My brother-in-law gave me a small collection of hats for Christmas. One of the hats was a University of Minnesota ball cap. On the back is stitched "Golden Gophers" in gold thread. I got to thinking about mascot names. The choice for UMinn was natural enough. After all, you probably can't swing a cat without hitting a gopher in Minnesota. A choice like "Golden Scorpions" would have been a stretch, although ridiculous choices in mascot are not that uncommon.

I especially like the "golden" part of the name. Normally, schools/teams don't have an adjective before the fearsome noun: the Eagles; the Bulldogs; etc. But the ones that have adjectives are much more interesting: the Fighting Irish; the Deamon Deacons; the Crimson Tide. Here is a link to Wikipedia's list of college mascots: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_colleges_by_mascot

My alma mater is NYU and I played soccer while I was there. At no time in my tenure at NYU was I aware of a mascot name. Of course, NYU sports at that time flew very far under the radar. We had two varsity sports, soccer and fencing. My father, who was a professor at NYU, told me that the mascot was "The Violets", which I accepted as truth, but I never heard that fact around campus. In fact, the school color was violet (not purple) and we had a symbol, the torch, but as far as I know, no mascot. According to my alumni news, NYU has a mascot now, the Bobcat. This relates back to what I said earlier about ridiculous choices in mascot. Has there ever been a bobcat in Manhattan? What about the NYU "Drunken Homeless", "Street Psychotics", "Subway Fugitives"? The most fearsome would be "the Washington Square Mimes".

A few years ago my kids' school decided that they needed a new mascot. They had been the Bulldogs, a mascot that is claimed by schools in every third town in New England and beyond. If you check the Wikipedia list above, you'll see Bulldogs is also popular with colleges. I have no idea why the Bulldog was chosen originally to be the mascot of the school. Maybe they wanted to sidle up to Yale, who uses a Bulldog as a mascot, but calls their teams the Elis, don't they? I suppose you have to be a Skull and Bones member to know how that came about. After an all-school contest, a new mascot was chosen, "the Shoreliners", which was a train. OK, a train track runs behind the school, but it is a little used branch freight line. The street in front of the school is Shore Drive. You can see the derivation of the new mascot, but it is not much better than the Bulldogs. For reasons that are not clear to me, the new mascot initiative was dropped, so the school is still, along with many of their rivals, the Bulldogs.

Using adjectives, I'll bet we could spice up the mascot naming considerably. Why not the "Rabid Bulldogs". "Flesh-eating Pit Bulls"? Moving it back to Worcester, they could have gone with "Disabled Civil Servants" or, one of my favorites, the "Quinsigmoids". "Indian Lake Tide" (they drop the level of the lake every winter and refill in spring).

• "The Gay Tower"
• "Brattle Stop" (may have to buy the rights to this name)
• "I-190ers", doesn't slip off the tongue too well does it?

Where this is going reminds me of the contests Worcester Magazine used to run where readers could send in their slogans for the city. There were some real beauts. If I can find them, I'll post them.

To wrap it up, mascots are fun - some more than others. I encourage you all to get your kids' schools to engage in a renaming process. It brings out the really ridiculous in nearly everyone for lost of different reasons. Work on your alma maters too. Challenge them to update their mascots, history be damned. Get a mascot that does some heavy lifting. "The Crimson"? Really? That's as bad as "The Violets", but suffers from being actually used. I'll bet the Harvard Lampoon could come up with a better mascot. Maybe they have already.

Got any favorites? Got any suggestions for mascots? Post them.