America is a strange country in many ways. I guess all countries are weird to a certain extent, but America seems to have a passion for it.
For instance, squirty cheese, inserting unnecessary Zs into words, daft gun laws, and the president.
Deep in the forest of America’s weirdness is their love of mascots. They aren’t the only country to love mascots, Japan springs to mind, but America really has gone to town with its mascotry.
Every football team, college, and business seems to have one. It’s almost mandatory.
Despite decades of practice, the Americans are still pretty darned awful at inventing mascots. Perhaps it’s because there are so many already in existence, which makes it difficult to invent new ones, or maybe they’ve just given up trying.
But, to give them their dues, I’ve had a great deal of fun looking through these college mascot abominations:
Mascot of Scottsdale Community College since the early 1970s, Artie looks like a bad joke.
The best thing is, he actually was meant to be a bad joke. Students in the early 70s were annoyed that too much money was being splurged on the sports team.
So, when they were asked to democratically vote on the team’s name, they chose “The Fighting Artichokes” and voted that the team should wear pink and white.
The college university decided to ignore the vote and chose a boring name.
The students went mad. A second vote was taken, the Artichoke was once again victorious, and this time it stuck. Nowadays, everyone loves the artichoke, and it’s easy to see why.
Mascot of Ohio Wesleyan. Nice.
The Blob is the mascot of Xavier University; actually, he’s one of two. The other is a relatively sensible musketeer.
The Blue Blob was invented because the mustachioed, sword-wielding musketeer was scaring the kids, so they brought in a massive furry blue blob instead.
The Blue Blob has become pretty famous in his own right, and even made an appearance in Playboy magazine.
Sorry, what? A train? No, sorry Purdue University, you’ve done it wrong.
Apparently, in the 1890s, Purdue was at the forefront of railway technology. Personally, I think they need to move on.
Now that’s better. It makes a lot more sense for a beer keg to be a mascot than a friggin’ train.
Well done Vassar College. Matthew Vassar set up the college, and he was a brewer, so there you go.
The mascot of the University of Arkansas is a giant green weevil called Monticello. Good, right?
You have The Ohio State University to thank for this monstrosity. The head is supposed to resemble the Ohio buckeye (Aesculus glabra), a type of horse chestnut.
The Ohio buckeye is the official state tree of Ohio… Yeah, I didn’t know states had official trees, either.
FYI: Arkansas’ state tree is the loblolly pine, and Missouri has the flowering dogwood. I thought you should know.
University of Louisiana. This is a chilli pepper if you were trying to work it out.
Chief Illiniwek was the official mascot of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign until he was retired in 2007 for being… well… racist, basically.
No prizes for guessing which state this guy comes from: Eastern Kentucky University.
This guy’s from DePaul University. Ahhhh… there’s nothing like a demonic figure to bring folks together over sports, is there?
St. Louis College of Pharmacy. Eutectic?:
“…relating to or denoting a mixture of substances (in fixed proportions) that melts and freezes at a single temperature that is lower than the melting points of the separate constituents or of any other mixture of them.”
That’ll do for now. Stay tuned, I might do a PART 2 one of these days. I enjoyed that.
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