A better world

A better world would be ours if...

1. White men in their twenties or thirties were banned from smoking cigars.

You don't look like Jay Z, you don't look like a rich ol' fella on a yacht, you look like a drunk office worker who's thrown caution to the wind for ten minutes.

2. Articles about the Pixies in music magazines were no longer allowed.

How many times do we need to know that Black Francis fired the group by fax? Zzzzz...



3. Skits on hip hop albums were...

Banned.

4. Football players not being allowed to moan about anything ever.

You earn way too much money. Your life will always be cushy. You don't have it bad.

5. Companies were not be allowed to change their logos just because some marketing dude in a fancy suit says the old one is old-fashioned.

This is something that gets my goat. After two years-ish, I still can't get used to the new UPS logo. Every UPS van that goes by provokes a moment's pause and a little sigh, thinking of what used to be. Which bunch of no-talent marketing shits decided that their lovely classy logo should change to something so ordinary and bland? After Eights, too. Why did they feel the need to change their clock logo and make it all modern and liquid-ly drawn?

It's horrible to admit, but one can become attached the the corporate identity of certain products or firms. I really should not care about UPS's logo, but I do. Maybe it's because the way companies decide to present themselves shape the way we live our lives. Their blandness contributes to our cities lacking in character. This is maybe why expertly (or even crudely) hand-painted signs seems so delicious these days.



This has been on my mind for a while. In my new-found thirst for baseball knowledge, I was looking at the logos of the Major League Baseball teams. Of the thirty teams, I only really like a few of them (Boston Red Sox, New York Yankees, Chicago Cubs, Cincinnati Reds, and I'm a little bit attracted to the St. Louis Cardinals' logo, too). Actually, come to think of it, five out of thirty logos is pretty good.

Then I looked at the logos of other sporting teams/clubs. There really are very few that are graphically strong. I quite like those of Cleveland Browns, Le Mans UC72, Racing Club de Avellaneda, and Yomiuri Giants, but on the whole, it's a fairly ropey area of graphic design.

Sadly, I can't really find any for English football clubs that are really really nice. Some have elements of niceness, but in the modern era of re-touching logos to be a bit more franchise-y, a lot of them have lost their charm. Specifically, and it saddens me to say this, the club badge of Liverpool FC.

When I was a kid it was like this...



Then in the nineties it changed to this...



And now it's...



What used to be a simple elegant Liver bird with 'L.F.C.' written underneath slowly evolved into the current monstrocity.
What's the point? I totally understand why there are the flames; that makes sense (in case you're unaware, it's to remember the 96 who died at Hillsborough). But all the other crap, the You'll Never Walk Alone area, the scrolls, the actual shape of the shield and stuff. And, damn, that horrible green!

Anyway, that wasn't meant to be a big rant. I meant to write a quick five-point piece about annoying things. Just seems that the annoyance got a grip.