Soviet propaganda poster: For the Motherland!
I recognize that the Google Doodles are creative and whimsical -- up to a point. But so often, they simply ignore normal, everyday holidays that the masses of people celebrate. Or they put in a very lack-luster non-animated doodle for those popular mass holidays like Mother's Day last year -- just a static square in purple with an uninspiring clip-art flower on a boiler-plate, literally, as if somebody really resented having to make this Doodle and let you know what they thought of big holidays about Mom. In 2008, Mother's Day was a mother duck and her two ducklets, off a Hallmark card, with a meta-sneer: "Yes, we know you celebrate this cheap and tawdry Hallmark-card holiday and we're going to let you know that we know that."
4th of July is usually very uninspired with obvious cliches and the lurking sneer -- indeed, in 2010, the American national holiday had to share the stage with Rube Goldberg's birthday. OK, Rube Goldberg is a cultural icon, but the national holiday in the country that created the opportunities for Google's wealth?
Pick any "mass" holiday like that and you'll find more uninspired dreck. But anything that is "science" and "paganism" (i.e. "world culture") gets loving, creative, even genius treatment. Like the Royal Ploughing Ceremony and Farmer's Day of Thailand. OrRamon y Cajal's 160th Birthday. Yes, we get it that Google is an international company and has to serve many people. But they could scatter different Doodles over the different language splash pages, you know? Well, at least we didn't have a communist worker's day thing on May 1st, thank God for small blessings.
Yet always, the didactic "world knowledge" approach. March 13th is the birthday of the Egyptian composer and singer Mohammed Abedel Wahab -- "always criticized for his orientation to Western music," as the stern Wikinistas tell us. Are we quite sure this is the politically-correct figure needed for the purpose of Sergey's Obshchestvo Znaniye (the Soviet Union's propagandistic Knowledge Society, spread through the land to indoctrinate people in slightly more sophisticated ways than Pravda). Of course, we'd want to avoid L. Ron Hubbard's birthday that same day, but there's Percival Lowell who discovered Planet X or Pluto and canals on Mars, but then later the canals were said to be an optical illusion and Pluto was de-planetized. I guess Western civilization is a failure.
On Victory Day (for World War II) on May 9th, Google didn't have anything, even though Sergey Brin is from the former Soviet Union. Instead, they opted to celebrate the...138th birthday of Howard Carter. Who the hell is Howard Carter, you say? He's the guy who discovered King Tut's tomb.
This "celebrate the anniversary of a birthday" thing is highly Soviet (very Russian; perhaps European?) -- Americans don't celebrate the anniversary of a birthday in quite the same way, with few exceptions. Do you remember JFK's birthday? No, of course not, you remember the day he was assassinated, November 22. Yes, there's Martin Luther King, Jr.'s birthday. Remember any others? Quick, when was Mark Twain's?
So at first when I saw they had the Mother's Day this year at least acknowledged, and at least animated, I was willing to give Google points. Finally, they were beginning more normal, instead of that mass-culture hating anti-people geek sneer that one always finds just below the surface -- hell, right on the surface -- at Google.
They should have user-tested it on my daughter first.
"Mom, did you see that horrendous Google Doodle they have today? It's dripping with blood!" she exclaimed.
I looked at it again, and I had to say that the little red child "O" did seem to be dripping blood, although if you looked at it another way, it looked like stick-figure legs.
And is that a string of pearls around Mom's neck, or a rope? And is she engulfing her "O" children?
Good lord, somebody must have parental "issues" at Google.
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