All You Need Is Word

This isn't that important, probably not that interesting either, but it's been bothering me for a while. A major deficiency of mine is that I tend to get hung up on irrelevant minutiae even when I shouldn't. Couple that with some mild OCD and you'll find me wasting time on a fruitless endeavour, "just because". This weekend I spent several minutes designing the Steaua Bucharest logo in Microsoft Word.

Steaua Bucharest, by the way, is now known as FCSB. Romania's biggest football (soccer) club has been reduced to an acronym as a result of legal wrangling over trademarks and dues.

You see, Steaua Bucharest, like pretty much every other team in Europe, isn't just a football club. They are a sporting association under whose umbrella you'll find basketball, water polo or weightlifting teams. The club was originally established as the sporting branch of the military, much like the Russians and Bulgarians have their CSKA teams, or the Serbs with FK Partizan. Communist football history notwithstanding, the symbol and crest fold into the club's palmares, that is, their achievements over time. The hardcore fans take it all very seriously, particularly Romanians (or dare I say, Europeans) who don't mess around with tradition. In Steaua's case, this includes the 1987 European Champions Cup and numerous league trophies.

More recently, however, somebody at Steaua realized that when owner, former sheep herder, marketing exec, director of football and jailbird extraordinaire, Gigi Becali, purchased the football club, he didn't pay the Steaua sporting association any dues for their crest. Fifteen years on, he's even less willing to pay. "No problem," he said, "I'll design my own crest!" And he fired up the laptop in his Jilava jail cell/design studio, started up Word, and five minutes later, Romania's biggest football club had a new logo*.

But that wasn't enough. The team also needed a new name. "Easy!" Gigi bawled into the phone from his cell to the PR team via conference call, "Do I have to pay anyone if we use FCSB? No? FCSB it is. Băăă, bagă FCSB că aşa am zis eu!"

(Actual screenshot of Gigi Becali's design on Microsoft Word**)

The outcome was more or less what you'd expect. The die-hard fans abandoned the football team in favour of the Steaua basketball club, while Romanian designers gouged their eyes out upon gazing at Gigi's masterpiece. Steaua Bucharest football club was no more. Along with it was gone any shred of dignity that Romanian designers had worked hard to cultivate.

Here is what the design looks like:

- The logo of a Hermetic cult
- An air force roundell for a fictional Second World War nation
- A medieval shield

- A Microsoft Word design

Indeed, it turns out it's entirely possible to design it all on Word. It makes you wonder, just a bit, when the country's biggest sporting club and European ambassador on the pitch, puts this much effort into their logo design; What can you really expect from people who do marketing, branding, and design in this Romania? Maybe it's harsh to judge the country on this one particular travesty, but there are discerning eyes out there that will. As I mentioned in the Romanians are Coming post, there are plenty of reasons to be embarrassed by what Romanians do to their own country, and now here is another (mostly if you're a Steaua/FCSB supporter).

PS: Here is what the logo actually looks like ( I refuse to embed the image in here as I don't want to be held responsible for yet more retina damage).

* This is a dramatization, events may not have occurred exactly as depicted in this blog post.
** Not an actual screenshot of Gigi Becali's design

Comments

10 Reasons Why Romania is Better Than America

Really? Yes, really. Let me count the ways. In America you can get everything you've ever dreamed of: GameBoy, Sega Genesis, plants that look like faces , and more. Maybe if you work really hard long hours at the job you hate (but that you tell everybody you love lest you appear to be a miserable person), you can even get a flat panel home theater TV that takes up half your basement (on credit, of course). Awesomeness!! In America you can always be sure to be on top of the latest fad, such as devil sticks or Tamagochi and you will be first to read bestsellers like The DaVinci Code and Fifty Shades of Crap literature. Basically there are thousands of ways of feeling accomplished -or pretending that you are - you just need to be there to catch all these wonderful trends on time! I know what you're thinking, how can Romania possibly top all that considering America is also the land of Root beer floats and Antoine Dodson? Everything's been done in America, that's ...

Is Cluj The Best City On Earth?

It's a question I ask myself at times. Let's put it this way; I've been around. Maybe not all around the world, but halway-ish maybe. Sailed the canals of Amsterdam, biked from one end of Paris to the other, took the train from Budapest to Berlin, drove the 405 in LA, and yeah, I even rode a hay cart back in the day. But other than enjoying all these forms of transportation, I got to enjoy the places I visited. I don't know about you, but when I visit a place I always ask myself, 'would I live here?' While the answer is often 'yes, why not', the only place I moved to was Cluj. Cluj, how do I love thee, let me count the ways: 1. I love your smell. It's like earth, and air, and city. I will never forget my first day here, when I walked out of the arrivals building at the airport and breathed in your smell. Spring. You're the city of eternal Spring. On a balmy day, it's what you smell like, even if it's December, or August. 2. I l...

Are Romanian Women The Most Beautiful In The World?

More than once, I was asked to write about the beauty of Romanian women, but... I have no words. Besides, I may be biased, but clearly it's a rhetorical question. However, there is no shortage of Facebook pages dedicated to the subject. Image: A typical Romanian woman, Madalina Ghenea.

