The Smarmy Carny

Google

For those who are not "in the know," Google replaces its logo every so often for a day or two during holidays and other observances. Not so on Easter, however.

An article at Michelle Malkin's blog points out that Google, despite displaying specialized logos for various other holidays, did not display one for Easter.

What's odd is that not only did Google not display an Easter logo, but five days earlier they displayed a logo for "World Water Day." This made me curious, so I did some snooping around. The only Easter logos were in 2000 (a logo with painted eggs on it) and in 2001 (not truly a logo, as it did not display in the header). Google has done logos for Bastille Day multiple times. That's a French holiday, just so you know. Other Google logo observances include Shichi-go-san, Holi (Indian festival of color), Swiss National Day, Korean Liberation Day, St George's Day, Children's Day, Dragon Boat Festival, and La Fête de la Musique. Also of interest: Google has done a logo every year for Halloween. Same goes for Thanksgiving. Christmas? Never. December gets the politically correct "Season's Greetings" phrase. No Christian symbols were ever used in a logo, as far as I noticed.

All of Google's specialized logos are available for viewing at Google's holiday logos page.

Dennis Hwang, the artist behind Google's special logos, is quoted on Google as saying that "Google makes a big effort to recognize holidays that aren't necessarily mainstream."

I expect this year, we should expect logos for Juneteenth, "Bring your child to work day," "No Pants Day," and "Talk Like a Pirate Day."

Spongebob is F. U. N.

You may or may not have read some of the articles claiming that Dr. James Dobson (of Focus on the Family) said that SpongeBob SquarePants was a gay character. Dobson never said anything of the sort, of course. As if the usual media slander wasn't enough, even TV Guide jumped in on the game and attacked Dobson. Not only was he jeered in the Cheers & Jeers section, but the listing stands out, thanks to a large picture of SpongeBob punctuating the entry.

I posted quite a bit about this in a post back in February. You can read all my thoughts about the issue.

Based on references in the Letters section, letters pointing to TV Guide articles and comments lag behind a few weeks. The week that referenced that particular issue of TV Guide has long sinced passed, and no letters or comments regarding their mistake were published in any form. (Just in case they were published and I missed them, I would like to point something out. Each week, I generally browse through all of the color pages at the front. If, by chance, something was published outside of these pages, it's my opinion that they weren't published at all.)

Since my letter to TV Guide was not published, I would like to publish it here. Trust me when I tell you that my original letter was much longer, but based on lengths of letters printed in TV Guide, I shortened it up so it would be friendly to the format.

Jeers to your uninformed jeer of Dr. Dobson. His qualm was not with the video of almost 100 popular cartoon characters (including SpongeBob) dancing to "We Are Family." Dobson said that the video is harmless on its own. He was alerting parents to this video's misuse of these cartoon characters to promote a homosexual agenda to children.

One must wonder if my letter was just drowned out by the (likely) thousands of other letters TV Guide gets on a regular basis. I assume that the editors of Letters tries to get a representative sample, and only a handful of TV Guide readers bothered to write in regarding this blatant untruth. Or, perhaps TV Guide is simply unwilling to admit that they took an embarassing walk down Dan Rather Lane.

March was 53's second full month online. The site experienced a significant drop in traffic after it dropped off of the first Google page for Numa Numa searches. Oh well, it was fun while it lasted. Also, I have no idea why 70 people would have read last month's post regarding February 2005's statistics. It's a weird, wacky world out there.

Posts: 20

Comments: 27

Hits: 13,224

Users: 5,550

Top 10 Visited Individual Posts (excluding feed and trackback hits):

1. Numa Numa Dance 2,366
2. Hey buddy, can you spare a defective quarter? 1,703
3. The Roach Is Not Hung 1,322
4. Napoleon Dynamite vs. Fender 200
5. Burger King's Weird, Wild Ad 99
6. Bobby Fisher pains 73
7. Gnome Sweet Gnome 72
8. Are Free iPods a Scam or Not? 71
9. February 2005 Statistics 70
10. Academy Awards / Oscars Prediction Contests 53

Top 5 Referring Sites (excluding search engines):

1. 1754blog.com 67
2. Blogwise 56
3. The Evangelical Outpost10
4. The Volokh Conspiracy6
5. Scared Monkeys4

Top 5 Browsers:

1. Internet Explorer 6 9,082
2. Mozilla Firefox 2,745
3. Mozilla 299
4. Opera 7 258
5. Apple Safari 224

Top 10 Search Terms:

1. numa numa dance lyrics 267
2. wisconsin quarter defect 266
3. numa numa dance 239
4. Mary Roach video 162
5. Numa Numa lyrics 154
6. mary roach Audition 119
7. defective wisconsin quarter 91
8. mary roach audition video 72
9. numa dance 53
10. numa numa dance video 51

WMD Found!

Weapons of mass destruction (a.k.a. WMD) were found in Iraq this morning at 06:35 Iraq time! Read all the details here. It seems that some inspectors accidentally stumbled upon the WMD in a very unexpected place.

April Fool's! Sorry, I couldn't resist.