Googlified

Google Israel today celebrates the 60th anniversary of independence. (You can see 60 replacing “oo” behind the flag.)

Yom Ha’atzmaut is the national Israeli independence day, commemorating the declaration of independence of Israel in 1948. It falls on the 5th of the Jewish lunar month Iyar celebrating the declaration of the state of Israel by David Ben-Gurion in Tel Aviv on May 14, 1948, and the end of the British Mandate of Palestine. [Wikipedia]

Now talk about being controversial.

A rather mysterious painting on a wall in the Google Phoenix office. I hope nobody’s turning into a werewolf (it shows a full moon). :D

Arooo!

[photo by Googler Don Loeb, used under a CC-license]

Google Japan celebrates Children’s Day today (actually, more like yesterday to them - timezone difference), like they have done in the previous years.

May 05 is Children’s Day. On this day, children display samurai swords, armor, and Kintarō dolls. Two important symbols of Children’s day are carps and irises. Traditionally, families fly carp kites with a carp representing each son*. [Wikipedia]

I am doing this again, but today is also Cinco de Mayo, and apparently “Google Doodles doesn’t care about Mexican people” - says ValleyWag.

And last but not least, Google is holding yet another Doodle4Google contest, and this time for the Israeli children.

* so Google has three sons?

On April 30th, Google Netherlands celebrated Queen’s Day with the above logo.

Queen’s Day is a national holiday in the Netherlands, the Netherlands Antilles, and Aruba on 30 April. Queen’s Day celebrates the birthday of the Queen of the Netherlands and is supposed to be a day of national unity and “togetherness”. […] During the celebrations as reference to the colours of the House of Orange-Nassau, people dress in the colour orange, which is sometimes called “orange craze”. [Wikipedia]

Google had celebrated the holiday previously, in 2003 and 2005 (the logos look pretty much the same though).

Google had several special logos in the last couple days to celebrate holidays that took place in various parts of the world.

Saint George’s Day (UK): Saint George is one of the most venerated saints in the Eastern Orthodox Church, Oriental Orthodox Churches, and the Eastern Catholic Churches. He is immortalized in the tale of George and the Dragon and is one of the Fourteen Holy Helpers. His memorial is celebrated on 23 April. [Wikipedia]

Girls’ Day (Germany): The Girls’Day opens up extensive future prospects to a generation of qualified young women. With the objective of establishing contacts and drawing attention of industries and the public to girls’ strengths. [Girls-Day.de]

ANZAC Day (Australia): Anzac Day is commemorated by Australia and New Zealand on 25 April every year to honour members of the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps who fought at Gallipoli in Turkey during World War I. [Wikipedia]

Children’s Day (Turkey): Children’s Day was celebrated on April 23rd each year, “children from around the world come to Turkey. They’re hosted by families who have children of a similar age. […] Many children, often not even speaking the same langauge, create lifelong friendships.” [Wikipedia] The logo used is created by Aytuğ Fidan, who won the Doodle4Google (Turkey) competition held last month.

Last but not least, Google is holding another Doodle4Google competiton opened to children age 5 to 18 in Germany, Austria and Switzerland. The theme is the European Championship (and soccer). Winner of this competition will have his/her winning logo displayed on the homepage of Google Germany, Austria, and Switzerland on the day of European Championship Finals, as well as receiving an Apple MacBook.

[thanks to Pascal :)]

Google’s been celebrating (the April 22) Earth Day since 2001, and this year is no exception.

Responding to widespread environmental degradation, Gaylord Nelson, a United States Senator from Wisconsin, called for an environmental teach-in, or Earth Day, to be held on April 22, 1970. Over 20 million people participated that year, and Earth Day is now observed each year on April 22 by more than 500 million people and national governments in 175 countries. [Wikipedia]

YouTube has a special logo for this day as well.

[thanks to Bram]

Google Belgium today celebrates the 50th anniversary of Expo ‘58.