10 More Reasons Romania is Better Than America

I get it. The US is special. I hate to say it, especially as a Canadian, but it is. But it's mostly special because of the America that it used to be. The idea of America is special. There was, once, an American Dream within the reach of any hard working man. It was a country that offered unprecedented freedoms and opportunities unmatched by any other. The great melting pot was about inclusion towards one common goal, it was not divisive, individualistic and driven by a Bergeron-esque vision of 'equality'. Assets were not based on decades-long lines of credit, and salaries kept up with cost of living increases. I could go on about 'the way things used to be' but you can look it all up if you're interested. If you live there, you should be. The reality in America is different now. Sure, it's still the land of plenty. But the plenty is not all good. Plenty of debt, plenty of poverty, plenty of obesity, plenty of civil unrest coupled with plenty of he...

10 Things Romania Does (A Bit) Differently - Part 1

A few days ago, after walking into a grocery store, I couldn't help noticing I was in a state of trepidation. The reason? I'd walked in with my gym bag, purposely avoiding the security guy at the entrance. I felt his eyes must be following me and that a loud, "Hey, you!" would ring out the moment I turned into an aisle. It turns out that the longer you live somewhere, the more you get used to it. A truism, of course. What is not immediately apparent is that this isn't necessarily a good thing, especially when you find that you've become used to something you may have found, at some point in the past, in another place, entirely unacceptable. This is why, now that I've crossed over the honeymoon period of my move to Romania, I find my enthusiasm for life here wanes when, for the 286th time, I am forced to walk into a supermarket through the designated entrance point, even if an empty checkout is much closer and no less accessible. Then, upon entry, a gr...

You Can't Plan a Romania Road Trip, But You Should Anyway

I started writing this post in September 2014, not long after coming back from vacation. I dropped it because I got sick of going through the hundreds of pictures we took just to pick the perfect ones for this post. But, like a seed once planted, it needs some water and the right conditions to flourish. In my case: an email from a reader, asking me about road-tripping through Romania, and the chance to lift this weight off my back. So here it is, a summary of one Romania road trip, from Cluj and back. The Itinerary ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ 2,656 Kilometers. 188 Liters of gas. 2,919 RON. That's more or less the tally for the Romania road trip I took with my roomie/wife Roxana. We could have booked an all-inclusive vacation to Greece, Turkey, or Bulgaria at about the same cost, but how could we resist a road trip? A unique waterfall , the ' tunnel of love ', the best dri...

What I Learned About Driving In Romania

I get it now. I understand Romanian drivers and their follies. It's something I thought would never happen. All it took to shape me into a Romanian road rage machine was one month of driving around Cluj and a 400 km round trip. I'm kidding about the rage part. The idea of driving in Cluj was intimidating. Last time I'd driven manual shift was almost ten years ago when a co-worker asked me to drive her and her newly purchased, Pontiac Firefly home because she had no idea how to do it. So of course I stalled that little bastard all over the place. Little surprise that the idea of driving along busy and narrow European streets was unappealing - especially after years of driving automatic on wide, North American roads. But I managed. Stalled an average of once per trip during the first week, and then a couple of times in the second week, and now, a little over a month later, I sometimes stall at stoplights when I forget I'm driving stick and leave it in gear when I rel...

Why Romanians Don't Like Romanians

To my knowledge, this national self-loathing is a uniquely Romanian experience. Maybe we share it with some of our neighbours, but I doubt it. I've never seen a people dislike their own as much as the Romanians. This is going to be highly generalized, but as with most things I write here it's rooted in personal experience and observations. Don't hate the player, hate the game. 1. Romanians like the exotic, to be Romanian is the antithesis of what it means to be exotic. 2 . Romanians are often prejudiced. The thought process goes something like this: If you're Romanian you're probably bereft of interesting experiences and financially limited. You're from 'the-worst-country-on-earth', after all. If you're well off, then you're just a rich asshole (probably a thief, too). Either way, your Romanian-ness ensures you're seen as a person with limited horizons who likely can't offer anything new or different. If you're Western Europe...

10 Things Romania Does (A Bit) Differently - Part 2

Most lists don't begin at number 6, so if you want to start at the beginning, head over to Part 1 . 6. The Clothes Dryer The mighty clothes dryer, a staple appliance in just about every North American home, is essentially non-existent in Romania. While it isn't suspiciously regarded as a harbinger of death, as is the A/C unit, it takes up a lot of space and consumes plenty of energy, both of which come in short supply relative to Romanian preferences. Besides, if everyone had a dryer, then balconies, clothes lines, and drying racks would take up space for no good reason, and doing the laundry would be an all too efficient endeavour (generally considered bad taste in our neck of the woods). Of course dryers do exist, usually on a steam-drying system, sometimes in a 2-in-1 washer/dryer combination (which requires no external vent or filters), but it's nonetheless a long-forgotten luxury for many a nostalgic expat. 7. Sidewalk Parking I could write several blog post...

Here Is Why Romania's Future Is Bright

The festival is only in its second edition, but following last year's inaugural event, Electric Castle has stirred up enough buzz to attract visitors from beyond Romania's borders. Walking around the festival grounds I had the impression that every other group was comprised of foreigners speaking Hungarian, English, German, or French. And judging by the license plates in the parking lots, every county in Romania was well represented. While there's plenty to be said about the artists and the music, there's something else I want to discuss in this post. When you think "music festival", the image that comes to mind is that of overly excited youth on a drug and alcohol infused rampage, laying waste to everything in their path. Maybe it has something to do with the way festivals like to promote themselves; these are basically the images that stand out on most 'Official Aftermovie' videos from major music festivals. But obviously the experience is defined...

Expat In Romania

Search This Blog