Heraldry and Geekery

Starfleet, originally uploaded by zawelski.

(posted by Dave)
The summer after fifth grade, we took a six week family vacation to the United Kingdom. It was there, in the gift shop of Westminster Abbey, I believe, that I cemented my lifelong interest in heraldry, funky logos, and all things systematically symbolic.

My ability to remember graphic symbols has helped me along here - as you can imagine, I get obsessed with Chinese characters from time to time. I've learned about four hundred of them! Only about 4,000 more till I can read the paper... That’s the subject for another post, however.

What I wanted to write about is a much easier system of symbology - Chinese automobile logos! I’m not particularly interested in cars per se, but I have to admit that I get a geeky thrill in finding a logo that I haven’t seen before on my walks around town. The names are great, too. Geely! Freeca! Click on the above photo to get to a Flickr set of some other logos I’ve uploaded.

My uber-nerd favorite has got to be the logo above. Give yourself five geek points if you immediately thought of Star Trek, and an additional twenty if you thought “hey, blue - that’s Science or Medicine!”

(And no, so far I haven’t spotted a red-colored Star Fleet car. Which only makes sense, if you think about what happens to those red shirt security guys when they beam down to strange planets...)