Wallace and Gromit get the Google doodle treatment Google's UK search tentacle has decided to ignore the fact that 4 November marks the day in 1890 that Edward, Prince of Wales, inaugurated the City & South London Railway* and instead is currently flourishing a Wallace and Gromit "doodle" to celebrate the pair's 20th anniversary. Google's Wallace and Gromit doodle Yes …
As I sit here in Rochdale I see Big Bird's legs as part of the Google logo.
For reasons known only to our IT department, our IP address sets us deep in the land of the cheese eating surrender monkeys, so the ggogle.co.fr logo celebrates "40ème anniversaire de Rue Sésame"
"Google's UK search tentacle has decided to ignore the fact that 4 November marks the day in 1890 that Edward, Prince of Wales, inaugurated the City & South London Railway"
So some railway in London is more important than something loved by people all over the country? Would that purely be because it's in London?
Not the centre of the universe you know!
US, France, and Japan get Sesame Street's 40th anniversary, so do India and mexico, but with custom pictures (not Big Bird's legs), UK and Germany get Wallace and Gromit. Looks like SE asia, most of latin america, switzerland and australia get neither.
So a lot of this makes sense... except.. Germany... is Wallice and Gromit really that popular there?
According to the official Wallace & Gromit web site, their first short film "A Grand Day Out was finally finished and transmitted on Channel 4 on Christmas Eve, 1990 - 6 years after production began!"
As November 4th, 1989 is clearly neither the transmission date nor the start of production, what exactly are we celebrating the 20th anniversary of?
India and Japan don't do legs, South Africa's got a very strange Muppet -- you could spend hours going through the nations.
Buying good cheese in the US is a bit of an art form but you can find reputable stores that carry decent cheese -- Whole Foods, Trader Joe's, that sort of place. Don't expect too much from the local supermarket ( "American Cheese" and cheese-flavored products such as Cheese-Wiz are a whole different class of sort-of-food).
Thanks for the heads-up, man.
Actually, I tried the link in the article, got google.co.uk, and there were W&G happily tinkering away.
True, Jim Henson was a genius -- even though I was already technically too old when Sesame Street first got popular, I still used to watch it for the puppet work -- but Nick Park is an even bigger genius.
Actually, as much as I dig Wallace'n'Gromit, one of my favorite Nick Park pieces was one featuring interviews with zoo animals speaking in the accents of their native habitats; the funniest bit was an interview with a leopard speaking in this elegant, sexy Brazilian accent. Too damn' much.
A wedge of Stilton and some crackers with that pint, please...
"where (in the former colonies) can I find Wensleydale cheese?"
If you are in the largish southern-most portion of North America, Whole Foods in Sonoma, CA carries it. I assume the rest of the Whole Foods Markets nation wide can access the same source. Ask for it at your local WFM, I did, squeaky wheel & all that. (I can get Dogfish Head beer at Whole Foods too ... For you Brits, that's a right-coast micro brew that's not generally available on the left coast).
Or get it from the source, probably cheaper even including shipping:
http://www.wensleydale.co.uk/
It's not quite what I remember from my teenage years in Yorkshire, but it's close. And for GAWD/ESS'S sake, don't get the stuff infested with fruit or vegetation or smoke! If I want fruit with my cheese, I'll cut up a Gravenstein myself! Now if I can only convince 'em to carry Red Leicester ...
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