Designing a good logo is a tough task. It’s no where near as simple as it sounds. It’s fair to say I’ve had a bit of a fixation with graphic design recently, and I’ve posted about logos before (anyone remember the Phallic Logo Awards?). This latest crop of logos don’t quite fit into the phallic category, but they could be seen as somewhat smutty.
So here I count down the top 5 most inappropriate logo designs.
Number 1: Arlington Pediatric Centre
Well, I’m not exactly sure what the client was thinking when they approved this one, but I’m not sure this one tells the story they were going for.
Number 2: Kids Exchange
Kids Exchange also appeared in one of the earliest Swollen Pickles posts entitled, “Hazardous Domain Name Registration“. If you can’t figure out what is going on with the one, then you better go read that old post!
Number 3: Clinical Dental
Mmmkay, do you think that is the standard level of service Clinical Dental provide?
Number 4: Kudawara Pharmacy
Now if they had really intended that to be the letter ‘K’ why in the world would they add two dots on the top?… unless… unless they wanted it to look like two people…
Number 5: The Computer Doctors
Well, this logo speaks for itself. Clearly the Computer Doctors get very excited and passionate about their business!
Well here’s some sloppy reporting from the Sydney Morning Herald (SMH), with the SMH website reporting that Meg White, “drummer” of the White Stripes, was the ‘star’ of the latest celebrity sex video doing the rounds.
As of writing this, the SMH “Meg White sex video claim” story is the second most viewed story on the SMH website. The story was first published on the SMH site at 12.30pm on the 26 September. The article signs off with:
“Representatives for the band are yet to confirm or deny the video is genuine.”
I have to say, it’s an attention grabbing story, I guess the only problem is that it’s not all that accurate.
What’s wrong with the story you ask? Well, anyone with access to Google, which I’m assuming is readily accessible by the people at SMH headquarters, can tell you within about 30 seconds that the “sex video” is a fake. In fact, it took me all of 30 seconds to find a statement from The White Stripes publicist Chloe Walsh:
“Some people have a very twisted sense of humor and this prank is in particularly bad taste. The tape circulating on the internet as featuring Meg White is fake. It’s definitely not Meg.”
Statement released by White Stripes publicist Chloe Walsh, quoted here, here and here (amongst many other publications).
You can also find similar sentiments on the PitchFork Media website, and countless others if you can be bothered surfing around for more than 30 seconds!
Now did you pick up on the date that The White Stripes publicist released the statement? Yahuh, the 24 September 2007. Now even when you take into account the timezone difference, SMH went ahead and published their story stating that “Representatives for the band are yet to confirm or deny the video is genuine” almost two days after the publicist came out and said that the video didn’t feature Meg White. So yes, very sloppy effort SMH!
Actually, if anyone from SMH reads this, here is the story behind the now infamous – not actually Meg White – sex tape. It all started with a guy (‘Itsmecraig’) who was a frequent visitor to the Hipinion internet forum. This guy posted a video at that forum, with the post title “MEG WHITE SEX TAPE” (WARNING: not everything on that page is ‘work safe’). So this happens on the 17 September. For the next day or two a few of the frequent forum visitors posted the obvious jokes that you might come to make (eg. “that can’t be Meg White, that girl can keep rhythm”).
It wasn’t long before the thread was “wiki’d” and not long after the sex tape story was picked up as ‘fact’ by a number of outlets. Things obviously snowballed from there.
Then on the 24 September, “Itsmecraig” checked back in on his one week old thread:
oh sh!t dudes,
i found this video through random wank mining efforts and put it up here cause i figured you guys would have a laugh. it had nothing to do with meg white when i found it.
So there you go, a random guy, posts a random porn video, labels it as a celebrity, and it gets picked up and run worldwide as news. It’s both funny and sad that news outlets didn’t bother to check if the story was based on fact at all! So the Sydney Morning Herald fail on two counts. They published old ‘news’ that had already been proven false. Sometimes the quality of Australian print media is laughable, I guess you could file the Meg White “sex tape” as exhibit A.
My ears are still ringing from last nights Silverchair/Powderfinger double bill, Across the Great Divide show at Rod Laver Arena. From where I was, the stadium appeared to be at near capacity.
Support act for the night was Expatriate. They put on an entertaining half hour or so of music, but I have to say, playing the support slot must be one of the toughest gigs in music!
Silverchair and Powderfinger both played full sets with Silverchair coming out first. They played quite a few songs from their latest album, Young Modern, as well as a mix of their older stuff. The tracks from Young Modern really stood up well live. Young Modern is an eclectic album, musically it jumps all over the place, and before hand I wondered how they’d be able to pull off tracks like Thieving Birds live.
