margot at work

Suddenly I became aware of the “FedEx Arrow” because someone posted a squib in Facebook, saying once you see it, you can’t ever not see it. So I looked for the arrow. Between the E and the x there is, in reversal, a symmetrical white arrow pointing right.

Old logo, no funny business. They changed this so they could do business in Red China.

Oh big deal. Branding people do this all the time. I designed dozens of logos for Citigroup, some of them actually used and plastered all over the world in corporate identity and signage (Smith Barney, Citigroup Equity Research, Global Corporate and Investment Bank, Citigroup Foundation). I got a big kick out of sticking subliminal designs into my brands. Did you see the little bald man in the Citigroup Global Wealth Management Logo? The little pig trotters in the Smith Barney serifs? Believe me, you had to look for them. Just as you have to look for the FedEx arrow.

The salient point about the FedEx arrow is not that it’s there, ho hum, but that FedEx is getting free advertising through a viral marketing campaign that goes ’round and ’round.

Portia’s friend William offers his thoughts. Not what I was expecting.

Twelve years of Internet and six (?) of Wikipedia have made me very flabby mentally.

Once upon a time, if I wanted to know something, I would gladly scour libraries’ card catalogs for many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore. Now I just Google, and if it’s not there…it’s not there.

Nevertheless there are at least a couple of things NOT found in Google or Wikipedia or YouTube:

1) The mid-1950s M&Ms TV commercial. I know I’ve seen this, years afterwards, possibly at the Museum of Broadcasting.  It starts with a live-action shot of a little girl with a dirty face. A male voiceover goes, “Susie! You’re a chocolate mess! You should eat M&M’s chocolate candies!” Switch to an animated cartoon of the talking Plain and Peanut candies. The Peanut is lying in a chaise longue by a swimming pool, sunning herself and talking in a Southern Belle voice. “I’m an M&M’s Peanut. Fresh roasted to a golden tan, then drenched in creamy milk chocolate–” whereupon she jumps off a diving board into the milk-chocolate swimming pool.

2) Conjecturism. This was a somewhat cranky mail-order art-history course, advertised in places like the NY Herald Tribune Book Review, circa 1960. “Don’t Learn About Art This Way!” was the hed, above a Fitzpatrick-style heavy-ink-style editorial cartoon showing the rear view of a big thug wielding a club before a cowering little man and saying, “Now look, I’m an Authority on Art, so you better listen to me–or else.” The National Lampoon or some other publication did a parody of this back in the 70s, when it was still fondly remembered. But you can’t find any reference to Conjecturism on the Net these days. At least I can’t.

Possibly 1) was plunked down the memory hole for reasons of taste and political correctness. I’ve written the M&M’s people for the whereabouts of the commercial, but have received no reply. Even the Prelinger Archives have no record of it. But what happened to 2)? Surely Conjecturism was no flakier than Esthetic Realism.

Curiouser and curiouser, said Alice.

*** ***

POSTSCRIPT: Well whaddya know? I Google again…and there…in the December 1964 issue of Commentary magazine…in amongst the ads for self-help books, flash cards, and Bank Leumi…we have an elaborate two-page spread for Conjecturism! Alas, the double-truck does not include the thug with the club. But fascinating.

http://www.commentarymagazine.com/viewpdf.cfm?article_id=10438

Mr. Theodore L. Shaw, it would appear, had a certain amount of money and an unlimited grudge against some long-departed art-history teacher he crossed swords with around 1923. Surely there’s a book in this.

I was wondering how to use swfObject in WordPress, and it occurred to me to search for existing plugins. Surprise! Here are two. First, the wp-swfObject plugin, which I try out above. It consists of one simple line that you add to your post–just the url, width, height, between open and close SWF tags.  Like many WordPress plugins and mashups it can sometimes seem buggy. When you add it to your post you have to be in the Visual tab, not the HTML one. Below, a video swf placed with this same wp-swfObject plugin:

Below, we test out the Kimili kml_flashembed plugin. Supposedly this one has the advantage of being able to work in sidebars as well as in the main body of posts and pages, but I haven’t tested that yet.

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-swfobject/

http://www.kimili.com/plugins/kml_flashembed

See also links to Aral Balkan’s explorations of the same subject: http://aralbalkan.com/606

These are all tests using the WP-swfObject plugin. First, simple Scrollbar text panel with no external text reference. The text has been placed into the same ActionScript code as the Scrollbar:

And here is another simple Scrollbar without external text. Instead of being referenced externally or typed into the ActionScript, a text box has been turned into a movieclip symbol. This is the least flexible option for scrolling text, but it gives one complete control over its appearance.

The kml-embed plugin does not seem to work at all, perhaps because the embedding disables the event listener. The purpose of the Scrollbar components is to sit there on the stage and wait for input. If they cannot receive input, they don’t appear.

I tried a Scrollbar text panel referencing an external text document.The text does not load for some reason. On the Mac I get a security error. Something to look up and work around.

What I am not really clear on is why one would want to use a scrollbox with text. If you have a lot to say, surely you want to say it without a scrolling device? Images in a gallery, well that’s a different issue.

Matthew Richmond of The Chopping Block has just posted a very useful article on the “Chromeless Player” that shows your .flv-format videos at your own site or on YouTube. The player was written in ActionScript 2, but nowadays is asked to perform in an ActionScript 3 environment. AS2 and AS3 are not compatible on a code level. The workaround: they pass information to each other via JavaScript.

Matthew’s article describes the process, gives you do-it-yourself instructions, pastable code, and access to necessary source files.

The basic idea is essentially the same as that used in swfObject, the snippet of js/html code that is now the standard for inserting Flash .swf files into standard HTML web pages. Conveniently enough, the creator of swfObject, Geoff Stearns, now runs YouTube development for Google. Even less coincidentally, he used to work with Matthew Richmond at The Chopping Block. It is a very small world.

Another test. I read you need to un-tick the ‘Visual Editor’ box in your profile in Users. Is this true?

No…If you have both HTML and Visual available in the Write Post panel, and you click on the HTML tab, the FLV comes up.

Another curiosity here: the tag is set to autostart=”true” yet these do not autostart. I wouldn’t want these nasties to autostart.

Postscript, Nov 15:
1)Videos placed via the FLV plugin sometimes disappear. I don’t know why this happens, but I have encountered it both in Posts and Pages.
2) The plugin simply does not show up when in Write Page mode. You can get around this by copying the tagged insertion code and pasting.

You must save and continue editing a wordpress post in order to get the FLV button. Very obscure feature! This is the flv player on one of my own sites. I thought I had replaced the original skin of the latest Jeroen flv player with another skin, but no, this is the factory model:

Nine Shades of Green: It is virtually unintelligible in Internet Explorer 7, which I understand some people use. A big green screen. Just what I want in my media plan. Works fine in Safari, Firefox, Chrome. Hats off to you, IE!

pretty, right?

Postscript, next day: Oops. The designer says it’s only good for WP 1.5 and 2.0. Fortunately I have several abandoned sites in 1.5 (we’re talking February 2005 installations here).  I knew they’d come in handy someday.

The designer’s site looks beautiful, even in IE.

http://stevish.com/archives/13