Category: Google doodles

Google Doodle celebrates Langston Hughes

February 1, 2015 • 7:30 am

Today’s Google Doodle celebrates the life of Langston Hughes (1902-1967), author and poet, who would have been 113 years old today had he lived. The Doodle is especially good today—animated, and with music. You can see it by either clicking on the screenshot below, or, if that doesn’t work for non-USers, watch the YouTube video below that:

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Hughes, who was on our assigned reading lists in college, was a founder of the “Harlem Renaissance”, a black movement of literature, and culture in general, of the early 1900s. It was perhaps the first sustained celebration by African Americans of their own culture.

The poem in the Doodle is Hughes’s “I Dream A World”: it’s a forerunner of Martin Luther King’s “I Have A Dream” speech.

I dream a world where man
No other man will scorn,
Where love will bless the earth
And peace its paths adorn
I dream a world where all
Will know sweet freedom’s way,
Where greed no longer saps the soul
Nor avarice blights our day.
A world I dream where black or white,
Whatever race you be,
Will share the bounties of the earth
And every man is free,
Where wretchedness will hang its head
And joy, like a pearl,
Attends the needs of all mankind-
Of such I dream, my world!

His most famous poem, though, is “Harlem,” from which came the title of a famous play and movie:

What happens to a dream deferred?

Does it dry up
like a raisin in the sun?
Or fester like a sore–
And then run?
Does it stink like rotten meat?
Or crust and sugar over–
like a syrupy sweet?

Maybe it just sags
like a heavy load.

Or does it explode?

Google tells how the artist, Katy Wu, made the Doodle. The source of the music is intriguing:

The doodle’s music, serving as a tour guide through each verse of the poem, features Adam Ever-Hadani on the piano and the The Boston Typewriter Orchestra, a 6 member musical ensemble that make music using manual typewriters.

 

Google Doodle celebrates fall of the Berlin Wall

November 9, 2014 • 7:09 am

I well remember visiting Berlin when Germany was divided: the huge, imposing wall dividing the city, the strip of cleared ground (containing land mines) on the East German side, and the drabness of East Berlin when my father and I visited after passing through Checkpoint Charlie. (As an American Army officer, my father was allowed to travel around the city for one day, so long as he remained in uniform.)

One of the eye-moistening, throat-swelling moments of my life was when the Berlin Wall came down after an abrupt announcement from Günter Schabowski, the head of the Party in East Berlin. That took place exactly 25 years ago today. Schabowski was told to announce there would be free movement between East and West Berlin, and, proclaiming that in a press conference, was taken by surprise when a reporter asked him when, exactly, the provision would take effect. Confused, Schabowski said, “Immediately”, even though it wasn’t supposed to happen for another day.

So, at 10:45 on Nov. 9, 1989, the East Germans rushed to the wall, overwhelmed the confused border guards, and crossed to the West. West Berliners, crossed into the East as well. People took pickaxes to the Wall and drank champagne on top of it. What a time!

It was earlier in the day in the U.S., of course, and I well remember staying up to watch the celebrations, old enough to know what this meant. It was the end for Russian hegemony over Eastern Europe, and a testament to the human aspiration for freedom.

Google Doodle celebrates this day, and if you click on the screenshot below you’ll go to the special 1:17 movie Google made for the occasion. It’s deeply moving, at least to those of us who saw it happen:

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I don’t recall Google actually making its own movie before for a Doodle, though it’s had plenty of animated cartoons. Here’s their explanation along with a reminiscence from the person who composed the music:

Determined to share this experience on the doodle and others like it around the world, we enlisted several folks and are grateful for their help. Our friends at veed.me arranged 17 international film crews to gather footage. The German Federal Archives (Bundesarchiv) provided powerful archival photographs by Klaus Lehnartz and Heiko Specht to set context for the video. Googlers from around the world translated more than 50 international versions. Morgan Stiff edited it all together.

We’re especially indebted to Nils Frahm, who composed the video’s beautiful music. Nils grew up in Germany and had this reflection of the event:

“I was 7 years old when thousands of East German signature cars arrived in my hometown Hamburg and filled the air with odd smelling blue smoke. I saw strangers hugging strangers, tears in their eyes, their voices tired from singing. I was too young to understand, but I felt that life was different now and that different was better. Now it is our obligation to tell this story to all those who couldn’t be there, who could not feel the spark of the peaceful revolution themselves and more importantly who can’t remember how existence feels when its incarcerated by concrete walls. It is time to celebrate 25 years of unity.”

We couldn’t have said it better.

If you’re too young to remember, well, imagine what it felt like when a people who had been physically divided for nearly 30 years (45 if you count restricted movement)—including separated relatives—began coming together again as one unified nation. I would love for this to happen in our lifetime for North and South Korea, but that seems unlikely so long as the North is ruled by inhuman tyrants and thugs.

