Your Eyes Are Right: The Dog Has Changed

Many of you have already written questioning your own sanity and asking me if there is a different Yellow Dog than the one you have become accustomed to on the blog masthead.

Your eyes do not deceive you. As much as I loved the fighting spirit of the old Yellow Dog, I ran into some sudden and unexpected trademark issues with the graphic's use. After consulting with a lawyer-buddy who knows a fair amount about patent and copyright law – and doing some trademark research as well – we discovered that I was indeed using a logo whose trademark was owned by someone else.

This was brought to my attention by a sharp-eyed reader, not the people who can assert legitimate ownership over my old "mascot" and I truly had no idea that this was the case. While there are undoubtedly ways I could have continued to use the old logo, it seemed correct from both a practical and ethical point of view to take the issue off the table.

Having searched high and low, we came up with some dogs that looked remarkably similar to the old one, but that required too much work to make a decent-looking blog graphic – and I'm a writer, with no talent whatsoever as a graphic artist.

So there you have it. I miss the old guy but, as my wife points out, the new dog is looking us all right in the eye – a straightforward approach I like, versus the old dog who was snarling at some conservative sighted in the distance.

Anyway, the new dog's starting to grow on me already – I hope you'll come to love him too.