Expo 58, also known as the Brussels World’s Fair, was held from April 17 to October 19, 1958. It was the first major World’s Fair after World War II. […] The site is best known for a giant model of a unit cell of an iron crystal (each sphere representing an atom), called the Atomium, which decades later remains one of the best known landmarks of Brussels. [Wikipedia]

[thanks to Mathieu :) ]

Google’s running two special logos on the home pages of Google Thailand and Italy, to celebrate the Thai New Year and the birthday of Antonio Meucci, respectively.

The Thai New Year (Songkran) is celebrated every year on 13 April to 15 April.  The most obvious celebration of Songkran is the throwing of water. People roam the streets with containers of water or water guns, or post themselves at the side of roads with a garden hose and drench each other and passersby. [Wikipedia]

António Meúcci was an Italian-born inventor who developed a form of voice communication apparatus in 1857 and he is credited with the invention of the telephone. [Wikipedia]

Ionut said on the Google Blogoscoped forum that “maybe Google wanted to make up for this doodle” - and they probably are. :) On a related note, Google’s GrandCentral service experienced a brief outage today.

Google Japan today has a very special doodle on their home page celebrate the 5th anniversary of the birth of Astroboy (more like 56th, but Google’s using April 7, 2003 - Astroboy’s birth date in the story).

Astro Boy is a manga series and television series first broadcast in Japan from 1963 to 1966. The story follows the adventures of a robot boy and a selection of other characters along the way. Astro Boy is the first Japanese television series that embodied the aesthetic that later became familiarized as anime. [Wikipedia]

Google also at the same time honor the author of Astroboy, the late Osamu Tezuka - father of anime. I remember seeing Astroboy in commercials quite often as a kid, but never really watch it in the form of a television series.

Google also created an Astroboy theme for iGoogle, you can preview and add it here.

Okay, this is not an official doodle from Google, but this entry to the Doodle 4 Google contest by Erik Wawerczyk is simply superb. The doodle depicts the Google logo being touched by Flying Spaghetti Monster’s noodly appendages.

The Flying Spaghetti Monster is the deity of a parody religion called The Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster and its system of beliefs, “Pastafarianism”. The religion was founded in 2005 by Bobby Henderson to protest the decision by the Kansas State Board of Education to require the teaching of intelligent design as an alternative to biological evolution.

May you all be touched by His noodly appendage. RAmen. :)

[via Church of FSM, image by Erik Wawerczyk, used with permission]

If you are in Argentina, Bolivia, Colombia, Canada, Denmark, Ireland, the UK, or the US right now, don’t be surprise when you see the home page of Google went dark today, because they are promoting Earth Hour, an effort to “raise awareness of worldwide energy conservation.”

Google invite you (and everyone) to join other people worldwide to turn off your lights “for one hour - from 8:00pm to 9:00pm in [your] local time zone.”

Google had a history of promoting events like this: San Francisco and a couple of German-speaking countries last year, and in Israel a few days ago.

UPDATE: Added Google Ireland. [thanks Tom!]

Google Hungary has a special logo on their home page to honor musician Béla Bartók.

Béla Viktor János Bartók was a Hungarian composer, pianist and collector of folk music. He is considered one of the greatest composers of the 20th century and was also one of the founders of the field of ethnomusicology, through his analytical study and ethnography of folk music. [Wikipedia]

This is the tenth doodle this month, including the Orkut logo for Easter I posted yesterday.

UPDATE: Turns out that there’s another doodle today, on Google Japan, celebrating the invention parametron by Dr. Eiichi Goto at the University of Tokyo in 1954. [via Google Blogoscoped]

A parametron is essentially a resonant circuit with a nonlinear reactive element which oscillates at half the driving frequency. The oscillation can be made to represent a binary digit by the choice between two stationary phases pi radians apart. [USPTO]

So this would be the 11th doodle this month, and sorry guys, I think I just created a rip in the space-time continuum by linking to a Google Blogoscoped post that has a link to this blog. :)

[via the Google Blogoscoped forum]