoShop ($25 limit)! Be sure to post your answer at the proper place by 10PM. Solve the ultimate week-long puzzle and win a prize from the NeatoShop PLUS a mental_floss t-shirt and your picture posted on the blog! Good luck. Link
Neatorama welcomes a new collaboration with the magazine Annals of Improbable Research (the folks who brings us the annual Ig® Nobel Prizes), where the article How to Write A Scientific Paper by E. Robert Schulman was first published.
Abstract
We (meaning I) present observations on the scientific publishing process which (meaning that) are important and timely in that unless I have more published papers soon, I will never get another job. These observations are consistent with the theory that it is difficult to do good science, write good scientific papers, and have enough publications to get future jobs.
1. Introduction
Scientific papers (e.g. Schulman 1988; Schulman & Fomalont 1992; Schulman, Bregman, & Roberts 1994; Schulman & Bregman 1995; Schulman 1996) are an important, though poorly understood, method of publication. They are important because without them scientists cannot get money from the government or from universities. They are poorly understood because they are not written very well (see, for example, Schulman 1995 and selected references therein). An excellent example of the latter phenomenon occurs in most introductions, which are supposed to introduce the reader to the subject so that the paper will be comprehensible even if the reader has not done any work in the field. The real purpose of introductions, of course, is to cite your own work (e.g. Schulman et al. 1993a), the work of your advisor (e.g. Bregman, Schulman, & Tomisaka 1995), the work of your spouse (e.g. Cox, Schulman, & Bregman 1993), the work of a friend from college (e.g. Taylor, Morris, & Schulman 1993), or even the work of someone you have never met, as long as your name happens to be on the paper (e.g. Richmond et al. 1994). Note that these citations should not be limited to refereed journal articles (e.g. Collura et al. 1994), but should also include conference proceedings (e.g. Schulman et al. 1993b), and other published or unpublished work (e.g. Schulman 1990). At the end of the introduction you must summarize the paper by reciting the section headings. In this paper, we discuss scientific research (section 2), scientific writing (section 3) and scientific publication (section 4), and draw some conclusions (section 5).
2. SCIENTIFIC RESEARCH
The purpose of science is to get paid for doing fun stuff if you're not a good enough programmer to write computer games for a living (Schulman et al. 1991). Nominally, science involves discovering something new about the universe, but this is not really necessary. What is really necessary is a grant. In order to obtain a grant, your application must state that the research will discover something incredibly fundamental. The grant agency must also believe that you are the best person to do this particular research, so you should cite yourself both early (Schulman 1994) and often (Schulman et al. 1993c). Feel free to cite other papers as well (e.g. Blakeslee et al. 1993; Levine et al. 1993), so long as you are on the author list. Once you get the grant, your university, company, or government agency will immediately take 30 to 70% of it so that they can heat the building, pay for Internet connections, and purchase large yachts. Now it's time for the actual research. You will quickly find out that (a) your project is not as simple as you thought it would be and (b) you can't actually solve the problem. However (and this is very important) you must publish anyway (Schulman & Bregman 1994).
3. Scientific Writing
You have spent years on a project and have finally discovered that you cannot solve the problem you set out to solve. Nonetheless, you have a responsibility to present your research to the scientific community (Schulman et al. 1993d). Be aware that negative results can be just as important as positive results, and also that if you don't publish enough you will never be able to stay in science. While writing a scientific paper, the most important thing to remember is that the word "which" should almost never be used. Be sure to spend at least 50% of your time (i.e. 12 hours a day) typesetting the paper so that all the tables look nice (Schulman & Bregman 1992).
4. Scientific Publishing
You have written the paper, and now it is time to submit it to a scientific journal. The journal editor will pick the referee most likely to be offended by your paper, because then at least the referee will read it and get a report back within the lifetime of the editor (Schulman, Cox, & Williams 1993). Referees who don't care one way or the other about a paper have a tendency to leave manuscripts under a growing pile of paper until the floor collapses, killing the 27 English graduate students who share the office below. Be aware that every scientific paper contains serious errors. If your errors are not caught before publication, you will eventually have to write an erratum to the paper explaining (a) how and why you messed up and (b) that even though your experimental results are now totally different, your conclusions needn't be changed. Errata can be good for your career. They are easy to write, and the convention is to reference them as if they were real papers, leading the casual reader (and perhaps the Science Citation Index) to think that you have published more papers than you really have (Schulman et al. 1994).
5. Conclusions
The conclusion section is very easy to write: all you have to do is to take your abstract and change the tense from present to past. It is considered good form to mention at least one relevant theory only in the abstract and conclusion. By doing this, you don't have to say why your experiment does (or does not) agree with the theory, you merely have to state that it does (or does not). We (meaning I) presented observations on the scientific publishing process which (meaning that) are important and timely in that unless I have more published papers soon, I will never get another job. These observations are consistent with the theory that it is difficult to do good science, write good scientific papers, and have enough publications to get future jobs.
