Austin's heinous new logo.

Reminds me of when NYC spent millions on bringing arts and culture back to the city after Covid. It was hard to believe it wasn’t an SNL skit pic.twitter.com/0dYhP2bWna

— King Francis the Turd (@YourTurdliness) September 5, 2025

"It was just a country store for country people and that’s what it is today, they just don’t understand."

Said Tommy Lowe, the 94-year-old co-founder of Cracker Barrel, describing how things began (in 1969) and how things should remain, quoted in "Cracker Barrel co-founder, 93, slams CEO after ‘pitiful’ rebranding fail: 'Throwing money out the window'" (NY Post).

“They’re trying to modernize to be like the competition — Cracker Barrel doesn’t have any competition,” Lowe told WTVF Thursday. “I heard she was at Taco Bell. What’s Taco Bell know about Cracker Barrel and country food? They need to work on the food and service and leave the barrel — the logo alone.”...

"She" = CEO Julie Felss Masino, who Lowe claims, doesn't know who he is and has never met with him. We're told "Masino began implementing changes to the menu, interior design and prices soon after [becoming CEO] in November."

Trump is everywhere, minding everybody's business.

Link and link.

"Cracker Barrel should go back to the old logo, admit a mistake based on customer response (the ultimate Poll), and manage the company better than ever before."

"They got a Billion Dollars worth of free publicity if they play their cards right. Very tricky to do, but a great opportunity. Have a major News Conference today. Make Cracker Barrel a WINNER again. Remember, in just a short period of time I made the United States of America the 'HOTTEST' Country anywhere in the World. One year ago, it was 'DEAD.' Good luck!"

Said Trump, who seems to involve himself in everything, in a Truth Social post.

I wasn't going to talk about the Cracker Barrel foofaraw, and I have nothing but free time to look at whatever might attract my attention and scribble about to my heart's content. But Trump talked about it, and that's a layer of meaning I cannot resist.

His Truth Social post is interesting — almost like a challenge on "The Apprentice."

By the way, I think Cracker Barrel needed a better logo. I've never understood what the background shape was supposed to be. Looking for it as I drove the interstate, I thought of it as the sole of a shoe. Or what do you think? A kidney? And then all that extra iconography — the man, his chair, the barrel. That's too much going on when people are whizzing by in cars.

"You can’t disfigure the Eiffel Tower by giving it a sense that isn’t its own."

Said Olivier Berthelot-Eiffel, great-great-great-grandson of Gustave Eiffel, quoted in "Eiffel’s descendants say Non to keeping Olympic rings on Eiffel Tower/The Paris mayor wants the Olympic logo to stay on the monument. Gustave Eiffel’s descendants say the tower shouldn’t be a permanent billboard" (WaPo).

The mayor, Ann Hidalgo, says it's a "very beautiful idea to combine the Eiffel Tower, a monument designed to be ephemeral for [the 1889 World’s Fair], with the Games, an ephemeral moment which will also have marked Paris and our country. I want the two to remain married."

It's a terrible idea to leave the Olympics logo on the Eiffel Tower! I'm not even a fan of the Eiffel Tower. I think it should have been taken down, as originally planned, after the 1889 World's Fair. It doesn't harmonize with the rest of the city. But people have fixated on the thing, so there it is, with its weird power. Don't change it now.

But I'd have sided with the "Artists against the Eiffel Tower," who said this in 1887 (Wikipedia):

"[O]nline life today descends from where it started, as a safe harbor for the computer nerds who made it."

"They were socially awkward, concerned with machines instead of people, and devoted to the fantasy of converting their impotence into power. When that conversion was achieved, and the nerds took over the world, they adopted the bravado of the jocks they once despised.... But they didn’t stop being nerds. We, the public, never agreed to adopt their worldview as the basis for political, social, or aesthetic life. We got it nevertheless. Musk’s obsession with X as a brand... reminds us that the world’s richest man is a computer geek, but one with enormous power instead of none. It calls attention to the putrid smell that suffuses the history of the internet. I’m kind of tired of pretending that the stench does not exist, as if doing otherwise would be tantamount to expressing prejudice against neurodivergence. This is a bad culture, and it always has been. Foul nerddom is part of what invented, popularized, and profited from the internet’s commercial rise. Twitter did its part to hide all that, with its unoffending avian verbs, its adorable birds, even its charming fail whale...."

