lovehatethings

The minor league baseball logos may not be the best designed or, in some cases, even appropriate for a baseball team, but they are funny or evoke a smile.

1. Las Vegas 51s - notice the Star Trek font and the alien head with baseball stitching calling an homage to the the mysterious government installation "somewhere" in Nevada.

2. Montgomery Biscuits - C'mon people! It's a smiling biscuit with a butter pad tongue!

3. Modesto Nuts - They need the SlapChop soundbite "How do you like my nuts?" played over the public address at every game.

4. Lansing Lugnuts - Looks more like something out of Mad Magazine than a sports logo. Why the solitary jutting tooth on Mr. Lugnut?

5. Fort Wayne Tin Caps - It's an apple wearing an upside-down pot on its head. Throw in a melting clock and you could sell this at a college poster sale.

6. Savannah Sand Gnats - That's one buff sand gnat with one flaccid looking bat.

7. Jamestown Jammers - Meet the ancestor of the California Raisin or the cousin of the Fruit of the Loom mascot. I guess they couldn't get the rights to put a picture of Phish or Jerry Garcia.

8. Casper Ghosts - Not too friendly looking. The name was an obvious choice. The logo looks like something from a Misfits album... creepy!

Never let it be said that the iPod touch cannot be used for a long form blog post. I said in a recent podcast that I never thought I'd be podcasting about hockey, but I'm Canadian, and after some 70 or so podcasts and a couple hundred blog entries, I think I'm entitled come playoff season. As I sit in a Montana's in Mississauga (restaurant chain for the uninitiated) I am watching the NHL playoffs on multiple TVs and recalling a few memorable times that hockey has influenced my life.
 
The only time I ever felt like a sports hero was at age seven when I scored an overtime goal on a breakaway and, for the first time in my life, intentionally lifted the puck off the ice for the winner. And while I enjoyed many other moments playing hockey, that moment ranked right up there.
 
A couple of decades later I had bit more of a surreal hockey moment when I spent the one semester if my post-secondary life in a university residence during Teachers' College. Sitting in our floor's TV lounge/common area, a group of us foul- mouthed Canadians in a US Teacher Ed. program (all guys in the room at the time mind you - and at a university that still bore the vestiges of a Franciscan monestary... save your Catholic jokes for later) learned that Mario Lemieux had been stricken with cancer in the prime of his career. In the five months I spent in that dorm, I never heard the place so quiet... eerily so. You wouldn't think that a collection of some of the most misogynist mouths I'd ever heard could be stunned into silence at the news of a hockey player's illness. No one spoke for several minutes, or at least until the next gratuitous sex-filled beer commercial anyway.
 
The last hockey memory comes in the form of a trip to Las Vegas. The moment itself was hardly earth-shattering, but did suffice in conveying a vast gulf between two culture. On the one occasion I've been to Vegas in October, I happened to be sitting in the MGM Sportsbook in front of a sea of television screens (a place I often refer to as Valhalla). That night was a major playoff game between the Red Sox and the Yankees and the room was full of fans in official MLB attire hootin' and hollerin' as their teams played what I'm sure was an amazing. My friend and I, however, sat at the far end of the room watching two small screen that were playing NHL games. It was the opening night of the regular season. The games were insignificant. I think Minnesota and the Ducks may have been involved. And we were in our glory.
 
There was a popular beer campaign a few years back that rifled off a dozen reasons to claim "I AM Canadian". And while I would never claim that Canadians have a sole claim on the game that I was raised with, I never watched one of those commercials without thinking, how many people could explain the following: Peter Puck, putting the biscuit in the basket, straddling the blue line, going roof, Savardian Spinnerama, neutral zone trap, or why 92 goals or 215 points in a season are feats of biblical proportions.

Okay, so we've all heard about the White House's bowling alley and, if not, now you know. Suffice to say that there's been talk of removing the bowling alley altogether under an Obama presidency. To this news, Jim Sturm, President of the Bowling Proprietor's Association of America claims:

"It would be a sad, sad day" if Mr. Obama scrapped the bowling lane... I think his political analysts ought to take a long look at removing [it]. It could have a long-term impact on his political prospects."

Really!?! Can you believe the size of the three-holed balls on the Sturm to think that he can strike at Obama's presidency and topple his political future? People are losing their houses all over the country and there's talk of retrofitting a bowling alley? Here's an idea Sturm, take the retrofit money and make someone's mortgage payments. That alley looks better than 90% of the recrooms in America anyway... well in Austin Powers' vision of America.

Then again, I'm Canadian... if they tried to take the hockey rink from under 24 Sussex Drive, I might be pissed off too.