Celebrating Pad Thai

Soak rice noodles in water for a few hours. Fry some eggs with tofu. Throw in lots of vegetables. Toss everything around in a sauce of tamarind, fish, and shrimp. Top it all off with roasted peanuts. Stick a fork in, make it messy, and slurp it all up! 

These are the basics of Pad Thai, the uniquely sweet-salty noodle dish that is a signature street food of Thailand, and a heartwarming favorite for foodies around the world. In fact, it was today in 1945 that the tasty dish was announced the national cuisine of Thailand! 

During the Second World War, Thailand faced an acute shortage of rice, a staple for the Thai people until that point. Rice noodles however happened to be cheap, filling, and plentiful. Coupled with vegetables and cheap sources of protein such as shrimp and prawns, rice noodles could provide a well-balanced, nutritious meal. An age-old recipe (thought to be introduced by Chinese traders) was popularized amongst vendors and began to be hawked widely on the streets. Overnight, a national favorite was born. 

The recipe might be simple but each chef adds their own signature taste to the sauce, making it sweeter, spicier, or something in between. As with all street food, the messier and more social a meal, the better it tastes! 

Today’s Doodle was inspired by Doodler Juliana's own research into cooking up Pad Thai with a friend. She wanted to be able to show all the delicious ingredients up close and invented some small pea-sized characters to be our culinary guides. Her lovely creation celebrates the process of cooking this unique dish and eating it with friends — warm, colorful, messy, social, and wonderfully Thai.

Kob khun mak, Pad Thai!

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Jackie Forster’s 91st Birthday

It is quite an achievement to leave a lasting legacy. Jackie Forster is known for two: first, for her charismatic TV news reporting; second, for her trailblazing gay rights activism.

Born on this day in 1926, Jackie launched her famed career first in acting, appearing in various West End productions and films in the 1940s. She moved to television news under her maiden name, Jackie Mackenzie, and became a favorite of producers and the public with her sharp, lively, and quirky delivery. Her coverage of the wedding of Prince Rainier to Princess Grace in 1956 won her the Prix d’Italia.

Thirteen years later, Jackie made history by publicly coming out as gay, paving the way for many other women of the time. Soon after, she appeared on a host of television programs, speaking openly about her identity and helping viewers find the strength to accept themselves. She walked proudly in the first gay rights march in the UK and co-founded Sappho, an English lesbian magazine and social club.

Today’s Doodle by London-based illustrator Hannah Warren celebrates 91 years of Forster’s passion and pioneering spirit.

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Hirotugu Akaike’s 90th Birthday

If you've ever conducted a statistical analysis, you might’ve spent hours thinking about which variables to include and the impact each would have on the outcome. But to ensure the model itself is accurate, shouldn’t someone measure the measurers?

In the early 1950s, a young Japanese scientist named Hirotugu Akaike asked this simple but crucial question. More than two decades of research later, he presented the answer as a simple equation known as the Akaike Information Criterion. With AIC, analysts select a model from a set of options by measuring how close the results are to the (hypothetical) truth.

For Dr. Akaike, experience was core to creativity. To get ‘a direct feel of random vibrations,’ for example, he bought a scooter and rode it around Mount Fuji. This first-hand experience helped him differentiate between the vibrations of riding on normal and heavily-trucked roads. 

Today’s Doodle portrays Dr. Akaike against a Google-inspired approximation of functions, parameters, and their respective curves.

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Above were a few initial conceptualizations of the Doodle
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Loy Krathong 2017

On this night of the full moon, lotus baskets adorned with candles and incense float along rivers, lakes, and ponds across Thailand. For centuries, people have gathered on this day of the twelfth lunar month that marks an end to the rainy season. In some provinces, thousands of paper lanterns are released up into the sky. It is believed that floating away one’s bad luck (loy) on these flower baskets (krathong) brings blessings and good luck.

The sight of thousands of softly glowing flower baskets floating up and down the country against the backdrop of a moonlit horizon makes this a picturesque and magical Thai festival.  

