Walmart is changing its logo.

From this:

To this:

MSN wonders out loud: “What does Wal-Mart’s new logo mean?”

“”(The new sunburst) looks organic. My sense is they are trying to say, ‘we’re an eco-aware company,’” says Marty Neumeier, president of Neutron, a branding firm in San Francisco.”

This is the same school of thought in which a train disappearing in a tunnel symbolizes travel.

It’s abundantly clear what the source of inspiration of this logo’s designers was: this passage from Kurt Vonnegut’s classic “Breakfast of Champions”

“To give an idea of the maturity of my illustrations for this book, here is my picture of an asshole: ”

To quote two other modern classics:

“It means “grease your little cornholes”“

For years I’ve been reading Count Nikolai Tolstoy’s “The Tolstoys, twenty-four generations of Russian history, 1353-1983” on and off. Amongst other interesting and surprising things that I’ve learned from the book was what Leo Tolstoy looked like when he was young. I used to think of him as and intense old dude sporting Karl Marx/Saddam in hiding/Fidel Castro hairstyle. It turns out that in his youth he looked more like Matt Damon:

Since we are on the subject of lookalikes, a couple of weeks ago I thought that I saw Darren Aronofsky on the train. It was on the BMT Brighton Line which is featured so prominently in Pi, and he got off at 7th avenue, which would make sense as well.

If I were to talk to Darren Aronofsky, I’d try to persuade him to film The Lady Who Sailed The Soul or Scanners Live in Vain. Rachel Weisz could totally be Helen America. That would have been awesome.