Writes Ian Bogost in "The Ugly Honesty of Elon Musk’s Twitter Rebrand/The platform’s new logo seems a little juvenile. So does the internet" (The Atlantic).

Where does this intense disgust come from? Is Ian Bogost the sort of man who felt naturally privileged to run the world before those horrible nerds broke out of their cage? Or is he being funny and he's one of the nerds? Wikipedia: 

"Gone is the stylized bird, once dubbed Larry T. Bird by the Twitter co-founder Biz Stone, which became one of the most famous internet logos — and which the company has described as its most recognizable asset."

From "Why Elon Musk Bid Twitter Goodbye/Rebranding the social network as X marks the billionaire’s latest gamble to reinvent the company, after buying it last year for $44 billion" (NYT).

What's the answer to the question "why"? The article just says Elon Musk is trying to make an "everything app" and has "long been fascinated by the X identity."

That's not enough of an answer to the question why he'd throw out the very well known brand he paid so much for. I'm thinking that in his struggles with the thing — his albatross, his ex-parrot — he got fixated on the damned bird. He's delusional that the bird is the problem. No bird, no problem. 

"And soon we shall bid adieu to the Twitter brand and, gradually, all the birds."

Said Elon Musk, quoted in "Elon Musk: Twitter unveils X logo to replace blue bird" (BBC).

"Tweets" will also be replaced, according to Twitter's owner Elon Musk, and posts will be called "x's".

Seems like an April-Fools-type joke. In any case, I can't imagine real people will switch and call their tweets "x's." 

"X's" seems spelled wrong, and it sounds like rejected lovers — exes — but at least it rhymes with Texas, as in that song, wherein it's spelled "ex's."

Why did he buy it if he didn't want whatever it was that it was — a name, a lingo, a habit of going to a particular place? Change the place and will the people still go there? It's nothing without the millions of people who, for whatever reason, continue to go where they are used to going, to that old familiar place. And here he is, making it unfamiliar. 

"I like the logo, definitely a piece thread that happens to be shaped like the Tamil கு (ku)."

 A comment on the NYT article "What Is the Threads Logo Supposed to Look Like? Sure, it’s probably an @ symbol. But the abstract logo of Instagram’s new Twitter rival has drawn comparisons to an ear, an ampersand and a piece of spaghetti."

Threads is getting a lot of puffy press. 

Is anyone saying that "Threads" sounds an awful lot like "threats"?

ADDED: Here's this in today's NYT: "Why the Early Success of Threads May Crash Into Reality/Mark Zuckerberg has used Meta’s might to push Threads to a fast start — but that may only work up to a point." That doesn't sound puffy. Mike Isaac likens Threads to Google+, which back in 2011, was supposed to be the "Facebook killer." It got a big headstart because there were pre-existing Google users. But by 2018, it was dead. You need people to keep using the thing.

The most obvious law school hypothetical when teaching the Good News Club case has come to life with the After School Satan Club.

I'm reading "Parents slam school’s ‘sick’ Satan Club for children as young as 5: ‘Disgusting’" (NY Post).

I got there via Sarah Hoyt at Instapundit:

WHOSE CHILDREN DO THOSE PARENTS THINK THOSE KIDS ARE? Parents slam school’s ‘sick’ Satan Club for children as young as 5: ‘Disgusting’.

Sorry, but this is exactly what was bargained for when by anyone who supported the after-school Christian club, approved of by the Supreme Court back in 2001.

Either you have a special rule excluding religion or you don't. In Good News Club, a Christian after-school club had been excluded and the Supreme Court saw that as discrimination against religion. Once you get that far, you can't have viewpoint discrimination. Viewpoint discrimination is worse than discrimination against religion in general. So there now you can't exclude the Satanist club.

I used to teach a Religion & the Constitution course, and I was teaching it when the Good News Club case came out. The first hypothetical that springs to mind is an After School Satan Club. Legal decisions have consequences, and sometimes they are perfectly obvious.

 

You think that's disgusting? Some people think all after-school religion clubs are disgusting, but they lost in the Supreme Court in 2001. And some people think government viewpoint discrimination is disgusting? Get your values in order and try to be consistent.

"Politics right now in the world is all kinds of crazy, and I feel like the creature that I drew kind of resembles the craziness of politics and the world right now."

Said Hudson Rowan, 14, who entered the Ulster County competition to design the new "I VOTED" sticker, quoted in "What Has 6 Legs, 2 Eyes and 158,500 Votes? This 'I Voted’' Sticker. 'This is how we all feel about politics right now,' a Twitter user wrote of one submission for a New York county’s 'I voted' sticker design contest" (NYT). 

