09 September 2008

An Operating System Or The Episcopal Church (tm). Is There A Difference Anymore?

Now that I have (electrical) power, I'm trying to catch up on what I missed while sans-Net. First up, I see The Episcopal Church (tm) has selected a logo for their upcoming General Convention:


Um.... ick.

First of all, the graphic image looks like an inflamed rectum. Or, some kind of trendy new bio-hazard warning.

Second, as others have pointed out Ubuntu is more popularly known as the name of a computer operating system, like Unix or Linux. (It is a variant of the latter.) Since the convention is being held in California, can't you just see some very confused hackers and code geeks showing up - "Dude, I don't know about any Windsor Report, we're just looking for the Wired party." Did anybody at 815 Second Avenue do any market research before they picked this name? Do they know what Google is, for politys-sake!?!

Third, "I in You and You In Me"? Not very original. I think "Do You Feel Like We Do" would have been more in keeping with current Episcopal theology. And could you make the text any lighter and harder to read?

Fourth, notice any mention of, or any symbolic reference to.... Jesus Christ? God? Anything remotely religious? Me, either. You know this is a gathering of Christians because.....?

Let me show you an Episcopal Church logo that says who we are and what we are about, without reverting to OS themes or Peter Frampton song titles:



(Full disclosure: I am biased here. That's the logo for my church, and my wife designed it.)

UPDATE 12SEPT08: Ontario Emperor notes that there is a Christian edition of the Ubuntu operating system. But he concludes that it wouldn't be suitable for Episcopal use as it includes a filter which blocks things like gay porn sites. He also notes that Ubuntu is actually copyrighted. And take a look at the image on the upper left of the Trademark Policy page, and look again at the GC '09 logo above. Anything seem, oh, I don't know..... similar?

2 comments:

mousestalker said...

To answer the question you posed in your headline, the difference between the conference and the operating system is that the operating systems works, it does so with a minimal amount of system resources, it's cheap, fast, small and useful. The General Convention will not have any of those characteristics.

It's a clear case of false advertising....

.....CLIFFORD said...

The GC as an Unbuntu shell script:

shell
finger god
chmod o-r god
bg god
mk newgod
grep lgbt
pipe newgod
rm god
ID=orthodoxy
kill ID
!!
rm creeds
chmod canons
chmod constitution
/shell

It's been years since I coded, but you get the idea.