Big Zero, Canary Squad, & Dating Websites | #186

+ The story of Blix and Blee 👉

Jan 06, 2024

Hello friends

One more trip around the sun.

It’s 2024 which means a new year, new resolutions, and new issues of our weekly newsletter. So keeping with the theme, we’re kicking off the first edition of 2024 with a dedication to new beginnings.

Buckle up.

Things we learnt this week 🤓

The story goes that Mikahil Gorbachev, the Secretary General of the Communist Party of the USSR, was at a political summit in Italy when he was asked to explain what “Perestroika” meant. He simply showed his Raketa Big Zero watch and said: “It’s like on my watch: the Soviet people want to start everything from zero”. This immediately made the headline of Italian newspapers and began the legend of the “Big Zero”. Raketa (Russian for ‘rocket’) is a Russian watch manufacturer named in honor of Yuri Gagarin’s first manned flight. Their watches are characterised by the absence of the ’12 o’clock’ marker, which is replaced with a zero, and hence the name. In this case, time is literally a flat circle.
“Do you have the time?”, “No”
Question - What colour comes to mind if we mention Brazil football team? The asnwer has to be the iconic canary yellow. The team is known as the Seleção Canarinha or Canary Squad because of their distinctive jersey colour but it wasn’t always like this. Back in 1950, Brazil hosted the World Cup and went into the final game against Uruguay needing only a draw to win the World Cup (they used a different format). However, they lost the famous ‘Maracanzo’ game 2-1 as the nation went into shock and mourning. To move past the loss, there was mounting pressure to change their jersey colour as Brazil wore a white jersey with a blue collar (see pic) which was considered unpatriotic.
In 1953 a competition was held by a local newspaper to design a new outfit, with the rule being that it must incorporate the colours of the national flag. Eventually, the competition was won by newspaper illustrator Aldyr Garcia Schlee who came up with the now-iconic design of a yellow shirt. The new design was first used in 1954 against Chile. Ironically when Brazil won their first World Cup in 1958, they had to wear their second kit - a blue ensemble, as they were the ‘away’ team facing Sweden at home.
The evolution of the Brazil football jersey, and Aldyr Garcia
Back in 2006, Steve Chen, Jawed Karim and Chad Hurley designed a dating website for people to upload videos of themselves talking about the partner of their dreams. The slogan was “Tune in, Hook up”. They even offered to pay women $20 to upload videos of themselves to kickstart it, but nobody came forward. Realising the narrow scope of the website, they decided it to open it up to any form of video starting with ‘Me at the zoo’. The rest is history.