Good Design Goes a Long Way

There have been several logos based on the concept behind the logo of Major League Baseball, most notably the logo for the NBA. The logo, is of a batter's white silhouette dividing a rectangular field; red to his left, blue to his right. The design is perfect not only because it instantly communicates a message (in this case, American baseball) but because it's simultaneously abstract and simple. The void between the two shapes draw the batter, but the longer you look at it, the more strange and disassociative those shapes become. Stare, and the batter disappears. Today I've seen red, white, and blue knockoffs for surfing (with a figure balanced precariously on a board) and for a company/brand called "Pornstar" with the sillhouette of a shapely nude woman apparently standing in a doorway.

A Regency cruise ship is leaving the port of Seattle about the same time as our ferry. It's massive and safe. After our outing yesterday, I find riding one of those ships more appealing than before.

I was reading an article in Harper's the other day, which was a collection of search results for the exact query "People always ask me." The resulting list had responses like, "...how I ever got here," "...where I can find a good camcorder," and the like. It made me thing that I would like to come up with some perl script that searched google for three-word combinations (or 2 or 4) based on a list of words. Starting with a pre-determined list, such as "You" would get strings of phrases, such as "make me want" and "have to go." Each of those would be a link to three word combinations of phrases based on the link phrase--clicking on "have to go" might return a list like "to the store" and "with me to". There would be a sentence stop button that would bring them back to the first list, or they could go on and try to make the longest sentence ever.