References
Blakeslee, J., Tonry, J., Williams, G.V., & Schulman, E. 1993 Aug 2, Minor Planet Circular 22357
Bregman, J.N., Schulman, E., & Tomisaka, K. 1995, Astrophysical Journal, 439, 155
Collura, A., Reale, F., Schulman, E., & Bregman, J.N. 1994, Astrophysical Journal, 420, L63
Cox, C. V., Schulman, E., & Bregman, J.N. 1993, NASA Conference Publication 3190, 106
Levine, D.A., Morris, M., Taylor, G.B., & Schulman, E. 1993, Bulletin of the American Astronomical Society, 25, 1467
This classic article, by E. Robert Schulman is from the airchives of the Annals of Improbable Research. Visit their website for more research that makes people LAUGH and then THINK.
At one time, it was a staple in movies and cartoons. Step in quicksand, and you'll never get out -unless the hero saves you! That trope has fallen out of favor in the last couple of decades because it was perceived as overdone and became a cliche. It didn't help that Mythbusters and other sources debunked the idea of certain death if you step in quicksand.
In any case, it's trivial to say that science has "debunked" quicksand. If anything, recent work on unstable granular media has revealed a far more diverse and complex set of phenomena than anyone imagined. Traditional scientific accounts describe just one type—the classic "artesian quicksand" shown in the MythBusters episode. That's ordinary sand that has been saturated with upwelling moisture: Given enough water, the sand liquefies, and the grains start to flow like a viscous fluid. But in the past 10 years or so, physicists have started looking at more interesting formations of sediment, in places where grains of sand or clay are assembled in delicate, latticelike structures. Step in one of these, and it collapses like a house of cards—before reforming in a dense pack around your feet.
Quicksand survives in movie fan clubs and fetish groups who avidly collect footage featuring quicksand. Daniel Engber put together a look at the phenomena of quicksand itself, quicksand fans, and a history of quicksand in the movies. Link
How much attention did you pay to Crayola crayon colors when you were a kid (or parent)? Today's Lunchtime Quiz at mental_floss, will test your memory, or maybe your guessing skills! Match the crayon scrawl to the color's name. I scored 100%, which is totally due to my guessing skills. Link
Lola just wanted to make friends, but ended up stuck in a trash bin for 15 hours before her owners, Darryl Mann and Stephanie Andrews-Mann found her. Their CCTV footage shows how she got there. Link -via reddit
Update: The woman in the video has been identified. -Thanks, oezicomix!
Flickr user Beniah Brawn has many sets of fascinating vintage photographs. Russian Types is a collection of early portraits of Moscow and St. Petersburg residents.
During the 1860s, several photographers based in Moscow and St. Petersburg produced series of cartes-de-visite showing Russian 'types.' These remarkable portraits provide a fascinating record of working-class townspeople, artisans, street vendors and peasants, some staged performing an activity, such as drinking tea or gaming, and some photographed in the performance of their occupation.
When you're traveling down the road with kids who are playing the alphabet game {wiki}, you would be extremely fortunate to happen upon this sign. Does anyone know if this is a real sign, and where it might be? Link
An article at the Guardian makes the point that the trend of screw top caps replacing wine corks may endanger the few remaining cork tree orchards as farmers move to more profitable crops. Along the way, we get a fascinating lesson in how cork is harvested and turned into bottle stoppers.
Deep into one of the 350 remaining cork oak forests (in my case Herdade dos Fidalgos, near Lisbon) sometime between June and August you'll suddenly come across a team of about 20 men, ranging in ages from 16 to 70, striking huge twisted trees with axes. Then, with a sensitivity you would not associate with an axe, they prise the juicy bark from the tree and it is levered from the trunk in great, satisfying pieces. From the base, right up to the beginning of the branches, it is peeled away to reveal the oak's red, nude surface underneath.
When the tree is completely harvested, the axeman takes a swig from his water barrel and moves on to the next. Periodically, a truck comes to collect the pieces of cork and take them to nearby sheds where they will be weathered for months before being processed. The truck is the only obvious exception to a process that hasn't changed since the 18th century, when montados (open cork oak woodlands) and forests here in Portugal, in southern Spain, Morocco, Algeria and Turkey began to be exploited commercially to produce wine corks. A white number is painted on the tree. It will be nine years before it's disturbed again.
Judge Joseph Wapner, who gained fame on the TV show The People's Court, is alive and well at age 90 (he even made a guest appearance on the show last year). He's lent his name to a drink company, so you, too, can enjoy a Judge Wapner Root Beer. Link -via Rue the Day
This color footage was filmed even before movies had sound, and 13 years before a color feature film was released.
