Complex Numbers

Branding

The penultimate entry into this round of "Journalistic Intentions"  [18+]:

Bobcats are fighting pythons

Actually, I just like saying "penultimate." Kid Me took a while to figure that one out, because it was before the internet and I never could be arsed to open a dictionary for a word that gets used so rarely. So for a long time I thought it was a synonym of "ultimate," like how "inflammable" means the same thing as "flammable."

Speaking of English weirdness, the sentence up there is ambiguous again. Are bobcats really pythons who are fighting? That would certainly be surreal. I like it. Let's go with that. Oh, wait, no, I guess the bobcats are fighting against pythons.

Pretty sure there are a few high school sportsball teams called the Bobcats. Are any called the Pythons? Probably. There are a lot of high schools in the US, and sometimes you have to get creative with the names. I went to two high schools, in succession. I didn't move; a new school got built and I was in its district. We all got to vote on the name of the new school. Now, what you need to know is that the mascot of the elementary school I attended, which didn't have organized sports (and they never let me play the disorganized ones because I was a nerd), was the Little Indians. You'll see why in a second. The middle school was the Spartans, for some utterly obscure reason. And the first high school was the Indians (which of course explains the elementary school mascot). So, two years into high school, and I never got to be at a school whose spirit animal was... well... an animal.

I should point out right now that yes, of course these days we understand that a lot of "Indian" type mascots are horribly racist. However. The high school's nickname was chosen in acknowledgement of the local tribe. As soon as people started seriously questioning things like "Redskins," naturally (and appropriately), they started to question that one as well. So they did the right thing and actually asked the tribe, many of whom had gone to that high school.

Basically, the tribe said, "We like the name, but lose the feathered headdress. That's not even historically accurate." So they changed the logo but kept the name.

Anyway. As I was saying, after two years as an Indian (the mascot, not the heritage), they went to choose a name for the new high school and had us vote on it. Whether our votes were fairly counted is a question we will never know the answer to, but at least they pretended to give us input into what the school would be branded as. This being before the Internet, no one suggested "Schooly McSchoolFace." But, as it was 1981 and all the cool kids were reading X-Men comics when we weren't fanning ourselves over Star Wars, we (supposedly; I'm still not convinced the vote was fair) collectively decided on the Wolverines.

So even though I finally went to school with a nominally animal mascot, I knew, deep inside, along with all the other kids who voted for that name, that it was actually named after a fictional Canadian mutant antihero whose only connection to anything in the area was... well... nothing.

Hey, while we're on the subject of mascots, there's a professional sportsball team nominally out of New York called the Jets. They're actually based in New Jersey, though, which is yet another example of how New Jersey gets fucked out of the spotlight in favor of a few islands to its northeast. But I digress. Would it really be too much to ask that another NFL team change its name (the team formerly known as the Redskins had the chance, but blew it) to the Sharks?

I mean, come on. That would be awesome. You know that would be awesome; admit it. Jets. Versus. Sharks.