Google Doodles

[Fran]

Veterans Day

[Shasta542]

Water found on the MOON

[Fran]

Happy Thanksgiving!

[Penthesilea]

Happy Thanksgiving!

I've already been waiting for this .

[Shasta542]

Happy Thanksgiving!

Cute!! I love the colors. Those colors aren't around very long---with being squished between black and orange; red and green!!! I saw cotton bale toppers in the field yesterday--red and green. Very Christmassy already.

[Sheriff Roland]

E. C. Segar's birthday

[Fran]

http://features.csmonitor.com/innovation/2009/12/08/ec-segar-why-popeye-popped-onto-googles-homepage/

E.C. Segar: Why Popeye popped onto Google’s homepage

Popeye, the spinach-gulping sailor, celebrates E.C. Segar on Google today.

By Chris Gaylord | 12.08.09

Newscom/WENN.com

E.C. Segar, the man behind Popeye the Sailor, received an appropriately raucous birthday message from Google Tuesday. Its home page features the husky hero smacking around Google’s logo and about to swallow a quick serving of his favorite meal, canned spinach.

Today marks what would be the American cartoonist’s 115th birthday.

Elzie Crisler Segar grew up in Illinois and quickly took to drawing. While holding down a job as a film projectionist and background percussionist at a local theater, he pursued cartooning through a correspondence course.

Segar eventually moved to Chicago and created the Thimble Theatre cartoon strip in 1919. After nearly 10 years of Olive Oyl and others gracing its panels, the series introduced a new character – a balding sailor with a perpetually shut eye, anchor tattoos, preposterous forearms, and a curious vocabulary.

Popeye soon outgrew the Thimble Theatre, earning his own cartoon strip, animated series, and live-action movie starring Robin Williams.

The spinach-gulping mariner is the latest in a long line of Google Doodles. Recent highlights include clay duo Wallace and Gromit, H.G. Wells’s mysterious UFOs, and a week’s worth of Sesame Street favorites.

[Fran]

The Birthday of L. L. Zamenhof

From Biography Base:

Dr. Ludovic Lazarus (Ludwik Lejzer) Zamenhof (December 15, 1859 - April 14, 1917) was a Polish-Jew ophthalmologist, philologist and the initiator of Esperanto, the most widely spoken constructed language to date. His native languages were Russian and Yiddish, but he also spoke Polish and German fluently. Later he learned French, Latin, Greek, Hebrew and English, and he also had an interest in Italian, Spanish and Lithuanian.

Zamenhof was born on December 15, 1859 in the town of Bialystok, in the part of Poland which was then a part of the Russian Empire, and the town's population was made up of three major ethnic groups: Poles, Belorusians, and a large group of Yiddish-speaking Jews. Zamenhof was saddened and frustrated by the many quarrels between these groups. He supposed that the main reason for the hate and prejudice lay in mutual misunderstanding, caused by the lack of one common language that would play the role of a neutral communication tool between people of different ethnic and linguistic backgrounds.

As a student at secondary school in Warsaw, Zamenhof made attempts to create some kind of international language with a grammar that was very rich, but also very complex. When he studied English (along with German, French, Latin and Greek), he decided that the international language must have relatively simple grammar with a wide use of suffixes to make new forms of the words.

By 1878, his project Lingwe uniwersala was almost finished. However Zamenhof was too young then to publish his work. Soon after graduation from school he began to study medicine, first in Moscow, and later in Warsaw. In 1885, Zamenhof graduated from university and began his practice as an ophthalmologist. While healing people he continued to work on his project of the international language.

For two years he tried to raise funds to publish a booklet describing the language until he received the financial help from his future wife's father. In 1887, the book titled as "Lingvo internacia. Antaŭparolo kaj plena lernolibro" (International Language. Foreword And Complete Textbook) was published under the pseudonym "Doktoro Esperanto" (Doctor Hopeful), from which the name of the language derives. For Zamenhof this language wasn't merely a communication tool, but a means of spreading his ideas on the peaceful coexistence of different peoples and cultures.

Dr. Zamenhof died in Warsaw on April 14, 1917.

As for the flag depicted, that's apparently the Esperanto flag.  (Who knew there was a flag!?!)  Per Wikipedia:

The Esperanto flag is composed of a green background with a white square in the upper lefthand corner, which in turn contains a green star. The green field symbolizes hope, the white symbolizes peace and neutrality, and the five-pointed star represents the five continents (Eurasia, North America, South America, Oceania, Africa). The flag was created by the Esperanto Club of Boulogne-sur-Mer, initially for their own use, but was adopted as the flag of the worldwide Esperanto movement by a decision of the first Universal Congress of Esperanto, which took place in 1905 in that town.

[Sheriff Roland]

Happy Holidays

And when you click the image, you get the message in English, French (Bonnes Fêtes), as well as in 4 other scripts, including Chinese, Japanese(?) and Arab; plus Felices Fiestas (Spanish?), Schöne Feiertage and Auguri di Buono Festa (Portuguese?)

Looks like it might be the first of a series.

Looks kinda Brokebackish, don't it. Maybe we could use it in our banner. Maybe not.


On a personal note, somebody should tell google nobody in my culture world EVER says 'Bonnes fêtes'. MAYbe 'Bon temps des fêtes, but never what they've posted - at least not in my part of the world, which is where the message was captured.

[Sheriff Roland]

Part deux:

Happy Holidays from Google