Don on the Gateway Arch: When you are coming to go to the Gateway to the West you pause for a refreshment -- er, a reflection -- and you say, "St. Louis is the best." So you don't go to the West; you stay here at the best.
Don on the logistics behind the fight: [City officials] changed the basketball schedule for St. Paul and Saint Louis University to acquiesce the date to this great extravaganza, which we're going to make a weeklong event that we'd call in the ghetto an SKD: something kinda different.
Don's nickname for our mayor: Though he Slay me, may I be a witness for Francis.
On the local impact of the fight: St. Louis has been resurrected today, and we're reclaiming the courage that she's had for the past 100 years and looking forward to the next century of new innovative and improvisational things that will happen here. We're going to have a party and it's going to be infinitesimal.
On the need for corporate sponsorship: We want to have a blessing from everyone to bring out the corporate structure, because this is going to be a homecoming, a party, a festival. It's going to be one that propagates friendship, unanimity and zeal, constricting negativism to its narrowest form.
On our city's role in American history: St. Louis was the Gateway to the West. Everyone would meet and greet just like when they brought the cavalry in from the Chisholm Trail and bring it into Chicago and Illinois and be able to bring meat to the East. We would never get steaks if it wasn't for those in the West. So [St. Louis] has always been something of a linchpin to bring this country together.
Local Blog o' the Week
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Author: Aaron B
About the blogger: Aaron is a resident of Belleville, Illinois, who appears to work for the U. S. Department of Defense. He likes taking photographs and recently tried Thai food for the first time.
Recent Highlight (December 11, 2004): remember those tests: which one of the following things is not like the others?
a) gloves
b) scarf
c) coat
d) giraffe
the obvious answer is d) giraffe. well i've made my own test for all of you: which one of the things in this picture doesn't belong: [see fridge photo at right]
if you answered "hard drive," then you're correct, and you're also wrong. after it crashed, pete suggested putting it in the freezer. that never occured ot me, but it made sense once i heard the suggestion. the contraction of the metal helps the moving parts pass each other, maybe even enough to get the drive working one last time to save some data. some techies suggest 15-30 minutes, and some suggest leaving it over night.
30 minutes was not enough. i gave it about 8 hours, and still got nothing. of course i'd already banged, dropped, and tapped it repeatedly. it was already dead; what was i gonna do? kill it some more? regardless, nothing worked and it's officially dead. i'm going to leave it in my freezer for the rest of the week, just for the hell of it. i might even bring it to oklahoma and make it a permanent fixture in the bug's freezer. talk about a conversation piece... Know of an Unreal-worthy local blog? Send the URL to [email protected].
Save Our Schools!
Last month officials at the College School rocked the area's educational community when they unleashed a new logo. In place of one that had been criticized as "too busy," the Webster University-affiliated private elementary school introduced a simpler image, described in a press release as "a tree that is well-established with solid roots and many thriving branches...the tree is pushing beyond its boundaries because at the College School learning takes place beyond expected boundaries everyday [sic]."
"We just felt that it was important to have something that visually explained what we were about," Adrienne Rusbarsky, the school's director of admissions and communications, elaborates to Unreal, adding that many independent schools have distinctive logos. "It unifies. People remember things visually, and it is a way of portraying an image. It's a pretty large organization, so unifying it visually certainly does add professionalism."
For comparison's sake, we asked advertising guru Paul MacFarlane, founder of local design team The Experiment, to analyze the logo of the St. Louis Public Schools.
Nutshell: "A mirror image of the Gateway Arch straddling a piece of lasagna with 1980s sans serif typography."
Nothing pushing the boundaries of anything. Nothing unifying. No roots, not even a branch, for that matter. No wonder the city's schools are floundering.
A call to Jim Flanagan, the school system's director of communications, confirmed our suspicions. "We haven't talked about it a lot," Flanagan concedes. "Not that it's not important. But as you're well aware, we've had a lot of other things to look at."
How about asking MacFarlane? Surely he'd have some suggestions!
Sure enough, the ad man got right back to Unreal with an e-mailed brainstorm: "A classic serif font," says he. "A heraldic angel bearing the light of knowledge, pouring an urn into a river of cascading cash, with a hillside of children, parents, teachers, administrators, donors and politicians dancing, arm in arm down a golden hillside, with maybe some vector art of a classroom full of space-age computers behind it all, with a tasty gaussian drop shadow and a Latin motto encircling all.... Maybe then city schools could be well-funded, safe, technologically up to date, staffed by well-paid teachers, serving only healthy, fresh food. Parents would no longer have to work two jobs and kids would grow up into beaming, healthy, free Bodhisattvas."