   

It's a voting sticker and they put it up for a vote — along with 5 other submissions from teenagers. You can see them all here. The rest are respectfully sedate, reflecting the concept of voting as a civic duty. In the predictable style of internet voting — need I say "Boaty McBoatface"? — the wild-eyed voter-insect has 93% of the vote.

"[W]hat we want is them to know that all are welcome and loved here. But when we put it on our bodies, I think a lot of guys decided that it’s just a lifestyle that maybe..."

"... not that they look down on anybody or think differently – it’s just that maybe we don’t want to encourage it if we believe in Jesus, who’s encouraged us to live a lifestyle that would abstain from that behavior.... It’s not judgmental. It’s not looking down. It’s just what we believe the lifestyle he’s encouraged us to live, for our good, not to withhold. But again, we love these men and women, we care about them, and we want them to feel safe and welcome here.”

Said Tampa Bay pitcher Jason Allen, quoted in "'We don’t want to encourage it': some Rays players refuse to wear Pride logo" (The Guardian).

I have 9 TikTok selections for your amusement tonight. I think they're all just exactly right, but you can tell me what you like best.

1. A strange device for popping popcorn.

2. A father's amazing skill at earthquake detection.

3. Hospice Nurse Julie went on a terrible date.

4. The self-dramatizing horse.

5. Son House sings "Death Letter Blues."

6. The first guy who comes up with the idea of going to the beach as an activity.

7. The cat on the Fancy Feast catfood can isn't fancy enough. (Later: Purina expresses thanks for the new design.)

8. Getting your hair braided in Ghana.

9. The rosy maple moth.

"Superglue"? Really? I'd use Elmer's Glue.

I'm seeing this in The Washington Post: "Incensed by the 'senseless upcharge' at Starbucks for nondairy milk, 'Succession' and 'Babe' actor James Cromwell and other members of PETA, where he serves as an honorary director, staged a protest Tuesday at a Midtown Manhattan location of the coffee chain.... As he reads his statement, the masked baristas behind him generally appear to continue working as if there isn’t a 6-foot-7 Oscar-nominated actor attached to the counter — and later they continue to as he leads the other protesters in chanting, 'Save the planet, save the cows. Stop this vegan upcharge now.' Eventually, the police arrive and tell customers the Starbucks is closed — though they can still pick up any outstanding orders. Cromwell and the other glued protester detach their hands from the counter and leave." 

I assume the vegan milks are more expensive than cow's milk, but Starbucks could average it out and adjust all the prices and thereby avoid giving people a money reason to choose cow's milk.

But I want to question whether it was "superglue."

"For years my mother bought me perfectly nice sweaters of a kind that I never wear: sweaters with patterns, 'Cosby Show' sweaters, suburban dad sweaters."

"I felt she was attempting to dress me as a big sexless teddy bear rather than a man living in New York City and still hoping, in middle age, to attract a mate. The most memorable of these was bright red, with a gold crest on its breast, like the sigil of the kind of hoity-toity prep school I did not attend, and drooped so hugely on me I looked like a small boy dressed in his father’s clothes. My girlfriend charitably suggested that I 'loomed large' in my mother’s mind.... My friend Boyd and I have an aphorism: All mothers live in palaces built of lies. When Mom gave me a gray-and-white snowflake-pattern sweater one Christmas, I took it across the country with me to Seattle, where I staged photographs of myself wearing it with friends.... Later that afternoon, we returned the sweater to Macy’s.... A few years ago, I finally wore a sweater that Mom gave me 10 years earlier to visit her in the memory care unit at her retirement home. Although she no longer remembered the sweater, she did go out of her way to admire it, and I got to tell her that it was from her...."

From "The Unbearable Sadness of Your Parents’ Bad Holiday Gifts" by Tim Kreider (NYT).

1. "All mothers live in palaces built of lies" — Ironically, that's a lie that the son is telling himself. The mother in his mind lives in a palace made of lies he's telling himself about what must be in her mind. 

2. He doesn't even have his lie-palace built straight. He won't commit to whether his mother wanted him to look unlovable ("sexless") or lovable ("hoping... to attract a mate") or go too deeply into whether he's thinking of the interior of his mother's mind or his own. 

3. Maybe his mother was playfully participating in the Ugly Christmas Sweater meme and waiting for him to overcome his politeness and call her out. He's a humorist. Did he not get some/any of his humor from her? 

