Wednesday, June 15, 2011

The Los Angeles Marauding Hornet Squad of Despair

I like when sports teams have really stupid names.* I mean, when you really want to scare the hell out of someone else, there really isn't anything more intimidating than calling yourselves "The Lakers", is there?** And I just can't imagine being able to not crap my pants at the thought of going head-to-head with "The Jazz".*** I mean, if your home city doesn't have any really scary animals, I'm sure you can just make some up and call the team that. Hell, Detroit did it. I am reasonably certain that there are no Lions in Detroit, but they went with it anyway. Of course, they could have ALSO come up with something relevant AND intimidating, like "The Detroit Trucks-That-Run-People-Over" or "The Detroit Gas Shortage". That's pretty scary.

Hockey gets the worst of this. Sure, "The River Flames" is sort of cool-ish, but it sounds more like the name of an indie band from Manhattan,**** not a group of people who regularly punches other groups of people in the face while wearing ice skates. I don't live anywhere near Cleveland and don't care about sports in the slightest, but I would totally follow a team called "The Cleveland Robots".

Overall, I think professional sports teams need to take advice from eight-year-old boys more often. Ask some third-graders to make up a team name, and you'll inevitably end up with something like "The San Marcos Elementary Giant Killer Death Bees", even if they're just playing Scrabble. In fact, we should probably just let third-graders name everything from now on. It would certainly make life more interesting.

Go ahead and make your own "Horrendous Space Kablooie" joke. I'll wait.

*I'm beginning to notice that whenever I start a post with "I like it when X", it almost invariably means that I'm going to be describing something that I don't actually like at all. I can't tell if that's sarcasm, bad writing, or both.
**I am aware that they're named after the lakes in Michigan. Shockingly, I don't care.
***I am also aware that, technically, there is no "The" in their name, but just calling them "Jazz" would be an offense to every rule of grammar ever, and saying "The Utah Jazz" would've ruined my flow. Kind of like how this footnote completely lacks any sort of comedic timing whatsoever.
****As if there existed indie bands from anywhere else.

No comments:

Post a Comment