It's Friday...

Thank goodness it's Friday. I'm ready for the weekend...it's been just either crazy busy or utterly boring here all week. Today is the computer department's Christmas luncheon...yippee. The gift exchange...well, I bought my recipient a demotivational calendar from despair.com. It's a pretty funny site.

Anyway, in other news, Bojo pointed this out to me and it is pretty funny...Princeton lost the lowest scoring game since the 3-point line was put in place. Princeton was able to put up a staggering 21 points. "Obviously, we just couldn't score," Princeton coach Joe Scott said. Well, I think that might be the understatement of the year. I could put Granny's church-league basketball team on the court against the Spurs and they would put up 21. Twenty-one points...how sad.

Lastly this morning, I ran into this on Everyday Should Be Saturday. It's an article about college mascots...I think it's pretty good. Here's the best part...

At their best, they (mascots) can channel the spirit of the assembled crowd into a single, ridiculously costumed avatar to behold, worship, fear, or if you're in the visitor's section, toss a beverage at. A superb case study in just how iconic a single, costumed individual can be to a college football program is the West Virginia Mountaineer.

The Mountaineer could have looked like something out of a Disney Davy Crockett movie, but WVU kept it real when they came up with the outfit and the casting. First, the Mountaineer has to be big-as in big enough to play for the team, or at least look that way from the stands. Burly is the word, here, complete with a full beard. He wears a buckskin suit and a raccoon cap, sure, but no Hollywood looking chamois or faux fur will do; the Mountaineer wears dark, unevenly colored, and oily cloth that looks like the tanned hide of an undetermined bit of roadkill, and the hat looks as if it will crawl bleeding off his head at any moment. The piece-de-resistance comes with the addition of a musket he totes around (note: not a rifle, but an antediluvian musket that fires with powder) and the frequent absence of shoes in warmer games.

The Mountaineer, more than any other mascot we know, represents the ideal role of accurately projecting the collective image of the fanbase onto a single palette. The Mountaineer doesn't do anything fancy. He doesn't flip, or lead namby-pamby cheers, or dance little jigs. He screams like a banshee and brandishes a firearm for the better part of four quarters, basking in the whiskey-infused roar of the Morgantown crowd and screaming back at them like a redneck Incredible Hulk. When the Mountaineers score, he fires his rifle in the air, and West Virginia fans go insane. The best tribute we can give the Mountaineer is this: he's our odds-on favorite in our own dream version of "Mascot Death Match," with or without the musket.