4. Do sons stereotype their mothers as Mothers? I won't say all sons stereotype their mothers as Mothers, but the ones who begin sentences with "All mothers..." certainly do — unless they're just kidding.

5. I learned a new word: "sigil."

Here's the video — narrated by Tom Hanks — in which the Cleveland Indians reveal their new name: the Guardians.

Together, we are all... pic.twitter.com/R5FnT4kv1I

— Cleveland Indians (@Indians) July 23, 2021

ADDED: Here are the graphics:

Introducing the Cleveland Guardians!

The name will go into effect after the 2021 season. pic.twitter.com/ggCFyIRD2y

— MLB (@MLB) July 23, 2021

A closer look at that logo:

I think the feathers are reminiscent of a Native American feathered headdress, but the Indians old "Chief Wahoo" logo was aimed the other way — with a face rather than a baseball — and wore a single feather. The new feathers could be associated with angel's wings, which fits with "Guardians" if you think of guardian angels. 

But if the baseball seems like a head rather than an entire body, then the wings make us think of the winged helmets of various warriors and ancient gods. If so, the name "Guardians" feels one step away from "Warriors," one of the names that — I presume — the Indians considered. I know the Washington football team — transitioning from "Redskins" — rejected "Warriors" because it contained too much of a residue of Indians. 

ALSO: As discussed in the comments, there's this:

TBH, The Guardians is much more authentically Cleveland than most jokesters on this website understand

These four statues--The Guardians of Transportation--are absolute icons in the city and familiar to anyone who has any sort of roots in the area https://t.co/8u0fx9SKI0 pic.twitter.com/vlifF39JjQ

— josh grubbs (@JoshuaGrubbsPhD) July 23, 2021

"We regard the Lesbian Avengers bomb logo and activist history as the intellectual and moral property of the Lesbian Avengers."

"No individual or member has the legal right to license it for profit. Our organization and movement then as now oppose the commodification and co-optation of our lives and history, what some today call 'Rainbow Capitalism.' We oppose commercial licensing of the Lesbian Avenger name, logo, or history – then, now and in the future."

From "AN OPEN LETTER from the NY 90s LESBIAN AVENGERS to the GAP" (PDF dated June 18, 2020), which I learned about reading "The Lesbian Avengers Will Not Be Commodified/At least, not by the Gap" (NYT).

The Gap has taken the shirt off its website, but it should be noted that it didn't simply appropriate the design. It bought it from the designer, Carrie Moyer. Moyer said:

"To be honest, at first, I didn’t even think they were going to want to use it because it’s more provocative than how they’re attempting to depict gay people."

Yes, the usual idea is the rainbow. A bomb with a lit fuse is pretty inconsistent:

But it's a bomb from women, so sexism — the idea that women are gentle and sweet — pads the message.

The Lesbian Avengers have been around since 1992. "Avengers" was chosen out of love for the Diana Rigg, star of the TV show "The Avengers." 

Moyer saw the little bomb icon at the bottom of a leaflet that somebody else designed for the group. Moyer then chose to put the bomb in the center of a logo with the lettering of the group's name around it. The group voted to adopt the logo. It had more to do with wanting to look like they had a sense of humor than that they were threatening violence. 

Quite aside from the issue of the group wanting to control its own logo, the Gap shirt has the names of the founders of the group on the back. I suppose the Gap people thought these women would just appreciate the support and publicity! 

The Gap "bypassed love-is-love platitudes to sell a memory of a community’s radical roots — for $34.95." Presumably, it's worth lots more now that it's been withdrawn. And yet the logo is out there everywhere, and anyone can get it printed on a white T-shirt for a lot less than $35. What failed was the Gap's attempt to put that branding on itself. Why the Gap would want to be associated with vengeance and bombing can only be answered by understanding sexism: It's just girls fighting.

Now who's saying the Nazi imagery was unintentional?

I'm reading "CPAC’s ‘Nazi Rune’ Stage Designed By A Liberal Company Which Has Worked For Biden, MSNBC"(National Pulse): 

The company – Design Foundry – told Forward it “had no idea that the design resembled any symbol, nor was there any intention to create something that did.”... The statement comes days after mainstream media outlets and left-wing Twitter activists slammed the conference for intentionally designing a stage to depict a Nazi rune, as outlets ran stories like “Nod or blunder? No CPAC 2021 apology for a stage shaped like a white supremacist symbol” and “CPAC veers into neo-Nazi fantasy: Was it deliberate? That hardly matters.”

