This is no small change, if you're a Target shopper:

You may not care, but at least they hope you noticed. The old Archer Farms logo is gone, replaced by something that doesn't have the same compact, if wordy, logo. Now it's instructional. The panes on the bottom tell you how to construct a well-balanced meal, I presume.

Pasta is starch? Who knew!

Here's the old logo that will, I presume, fade away as stock moves through the channels.

(The "Satisfaction Guaranteed" font is Coquette, by local fontographer Mark Simonson.)

MUSIC And she's borrowing a stairway to heaven: allegations resurface that Jimmy Page's opening to "Stairway" was, shall we say, inspired by "Taurus," a song by Spirit. Business Week:

Yes, indeed. Zep opened for Spirit on their first US tour, and that's where the surviving band members suggest they heard the riff. The stakes aren't small; the song has generated over a half a billion in revenue. Listen here, and make up your own mind.

HEY YOU Today's bossy, know-it-all headline is from Gawker's "The Vane" site:

I'm surprised the site doesn't say it's so Vane, You Probably Think This Site is About You. It's about humidity and relative humidity, but you wouldn't read that if you weren't told someone is lying to you, intentionally, and that here's one weird life-hack trick to figure it out.

Also, WE are responsible for mass murder.

It's an interesting piece, nevertheless - an interview with an observer of the trial of a Pol Pot prison warden. Relevant graf:

On ordinary people, in other words, doing horrible things for different reasons. This isn't news. But the idea that 80% of the dead were Khmer Rouge was news to me.

Anyway, back to the original point: why must everything have to be about YOU to make it interesting?

LITERALLY Disappearing, that's what the 90s are doing. Literally. You could make the point that they have already disappeared, literally, but what the guy's talking about are the cultural artifacts in old formats. Salon:

It's another piece about giving up records and saying goodbye to CDs, which are not eternal. The article's illustration is a TV with a fuzzy picture of the "Saved by the Bell" cast, which makes you think it's about VHS. It's not. The article notes a resurgence in vinyl, which is due to nostalgia and interest in all things "vintage," not a generational shift to the sound of vinyl. VHS is different; it's in a dire state. The number of tapes in boxes in basements probably numbers in the tens of millions, if not more; few people have the desire or time to transfer them to digital formats, to say nothing of the means. There might be a market for the old shows, but will people accept the low-res versions when they're used to HD, or will future generations wonder why everything was filmed through a haze of Vaseline and hair spray?

Unless, of course, they were Super-VHS tapes. Those things were razor-sharp.

VotD If you could see this coming from the first seconds of the video, why couldn't the driver?