- is just one of the comments on the BBC site about the London Olympics 2012 logo.
A colleague reports that another is "two cartoon people having sex". Well, you can see what he means. My own would be "Picasso's Cubist rendition of a bird poo". Look closely and you can see it has a "TM". Someone has optimistically registered it as a trademark. Their seeing-eye dog probably helped fill in the form.
You can read the full story, and indeed vote for it: gold, silver, bronze or wooden spoon. So far wooden spoon leads the field with 82% of the vote. The Beeb adds a disclaimer that "Results are indicative and may not reflect public opinion", but in this case I really think they may.
Honestly, £400,000 for that? I am so in the wrong job. And clearly I'm not the only one.
Millennium dome syndrome.
ReplyDeleteI look and I look, but I just can't see what Lisa Simpson is doing.
ReplyDeleteUnless it's "bleeding into the fifth dimension shortly after being run over by a train". But that doesn't really sound obscene enough. Obscene to Euclid, perhaps, but we all know what a prude he is (topologically speaking).
It's clearly saying different things to different people, so maybe that qualifies it as art. It's certainly making people ask questions.
ReplyDeleteSpecifically, "Why?" and "How much?!"
ReplyDelete[IP lawyer nerd]'TM' doesn't mean that the thing's been registered as a trade mark. (The Trade Mark Registry [the bit of the Patent Office that issues trade marks] think that TM stands for 'totally meaningless'). What it really means is 'we haven't registered this as a trade mark yet, for whatever reason, but we'd like you to think that it's associated with us in some way'. The (R)symbol, on the other hand, does show that the mark is registered.
ReplyDeleteOh yes.
A quick search on the TMR website only throws up registrations for the old logo, you know, the elegant one with the ribbon in the shape of the Thames. It could be that the BOA or LOCOG have applied and the application hasn't been published yet.
OK, I'll stop now.
[/IP lawyer nerd]
Curse you for interrupting the smooth flow of my rant. I mean, um, thanks. Yes, I should have known that and, indeed, once did. So to add to its crimes, the logo is a hideous blit-like fractal that bores into your consciousness and deletes memory.
ReplyDeleteHa, yes. It would look so much better through distorting glasses, with a bottle of vodka to scrub your memory afterwards.
ReplyDeleteMaybe it's a cunning plan to compensate for the uselessness of our athletes by exposing the competition to the full horror of the logo at the start of each event...
Ha, of course, cognitively lethal branding. No other explanation makes sense. The parts of the image resolve in your mind until you suddenly realise what it is Lisa Simpson's doing, and presumably it's at that point that your eyes glaze, your jaw slackens and your hand autonomously writes out a cheque for £400k.
ReplyDelete"Millennium dome syndrome" doesn't make sense on it's own. What I mean by it is when the milliennium dome was being built those who designed it were going 'Hey look at this. Aren't we cool and hip. Yeaaah.' and it ultimately blew up in their faces. This is the same kind of thing.
ReplyDelete