That last one, saying the deliberateness "hardly matters," was in Salon, here.  Does it still hardly matter when you could accuse this design firm of branding CPAC as Nazis?

"I thought you'd be interested that he went on and on about Joe Morgan... and himself"/"Yeah, it's mainly himself."

That was the conversation here at Meadhouse after I read this passage from the transcript "Joe Biden Campaign Speech Cincinnati Museum Center Transcript October 12": 

Before I begin, let me say that I’m saddened to hear that one of my baseball heroes, Joe Morgan, second baseman, Red’s legend, Hall of Famer and a good man passed away. And my condolences to the Morgan family and his teammates and to his fans here in Cincinnati and all across the country. He played one year on the Philadelphia Phillies. Now, I’m going to get myself in real trouble, but I have a bad habit of telling you the truth. I happened to grow up in a household in Scranton, Pennsylvania, where, if you wanted to have dinner, you had to be Yankees fan because that was the farm called, the Triple A ball club was a Yankee ball club.

He obviously couldn't call to mind the name of the Triple A ball club in Scranton.

And my grandpop was an All-American football player, but he was a great Yankees fan. But it wasn’t hard back in those days. There was Whitey Ford and a few others, but in Delaware, if you are not a Phillies fan, and let me put this way, if I were not a Phillies fan, I’d be sleeping alone. My wife’s a Philly girl. You think I’m kidding. I’m not. But Joe actually played for a year in the Phillies if my memory serves me correctly, but he had fans all over the country. It’s amazing to be both the heart when he was a second baseman, and the voice as one of the great baseball announcers in history, of the same club. I mean, that’s a pretty incredible accomplishment. And so, my best to his family and to his fans, and he has fans all across the country. Folks, as my football coach says, “Go time, Joe.” It’s go time. This is the most important election of our lifetimes, not because I’m running, because what’s at stake....

The Union Terminal is a big conspicuous place in Cincinnati. I've been there. Photo from 2010:

 

So I wonder, how many people were there. The Cincinnati Enquirer reports "Biden spoke for about 35 minutes to about 20 local Democrats and union leaders in the massive rotunda of Cincinnati's Union Terminal." He goes to a "massive rotunda" and only got 20 people? Well, the article says "The event was limited to invited guests in order to follow COVID-19 safety protocols." It also says that local party officials "urged Biden supporters not to show up outside for safety reasons." That's lots of safety... and also lots of protection from creating an embarrassing visual if nobody shows up. 

Here's the Wikipedia article on the Scranton triple A baseball team, and the name of the team in the relevant years — 1919–1988 — was Heritage. Something metaphorical in Biden's forgetting "Heritage," but there's also a lot of basis for confusion as the team has a few different names since then — Red Barons (1989–2006), then Yankees (2007–2012), and now RailRiders (2013–present). [CORRECTION: “Heritage” is the heading for a section on a series of names, not a team name. And this team, in the relevant time period, wasn’t located in Scranton. Biden seems to have been talking about some other minor league team in the Yankee system!]

Why RailRiders? "The team name was submitted by Chuck Parente of Duryea. Although 'RailRiders' received the most first place votes by fans, 'Porcupines' received the most overall fan votes on the ballots ranked one through three. As a result, a porcupine was incorporated in the RailRiders' logo. The name of the team was a tribute to the Wyoming Valley's history as an economic powerhouse and railway center in the eastern parts of the state and Scranton's long contributions to the history of the US railroad and streetcar industries."

"This establishment is not black-owned, but you're stealing black culture... Trap Tea... You're thieves, Asian people, stealing black culture, once again...."

"You’re thieves! Asian people stealing black culture once again.”

A strong, black Muslim woman went inside the new Trap Tea business in Aurora, Colo. on Friday and confronted the staff. A black customer tries to defend the business & is called a racial slur by her. pic.twitter.com/uejQ6nC8cr

— Andy Ngô (@MrAndyNgo) August 23, 2020

I had to look up "trap" in the Urban Dictionary. I see the top-voted definition is a type of anime character, but there's also a secondary meaning, a place where drugs are sold.

The slur the woman uses against the black man who intervenes is "coon": "When used by blacks its describing an uncle Rukus type character. A black person who is ignorant to white discrimination and unknowingly suffers with self hatred."

ADDED: Here's their logo, which uses a font that I would characterize as an effort to signal Asianness: