If you wanted to be a truly legendary designer during the 20th century, you had to make at least one great chair. The world we live in - offices, especially - is adorned with countless knockoffs of the innovative chair designs of the masters. You'll doubtless recognize the shapes and angles of these chairs - but can you name them and their designers?
Breweries have traditionally spent a lot of time designing distinctive, elaborate labels, which is weird because it's not like people need a lot of encouragement to drink beer. Just look at that plain can Archie Bunker drank: he knew it's what's on the inside that matters, not the outside. Anyway, if you've spent a lot of time locked in a lonely stare with a vessel of suds, you'll have no trouble identifying the beers and brewers associated with these visual chasers. Congratulations?
School: crucible of learning, forge of character, backdrop to films both sublime and substandard. As us Woot bloggers think about school all week for our Dealgebra 101 event, we'd be remiss not to reflect on some of our most powerful formative experiences: the ones we watched other people having. Can you name these eight filmic adaptations of the educational experience, as depicted by their posters?
The organizers of London 2012 mangled the logo. They fumbled the mascot. But they did get one other piece of Olympic design right: the pictograms. No cheesy attempt to be contemporary. No contrived translation of ancient visual styles. Just a clean, sharp set of universal-symbol athletes with just enough visual dash to keep it interesting. But are they accurate enough to bring to mind the sports they represent? You tell us... what sports are we looking at here?
Amid all the ridicule for the London 2012 Olympic logo, it's easy to overlook the equally bizarre Wenlock and Mandeville, the official mascots for this year's games. Some say they're a bold departure, others say they're softening up the youth of Earth for the imminent metal-cyclops takeover. But one thing's for sure: most of us will forget about them before the last empty can of lager has been cleared from the Olympic village. Take these eight mascots of Olympiads past: do you remember their names and the games they represented?
Answers are here. Please post your guesses, speculations, or arguments below! But know this: the Trivial Eye is presented for public amusement and no prizes are offered other than that familiar feeling of aggravation that so much of your mind is occupied by useless trivia.
You want more Trivial Eye, don't you? Yeah, you do.
If the '70s was the last great age of vinyl (and record covers) and the '80s squirmed beneath the cruel plastic jackboot of the cassette, the '90s unquestionably belonged to the compact disc. The major labels thought they'd found the goose that laid the shiny silver egg. By the end of the decade, they were selling over 900 million CDs a year in the U.S. alone.
But like a disillusioned sophomore who has just blown five hours of her Hardee's wages on a disc with one-and-a-half good songs, music consumers soon found the "skip" button. CD sales are now a quarter what they were at the end of Clinton administration. This year, revenue from digital music sales will probably surpass physical sales for the first time. And it seems that every few months, there's another report about the major labels perhaps killing CDs altogether. After all the claims that CDs attained eternal perfection in music formats, it didn't take long for them to become as dated as 8-tracks or 78s.
Let us remember the CD era by remembering the 90s albums represented in the cover snippets below...
Answers are here. Please post your guesses, speculations, or arguments below! But know this: the Trivial Eye is presented for public amusement and no prizes are offered other than that familiar feeling of aggravation that so much of your mind is occupied by useless trivia.
The Euro 2012 soccer championships are coming to a close, and World Cup 2014 in Brazil doesn't seem that far away. Major tournaments like these are more than just a showcase for great soccer: they're also the way millions of Americans learn what a nil-nil draw is, or what people from Slovenia and Cote d'Ivoire look like. Here are eight shirts worn in either the Euro 2012 or World Cup 2010 tournaments - can you identify the countries whose players wore them?
Answers are here. Please post your guesses, speculations, or arguments below! But know this: the Trivial Eye is presented for public amusement and no prizes are offered other than that familiar feeling of aggravation that so much of your mind is occupied by useless trivia.
If you're a baseball fan, you have no trouble identifying the cap emblems and jersey logos of Major League Baseball teams. But what about the team colors? Can you spot the subtle differences in the various shades of red and blue? Are you aware of the sometimes-esoteric third and fourth official colors of every team? I've used the "team color" info on Wikipedia, including the precise RGB codes, to put together these swatches for eight big-league teams. Can you name the teams that wear these colors?
Answers are here. Please post your guesses, speculations, or arguments below! But know this: the Trivial Eye is presented for public amusement and no prizes are offered other than that familiar feeling of aggravation that so much of your mind is occupied by useless trivia.
Imagine you had to wear the same outfit for decades - and then suddenly got a chance to change your clothes. Chances are, your atrophied fashion sense would probably pick something heinous. So it goes with these eight storied superheroes and their brief flirtations with a new look. The comics industry just wouldn't be the comics industry without misguided attempts to ditch iconic elements for laughably "updated" versions. Can your x-ray vision see through these unfortunate togs to the familiar heroes beneath?
Answers are here. Please post your guesses, speculations, or arguments below! But know this: the Trivial Eye is presented for public amusement and no prizes are offered other than that familiar feeling of aggravation that so much of your mind is occupied by useless trivia.
If you're into this kind of thing, you may also be into The 12 Most Eighties-Style Superheroes and Supervillains and our look at the costumes of Emerald City Comicon 2012.
Bracket season is here! Americans across the U.S.A. are competing against their friends, neighbors, co-workers, and fellow netizens in filling out brackets. There's even a bracket group for Woot fans (which must seem like easy prey for true bracketologists). For the next few weeks, millions of obsessives will follow the action to see whose bracket will overcome all comers and overpower all powers to take the most coveted title in online sports. (I think there's also some kind of "basket ball" tournament going on out there in meatspace.) But if filling out an entire 64-team bracket sounds too much like work to you, here's a game that demands much less commitment. Name the eight NCAA men's basketball tourney teams whose logos are partially shown below. No bracket required.
Here there be answers. Please post your guesses, speculations, or arguments below! But know this: the Trivial Eye is presented for public amusement and no prizes are offered other than that familiar feeling of aggravation that so much of your mind is occupied by useless trivia.