Doodle by Sophie Diao

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Day of the Dead 2017

For centuries, the indigenous peoples of Mexico have honored death, viewing it as a part of the cycle of nature, rather than fearing it. Today’s Doodle celebrates El Día de los Muertos(the Day of the Dead). On this day, everyday creatures represent those who have passed. Dogs are considered spirit guides, bringing souls to their final resting place, while migrating monarch butterflies are thought to be ancestral spirits come to visit their loved ones. 

Present-day celebrations combine two days ⸺ All Saints' Day on November 1 is devoted to los angelitos (“little children”), and All Souls' Day on November 2 is dedicated to adults.

Candlelit altars of ofrendas (offerings) are laid out in cemeteries to honor loved ones. Sugar skulls, copal incense, vivid marigold flowers, photographs, and sweet pan de muertoare placed to help the dead find their way into the world of the living. This holiday serves as a tremendous source of comfort and community to its observers.

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Abdul Qavi Desnavi’s 87th Birthday

On this day in the year 1930, Urdu author and literary critic Abdul Qavi Desnavi was born in the village of Desna in Bihar. In the course of a literary career that spanned five decades, he authored a vast body of Urdu works covering fiction, biographies, poetry, and anthologies. His most famous works include ‘Sat Tahriren,’ ‘Motala-E-Khotoot Ghalib,’ ‘Talash-E-Azad,’ and his magnum opus, the biographical ‘Hayat-e-Abul Kalam Azad,’ celebrating the life of freedom fighter Maulana Abul Kalam Azad.

As the head of the Urdu Department at Bhopal’s Saifia College and a member of several regional and national literary bodies, he exerted a powerful influence on the evolution of Urdu literature and academic thought in India. At a personal level, he mentored some of India’s finest Urdu poets and writers such as Javed Akhtar and Iqbal Masood.

Today’s Doodle depicts Abdul Qavi Desnavi at his work, the logo stylized in Urdu-style script. Guest artist Prabha Mallya tried a few concepts before landing on the final design.

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Hannah Höch’s 128th Birthday

If a picture is worth a thousand words, Hannah Höch’s pioneering photomontages speak volumes about gender stereotypes and politics, especially during the Weimar Republic era.

Born on this day in 1889, in Gotha, Thuringia, Germany, Höch was the only female member of  the Berlin Dada movement, an avant-garde band of artists that rejected the conventional German Expressionist aesthetic of the moment. As a student, Höch studied applied arts, including glass design, painting, and graphic design. Her romantic involvement with Austrian artist Raoul Hausmann introduced her to the inner circle of Dada artists, inspiring her later photomontage (or fotomontage) collage work.  

Höch showed her most famous photomontage, Cut with the Dada Kitchen Knife through the Last Weimar Beer-Belly Cultural Epoch in Germany, at the First International Dada Fair in 1920. Juxtaposing fragmented images culled from newspapers and magazines, including bits and pieces of movie star Pola Negri, philosopher Karl Marx, and a map of European countries where women could vote, this large-scale piece conveyed her stance on women’s roles in society, art-world misogyny, and current affairs. Later works further revealed Höch’s incisive perspective as a 1920s New Woman who lived by her own rules.

Created by Berlin-based collage artist Patrick Bremer, today’s Doodle uses photomontage imagery and the feeling of brushstrokes to capture Höch’s likeness as one of her own collage characters. “Höch and many other Dadaists have long been an influence in my work, as I expect she is to most artists working in collage,” says Bremer. “Taking on this project meant delving back into her work and visiting it in person at the Berlinische Gallery, and it has been fascinating to surround myself with her unique dada vision of the world.”

Happy birthday, Hannah Höch!

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Here an early sketch and in-process draft of the Doodle being developed in Bremer's studio 1.
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Here an early sketch and in-process draft of the Doodle being developed in Bremer's studio 2.
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Here an early sketch and in-process draft of the Doodle being developed in Bremer's studio 3.
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Here an early sketch and in-process draft of the Doodle being developed in Bremer's studio 4.
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