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Can't believe I didn't notice this until recently, having been a Phoenix Suns fan for ages. Maybe it's a recent redesign of their logo. But check it out:
The word "SUNS" reads the same rightside up or upside down. The logo is painted at center court, and during a game earlier this year, when they switched camera views, I noticed this cool design. A little research online found this Wiki entry. Apparently, this is called a rotational ambigram (there are other types of ambigrams, as explained in Wiki). It goes on to say they are sometimes called vertical palindromes. If you do an ambigram image search on Google, you'll see a ton of other examples -- including an ambigram of "ambigram." Looks to my left-brain that this is a very difficult art.
Not really a question ... just something interesting I thought I'd share.
Won 38, lost 43. Must be working, because Phoenic is a LONG way from basketball country, and without it, they'd probably have won 16, lost 65.
Of course, Duke isn't in basketball country. either; I think they're using some of Dr. Rhine's research to confound their opponents....
(Removing tongue from cheek, congrats on an interesting find.)
There's definitely been a redesign of the Suns logo since the first time I looked at it, but it's always been an ambigram.
And there's nothing particularly hard about creating them. Here's one I did years ago with my first animated-gif editor (the file name is umop apisdn):
Ron Draney said: And there’s nothing particularly hard about creating them.
Well sure, if you limit yourself to the letters that automatically work upside down, although you did do something funky with that"a/e", and I note that the "u/n" is the same style font used in the Suns logo ... that wouldn't work with all fonts.
It's also easier if you don't care if the upside down word is nonsensical. I was talking about the ambigrams I saw on that Google Image search, where each letter is like a custom font the artist designed. Now that takes a fair amount of skill and creativity.
Of course, before I could call "umop apisdn" nonsensical, I had to Google it. Got 114,000 hits. Most were just noting that it's an ambigram. But it looks like there's at least one band that's using it for their name, and it's also entered the Online Slang Dictionary with the given meaning "upside down and backwards" which I'd guess is some kind of disparaging adjective. Not sure. They don't provide a definition or synonym. And I never heard it before.
We actually talked in passing about ambigrams before in the course of discussing heteropalindromes:
AWWW ambigrams
In this discussion, I also link to a number of interesting tattoo ambigrams here
Is there a name for phrases like NOW HERE and NOWHERE?
I've seen an awful lot of unfortunate domain names. Domain names, by definition, have no spaces, and are case insensituve (although the rest of the URL/URI usually is not) and it's important to use mixed case when promoting websites, lest JonesTherapist.com gets read as JonesTheRapist.com
Yes, there is a name for that. It's called a "SLURL" ... apparently a portmanteau of "slur" and "url". Interesting thread about that (and more hilarious examples) at this URL: http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=617722
The link in that thread validating "SLURL" is broken, but here's the source (a book on Amazon).
BTW, I recall an episode of the Benny Hill Show where Benny rearranges the sliding letters in a therapist's door sign by adding a space after the "the". So that SLURL probably predates the internet, but is nonetheless a SLURL by today's definition.
EmmettRedd said
I always wanted to market some heavy-duty carbon batteries endorsed by the 1953 to 1974 Detroit Tiger, Al Kaline, and price them just under alkaline batteries.
Nice scam! He was a "power hitter", so you could coimpete with the Alkaline Energizer with your "Al Kaline Power Hitters". A decade or two back, I bought a card of batteries that was the color of the Durecell "copper top" batteries, and they were heavy duty, but almost powerless. Ray-O-Vac makes HD "AA" abd "AAA" batteries that are actually good although not an alkaline. I'm running my wall clocks on them, and the batteries last about a year, same as alkaline, but they don't last long in a flashlight or TV remote.
Knew a guy with a piano-and-organ store. He said that most of the old piano brands now belong to Aeolian, and as a dealer, he could order their generic pianos with a historic brand name - or branded with your own brand name. He kept playing with the notion of ordering a dozen of their cheapest model with decals declaring it to be "UZED" brand.
Parents, afraid their kids won't stick to taking lessons, want to start with a used piano, saying that they'll upgrade later. Used pianos, however, are usually in poor condition, and with sa piano that won't hold a tune, and javing keys that stick, it makes it harder to remain interested - and he had never had a customer come in saying that the kid's stuck to her lessons, and they want to het a good piano now. Too many other things fighting for the same dollars.
But he thought he'd run a classified ad sayiing "Uzed piano, this year's model. tuned and delivered, perfect, $cheap" and bargain hunters would assume uzed was a typo for used, consider the hassle and cost of hauling a piano, the cost of getting it tuned, the fact that it was scratched and scarred, and they'd stop in to check it out.
Won't shoppers consider him dishonest? I asked. Doesn't appear to be a problem for the folks selling Grand brand pianos, he replied. That brand offered shoddy plywood spinets, at a cheap price. But he got out of the business a few months later.
deaconB said
But he thought he'd run a classified ad sayiing "Uzed piano, this year's model. tuned and delivered, perfect, $cheap" and bargain hunters would assume uzed was a typo for used, consider the hassle and cost of hauling a piano, the cost of getting it tuned, the fact that it was scratched and scarred, and they'd stop in to check it out.
Back in the '70s, I thought it would be great to have a band and call it "Many, Many More". That way, every K-Tel record commercial would declare that their newest hits package would have at least one song by my band; they'd either have to include one or change their standard sales pitch.
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