Google Doodle Talk

Hey, I am creating this space to talk about Google Doodle. For months, I have been fascinated with the Google Doodle. The people, the events, the feats and the creativity that goes in the simple design of the doodle itself. This is to share and talk about ongoing Google Doodles and bit about the obscure books and titles that Google promotes during such doodle teases.

 

When Google honoured Gloria E. Anzaldúa’s 75th Birthday in a doodle, I had no idea who she was.







Is she a writer? If she was writing, what was she writing about.

Gloria Evangelina Anzaldúa (September 26, 1942 – May 15, 2004) was an American scholar of Chicana cultural theory, feminist theory, and queer theory. She loosely based her best-known book, Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza, on her life growing up on the Mexico–Texas border and incorporated her lifelong feelings of social and cultural marginalization into her work. She also developed theories about the marginal, in-between, and mixed cultures that develop along borders.

What interested me was this para ..

Anzaldúa's essay '"La Prieta" deals with her manifestation of thoughts and horrors that have constituted her life in Texas. Anzaldúa identifies herself as an entity without a figurative home and/or peoples to completely relate to. To supplement this deficiency, Anzaldúa created her own sanctuary, Mundo Zurdo, whereby her personality transcends the norm-based lines of relating to a certain group. Instead, in her Mundo Zurdo, she is like a "Shiva, a many-armed and legged body with one foot on brown soil, one on white, one in straight society, one in the gay world, the man's world, the women's, one limb in the literary world, another in the working class, the socialist, and the occult worlds"

I could not find an English translation of her essay so I have to rely on that Hindu imagery she invoked in her Mundo Zurdo. It is good to know someone from Chicana culture versed with Hindu symbolism.

 

Two is still a study centre but three volunteers is a university as we recently discovered in one of our chat sessions.

Rihana and I are old mateys. Hiya to Naari and Archana! You both might have seen me around blabbering or heard whispers about me that I chop off heads and amputate limbs and play goli with eye balls. Mind you, they are not whispers (as long as you have a healthy sense of humour, they are not whispers)

My exact feeling! I am enamoured of these personalities who feature in Doodles. At times, they are obscure but at times they are loudly screaming and famous and they just happened to be missed out by me. Let's use this thread to discuss the ongoing Doodles and also as Archana mentioned any interesting coverage on the selection and creation of these icons. Cheers!

 

Google Doodle: September 29, 2017

Today's Doodle honoured Children's Day in Dominican Republic. I was staring at the Doodle and thinking, what are the kids modeled as, is that a drum?



Do you think it is a drum? Any specialized drum. I found no intel on this doodle design. My wild guess is that they were modelled on Dominican tambora.

The Dominican tambora (from the Spanish word tambor, meaning "drum") is a two headed drum played in merengue music. In many countries, especially the Dominican Republic, tamboras were made from salvaged rum barrels. Performers on the tambora are referred to as tamboreros.

Then, I looked up the Doodle archives for the day and found



Which design do you think is the best?

I liked the Mars rotation holding a drink (hurray! water found)
The Austrian election doodle is intricate. I wonder if those ballot casting hands represented any political theme.

But the most interesting was,

29 September 2016
Ladislao José Biro’s 117th birthday

You may not know the name Ladislao José Bíro, but you certainly know his most famous invention: the ballpoint pen.

Bíro was born in Budapest, Hungary, into a Jewish family. A journalist by trade, Bíro noticed how efficiently newspapers were printed and how quickly the ink dried – in stark contrast to his fountain pen. He worked with his brother, György Bíro, a chemist, to develop a new type of pen made up of a ball that turned in a socket. As the ball turned, it picked up ink from a cartridge and rolled to deposit it on paper, much like a newsprint roller transfers an inked image to paper. Bíro presented the first prototype of the ballpoint pen at the Budapest International Fair in 1931, later patenting his invention in 1938. To this day, the ballpoint pen is still referred to as the “Biro” in several countries.

When Ladislao José Biro is introduced with "you may not know", I feel happy as I really don't know. Growing up in India, I had never heard that ballpoint pen is also known as "biro". Did anyone?