Comparing APLs and Eagles

On p. 21 of my Lv1 book, the note under Fig. 3 includes a homemade acronym for the 3 "almost-parallel lines" seen on the x2x icons: "APL". When I began writing it in 2003, my goal was to remain as objective/neutral as possible with regard to the various interpretations of the icon (sun rays, light beams, scroll folds, bird feathers, or something else). On the next page, Fig. 4 showed an eagle since the icon had been interpreted thus; in fact, my drawing came from an actual museum placard:

As I went for my typical walk around the block during a work-break yesterday, I was practically floored to see the following gigantic logo staring at me from the side of an 18-wheeler truck, which was making a delivery to a yoga-mat warehouse:

It turns out to be one of the oldest shipping companies in business, American President Lines (named thus after its ships, which were named after ... wait for it ... American presidents). That photo's cropped from their website since it resembles the blue truck I saw (& I pasted a blue-letter version from their website that isn't angled). Here's a direct link to a large, detailed version of their logo (protected by copyright) at WikiMedia.



G.M. Grena