George Eastman House is the repository for many of the early tests made by the Eastman Kodak Company of their various motion picture film stocks and color processes. The Two-Color Kodachrome Process was an attempt to bring natural lifelike colors to the screen through the photochemical method in a subtractive color system. First tests on the Two-Color Kodachrome Process were begun in late 1914. Shot with a dual-lens camera, the process recorded filtered images on black/white negative stock, then made black/white separation positives. The final prints were actually produced by bleaching and tanning a double-coated duplicate negative (made from the positive separations), then dyeing the emulsion green/blue on one side and red on the other. Combined they created a rather ethereal palette of hues."
http://1000words.kodak.com/post/?ID=2982503 -via Nag on the Lake
Imagine the boy next door trading in his Levi's for fishnet stockings, his all-American sister sporting a sexy French maid's outfit. It's a scene that's played out at movie theaters around the world every Saturday at midnight-all because starving actor/playwright Richard O'Brien needed to pay the rent.
DON'T DREAM IT, BE IT
In the early 1970s, Richard O'Brien had just been fired as a chorus boy in a musical on London's version of Broadway, the West End.With no money and a wife and child to support, and lots of time on his hands, O'Brien penned a bizarre musical about cross-dressing, sex-starved aliens. He called it The Rocky Horror Show. And somehow this weird show actually got produced. It opened at London's Royal Court Theatre in 1973 and was an amazing success; it was even named the best musical of the year.
Shortly after its debut, producer Lou Adler bought the play and moved it across the Atlantic to Los Angeles' Roxy Theater, where it met with critical and audience acclaim. It also caught the eye of filmmakers at 20th Century Fox, who were sure they could transform it into a hit movie. The film version starred newcomers Tim Curry, Susan Sarandon, Barry Bostwick, and the singer Meat Loaf. It took eight weeks to shoot and cost $1 million to make. But before the movie was released, the play opened in New York...and flopped.
COLD FEET
Because the play had bombed, 20th Century Fox spent little on publicity for the film, and it played in very few theaters. The movie initially had about as much success as the Broadway show-critics hated it and audiences stayed away in droves. It appeared that The Rocky Horror Picture Show was dead in the water.
But because of the play's early success at the Roxy, the movie did well in Los Angeles, so Adler was convinced that the film just hadn't found its audience. In 1976 he persuaded New York's Waverly Theater, in the heart of Bohemian Greenwich Village, to begin midnight showings. The tactic was tried in a few other select cities across the country as well. The hope was that it would catch on with cult audiences, just as offbeat films like El Topo and George Romero's horror classic Night of the Living Dead had done.
JUST A JUMP TO THE LEFT
Within months, a phenomenon began to take hold. Audiences decided to tear down the invisible wall that separated them from the on-screen action. They weren't content just watching the movie from their seats-they began to dress as their favorite characters and perform along with the film, creating a show within a show. Seeing the movie became an interactive adventure, the Rocky experience was now part movie, part sing-along, part fashion show, and all party. Being in the audience at The Rocky Horror Picture Show now involved shouting lines at the screen, covering up with newspapers during scenes with rain, squirting water pistols to simulate rain in the theater, throwing rice during the wedding sequences, and dancing in the aisles doing the "Time Warp", the film's contagious anthem.
The Rocky phenomena spread across the United States, giving birth to a midnight movie industry that spanned from major metropolitan areas right through to the straightlaced suburbs of America's heartland.
Almost 30 years after its initial debut in the attic of London's Royal Court Theatre, Rocky still plays every weekend at midnight in dozens of theaters across the United States and around the world. And in November 2000, The Rocky Horror Show returned to Broadway...this time to critical praise and commercial success. It was nominated for several Tony Awards, including best revival.
Launching Pad
Can you picture Russell Crowe in high heels and a black bustier? In the 1980s, the Academy Award-winning star of Gladiator toured Australia and New Zealand singing and dancing through more than 400 performances of The Rocky Horror Show as the cross-dressing Dr. Frank N. Furter.
Since 1988, the Bathroom Reader Institute had published a series of popular books containing irresistible bits of trivia and obscure yet fascinating facts.
A family of giant armored turtles called meiolaniid flourished millions of years ago and was thought to have gone extinct 50,000 years ago. But now evidence from an archaeological dig on the island of Vanuatu shows a species called Meiolania damelipi survived until about 3,000 years ago.
The shell of one early meiolaniid species, known from fossils recovered in South America and named Stupendemys for its size, was 11 feet long and seven feet wide. The more modern Meiolania platyceps, found in Australia and Melanesia, had a relatively small five-foot-diameter shell, and weighed an estimated half-ton. All had armored club tails and horned heads.
(One species is even named Ninjemys, in honor of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, though M. platyceps looks much more like Super Mario Brothers 3-vintage Bowser, the King Koopa).
According to the fossil record, Meiolania damelipi flourished 3,000 years ago and were extinct 200 years later, possibly because of human hunting. The size of the newly-discovered species is not specified in the article. Pictured is Meiolania platyceps. Link -via Unique Daily