Powderfinger followed with their set consisting largely of songs from their new album Dream Days at the Hotel Existence. They also played a few tracks from Vulture Street and Odyssey Number Five.
At the end of the show Powderfinger were joined onstage by Silverchair to blast out a quick rendition of the Who song, Substitute.
I have to say Dream Days is not my favorite Powderfinger album, so their reliance on material from that album means that I’d have to hand the battle of the bands title to Silverchair.
In my opinion, Silverchair really stole the show. There is so much more light and shade in their music, which really stood out in comparison to Powderfinger’s more ‘meat and potatoes’ style rock. That’s not to say that meat and potatoes is bad, just that Silverchair had a far more varied library of material to draw from, which I would argue, made for the better show.
If you get a chance to catch the Across the Great Divide tour, I’d highly recommend getting along (if you can find a ticket!). It was definitely entertaining, and also fantastic value for money. Two of Australia’s biggest bands, playing full sets, all for the price of one!
Now I think it’s time I caught a little more shut eye…
As you may have read, a few days ago I found that I was having a few issues with bandwidth theft with people hotlinking to images on my automotive blog without permission. I decided I’d have some fun for a couple of days by replacing the hotlinked images with some non-auto related, border line inappropriate, images.
Yesterday I decided I’d had enough fun and started doing some research into how to prevent hotlinking through editing the htaccess file. I “google’d”, asked questions of people smarter than me, and scratched my head. All the usual stuff. I’d became quite partial to one of my bandwidth thief banners, and wanted to implement a solution that would incorporate the banner somehow.
The solution I settled on (see code below), was to block requests for images from outside sources, and serve up the banner of my choice in place of the actual request.
In other words, if anyone attempts to hotlink to any images (jpg, gif, bmp, or png) on my server, instead of displaying the requested image, they will instead display my banner of choice.
Simplifying it further, the bandwidth thief thinks they are getting an image of a Subaru WRX STi, but are instead served up a massive set of bulls testicles (see below). I love the internet. If you want to use the “Bull Balls” solution, feel free to copy the image below (NO HOTLINKING!!) 😛 A link back would be appreciated.
Well it’s been over 24 hours since I identified the ‘bandwidth theft‘ occurring on one of my other sites. It was the first time I’d found this happening, so I thought I’d conduct an experiment, firstly, to see what sort of images I could display on the offending site, and secondly, to see how long it would go on for before the dumb ass responsible figured out what was happening. Well that was 24 hours ago, my bandwidth theft images were still online, so, I’ve decided to raise the bar a little.
Five minutes ago, I replaced my bandwidth theft banners with all new, possibly even more disturbing, bandwidth theft banners. As you can see from the screen shot below, I decided to stick with an “animal” theme.
Yup, two rhinos humping, and a set of massive bull balls. All class. I’ve done the .htaccess research, so I’ll fix that up soon, in the meantime, I think I’ll leave the offender with the bull balls for a little longer.
As an aside, I’ve also learned another very valuable lesson from all this. Never do a Google image search for “bull balls” with “safe search” switched off.
For webmasters interested in building back links to their sites, this just might be my most useful post ever.
The list below is of forums (with a page rank of 3 and above) that currently allow you to post signature links that “dofollow”. I’d searched around for a while but haven’t found a decent sized list, so I thought I’d start one up myself. If I find news ones I will add them to the list. If you have a forum that has a PR3 or above, and you think belongs on the list, let me know via the comments field.
Like Muse the night before, this was my first time seeing Tool play live in the flesh. Having listened to their albums for years, and hearing about their live show second hand, my expectations were fairly high. I’d heard the last time they played Melbourne, for the Lateralus tour, they were on stage for close to 3 hours with a 10 minute break/intermission.
That was roughly 5 years ago now, and based on last nights performance, things must have changed. The opening act was Shapeshifter, a drum and bass outfit from New Zealand. They weren’t too bad actually. Far better than Ground Components in any case. They were on and off stage before the sun had set.
Tool @ Myer Music Bowl, Melbourne, 31 January 2007 Gig Poster
The weather was near perfect and the outdoor venue far nicer than Festival Hall. Tool hit the stage at 9pm on the dot. Kicking out Stinkfist it was immediately clear that the band were preaching to the converted. They quickly followed up with 46&2 by which point they had the crowd eating out of the palm of their collective hand. Jambi and Schism had things rocking along nicely. Maynard James Keenan was set back on the stage, and from where I was, I could hardly see him. The trippy visuals and light show made up for the general lack of activity onstage.