 

Google Doodle: Day of the Dead

November 2, 2014 • 6:59 am

Today is the Día de Muertos, or the Day of the Dead, a celebration and remembrance of ancestors and friends that happens once a year in Mexico. Last year I was lucky enough to be in Mexico City on that day, and it was a stunning display of skeletal gruesomeness and artistic ability, as seen in the many bizarre floats on display in the main plaza.

You can see the Doodle here, but someone has also put it on YouTube with the note, “An animated celebration of Day of the Dead. Music: ‘La Bruja’ as performed by Little Jesus.”

Et voilà:

Google Doodle: Fall is here

September 23, 2014 • 4:55 am

Today is the autumn equinox in the Northern Hemisphere (actually, it began in Chicago at about 9 last night, but we have 24 hours). Google celebrates that with a short but appealing animated Doodle that you can see by clicking the screenshot below:

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From the Independent:

The animation shows a black and white cartoon figure hop past five grey trees, transforming the leaves into rich autumnal colours.

With the character’s final leap, the leaves fall from the trees – revealing the word ‘Google’ in gnarled branches. A large red leaf then floats down and lands on the smiling character’s head.

This year, the autumn equinox falls in the northern hemisphere on 23 September – the date where day and night are of equal lengths. The Latin term equinox, or ‘equal night’, is derived from this phenomenon.

Google Doodle celebrates Tolstoy

September 9, 2014 • 6:21 am

Today is Tolstoy’s 186th birthday (9 Sept. 1828-20 Nov. 1910), and Google has celebrated with an animated Doodle recounting his best works. You can get to it by clicking on the screenshot below, and you advance from work to work by clicking on the arrows that will appear.

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The Guardian took a break from its atheist-bashing to explain both the Doodle and the intentions of the artist, Roman Muradov. Be sure to click on the link to see Muradov’s piece:

Artist Roman Muradov has also picked out scenes from The Death of Ivan Ilyich for his Google doodle. In a piece written for the search engine, the illustrator, who has also recently designed and illustrated the centennial edition of James Joyce’s Dubliners for Penguin Classics, said the tribute to Tolstoy was a “daunting task”.

“No set of images can sum up a body of work so astonishing in scope, complexity, and vigour – its memorable scenes come to life with seeming effortlessness, fully realised in the immortal lines and between them,” he wrote. “Tolstoy’s lasting influence is a testament to the power of his art, which will remain relevant as long as the questions of life and death occupy our minds, which is to say – forever.”

Tolstoy wrote what I consider to be the best novel of all time, Anna Karenina, though I’ve read it only in the Constance Garnett translation and I’m told there are even better ones.  His second-best piece (though not the second best work of all time, which I consider to be The Dead) is The Death of Ivan Ilych, which is a gut-wrencher. It was such a realistic portrayal of death that it was once (and still is, I think) used in medical schools to teach students what it is like to die, and to make them more empathic.

Hail to the Lev! Here he is at age 20, looking nothing like the bearded patriarch he became later:

640px-Lev_Nikolayevich_Tolstoy_1848

 

Today’s Google Doodle: Nelson Mandela

July 18, 2014 • 5:57 am

Sadly, Mandela is no longer with us, but, had he lived, today would be his 96th birthday. Google has celebrated that with an animated Google Doodle (click on screenshot below to see it), which, when you click on each frame, goes to a new picture and a new quote from Mandela.

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The Independent gives more information:

Google Doodler Katy Wu said she at first thought she would have to make a very serious, sombre kind of Doodle about such an important figure. However, as she learnt more about Mandela, Wu says she started to understand that he was a man with a lot of character, a realisation that gave her fresh ideas for the tribute. On the choice to incorporate his quotes, she says: “Something that stood out to me about Nelson Mandela was his eloquent way with words.  I thought his words gave a great insight into the kind of man he was, so I wanted to focus the creative direction of the doodle on his quotes against a backdrop of the history of South Africa.”

The Doodle shows the village where Mandela grew up, and follows his journey through his incarceration to his election as the first black president of South Africa in 1994.

 

 

Today’s Google Doodle celebrates civil rights activist

March 24, 2014 • 11:14 am

Am I mistaken, or have Google Doodles been appearing more frequently these days? Today’s is a good one, a lovely portrait:

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If you click on the portrait at Google (the picture above is a screenshot), you’ll see that that person is Dorothy Irene Height (1912-2010), who would, if she had lived, been 102 today. Regarded as the “Mother of the Civil Rights Movement”, her involvement in that endeavor was pervasive and long lasting. You can read about her at the Washington Post, or on Wikipedia.