or, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to Fear and Loathing at a Public Library Reference Desk


Reference Question of the Week – 7/4/10

   July 10th, 2010 Brian Herzog

Pope Benedict image from tldm.orgCoinciding nicely with the 4th of July holiday, here's a (loosely) government-related reference question:

We have a few regular patrons who are really into conspiracies and religious extremism - at least, a few who always need help with computers.

One minute after opening one day this week, one of them (an 80+ year old, frail, sweet woman) came to the desk with a web address written on scrap paper. She said it was a news site she had never visited, and wanted to print out all their latest stories.

I typed in http://tldm.org, and found their homepage to be about a three foot long list of links to their stories. She wanted them all, but settled for the first 15 stories (which was still 54 printed double-sided pages @ $0.15/page = $8).

While we were printing those (which, as you can imagine, took a little while), she talked about how she likes these sites that give her the real news, or the "news behind the news," that you can't get elsewhere - like how President Odama [sic] is inching toward a gay agenda.

Speaking of Obama, the patron next asked me to find out when the deviled ham logo changed. Not having any idea what she was talking about, I just did a Google images search for deviled ham logo and luckily she pointed to the first one - the logo for Underwood Deviled Ham.

I did a few more searches including the words "change" and "logo" and "underwood," but Wikipedia's William Underwood Company article was the only thing I could find that mentioned the logos. They were/are:

Underwood Logo 1921
Illustration of can of Underwood Deviled Ham, 1921 advertisement.
Underwood Logo 2008
New 2008 Underwood logo from Underwood Chicken Spread.

She said she remembers a different one from her childhood, but was satisfied with article saying the logo was updated in 2008. That was the year Obama was elected. In the old logo, the devil is just "standing still." The updated logo now has the color black and other shading, and emphasizes the devil being "on the march." Coincidence?



Tags: , , , , , , ,