At times the vocals sounded like they were set a little too low in the mix, but in general the sound was excellent, particularly for a wide open outdoor venue. After Schism, things slowed down a notch. For me Lost Keys and Rosetta Stoned are not two of the highlights from 10,000 Days, and they were given a little to much airtime. Sections of the crowd seemed to get a little restless, bogans started taking calls on their mobile phones talking up the show to their mates. “Oh mate, it’s going off, they’ve been playing for like two hours”. Ummm… someone perhaps needed to point out that the band had only been playing for some 45mins at this stage but anyway I digress.
It was probably at around this point in the show that some clown decided it would be a great idea to scale the Myer Music Bowl roof. He was up there for 10 mins or so, playing up to the crowd, but for some reason he decided to climb back down. Probably not a wise move given that a tonne of police and security were waiting at the bottom, ready to cart him off, and end his night.
The show ramped up again by the time the band busted out Lateralus. Vicarious was the highlight for the night, it really stood out from everything else, and proved that it was as good a song as anything else Tool has released.
The night ended with Aenima, and a suggestion by Maynard that the band will be back in the summer, adding fuel to the rumor they’ll be touring Australia again in November later this year.
Then, that was it, it was over. An 11 song set that spanned roughly 1 hour and 45 minutes. No encore. No 3 hour epic performance. As good as the band was, I couldn’t help but feel a little short changed. They’d sold out the Myer Music Bowl, at $100 per ticket, and they hadn’t even hit the rumored 11pm Music Bowl curfew. The band was tight, the songs they played hit the mark, but you’ll have to forgive me, I wanted more! The other thing I noticed was that there were quite a few dip shits that thought the middle of a Tool concert would be a great time to have a conversation on their mobile phones.
There were three things that really stood out for me after seeing Tool live.
1. Danny Carey is a phenomenal drummer. He was hitting the skins hard and the shifting time signatures could not be easy to pull off live, but he never missed a beat. I now see why he’s the poster boy for all the bedroom drummers out there.
2. Tool are not the most active band I’ve seen on stage. They make up for it with an amazing light show (which included laser lights), but at the same time, the general lack of activity or crowd interaction could give the impression that they aren’t really happy to be there. In that regard, it’s perhaps understandable why some people right them off as a wank rock shoe gazer band. In terms of stage performance, I’d have to say Muse, from the night before, set a very high bar.
3. The band has been around for a good 15+ years and has built up a strong back catalogue of songs. That’s why an 11 song set that only just crawled past the hour and a half mark (on the back of a feedback filled defacto band break?) didn’t seem quite fair.
All in all, Tool are a class live act, and definitely one I’m glad to have seen. Their performance was faultless, I just wonder if I have missed seeing them in their prime?
Again, for the rock nerds, here is the set list from last night show. It may or may not be accurate so corrections are welcome.
Stinkfist 46&2 Jambi Schism Lost Keys Rosetta Stoned Wings for Marie 10,000 Days Lateralus Vicarious Aenima
Last night I saw Muse live for the first time. I’ve got both of their live DVD’s which are cool, but after seeing them play live last night, I have to say, they don’t do them justice.
The support act, Ground Components, weren’t my cup of tea really. The lead singer got on my nerves, carrying on like a kid who didn’t get enough attention in primary school.
Muse came on and blasted straight into Knights of Cydonia, one of my favourite tracks from their latest album. The light show and screens behind the band looked fantastic, it certainly didn’t seem that they had skimped on production just because it was a Big Day Out side show. The bulk of the songs played came from Black Holes and Revelations, and Absolution. The band seemed happy to jam out a few of the songs which I personally appreciated.
During Bliss (at least I think it was during Bliss?) massive balloon things came out into the crowd, filled with confetti stuff that sprayed everywhere when the balloons burst.
They ended the night with Stockholm Syndrome and Take a Bow. Both rocky numbers and hard songs to top. The energy the band gave off was pretty impressive, and made up for the stinky venue, Festival Hall (or is that Festering Hole?).
If Muse ever roll into your town, snag some tickets ASAP. Top night. For rock nerds, a copy of last nights set list is below (it was posted in a Muse forum).
Set list:
Knights of Cydonia Butterflies and Hurricanes Assassin Map of the Problematique Plug in baby Forced in Hysteria Feeling good Hoodoo Invincible Supermassive Blackhole Time is running out New born Starlight Bliss Stockholm Syndrome Take a bow
