The Friday Fillip

Today we’re offering what the menu of one of my much-frequented restaurants might call “Google two ways.” But have no fear: the fact that our favourite double-O agent is the subject doesn’t mean this is business. No, this is about doodles, Google doodles — and particularly some of the hundreds out there that you have never seen before.

The main lode can be found on Google’s Holiday Logos page. This is a truly astonishing collection of inventive plays on the name.

If you’d like a source that’s organized a bit differently, go to Doodle Source, which started collecting the Google doodles available, from countries around the world in August of this year, and has organized them by country (as well as by date). So you can find the Big Bird Google, celebrating the 40th anniversary of Sesame Street, released last Wednesday here in Canada, which you can then compare to the curiously greyscale doodle celebrating the same event in Belgium, with a mouse as the ‘e’. You get the idea.

You can also troll for beauty. My current pick is this recent doodle from Thailand, marking the Loy Kratong Festival:

Though, you might prefer the intricacy and fun of a Wallace and Gromit doodle, this one from Taiwan, among other places:

Okay, so that’s Google one way. The other? Well, how did I know the Thai doodle above was in celebration of the Loy Kratong Festival? After all the text on the page looks like this:

And my Thai is weak. But Google’s is way better. So over to Google’s Translate page, pop in the URL and up comes a half decent rendition into the language of my choice, English in this case.