Dogs with flippers, and other oddities

Chances are you’ve never heard of Mr. Moon.

Which is a shame, because Mr. Moon is a golden god – in the realm of sports mascots, anyway, which is a group as eclectic as the contestants in a Miss America pageant. The difference is that, being a generally higher-I.Q. bunch, the mascots would likely be able to cobble together more coherent proposals for world peace.

The Asheville Tourists, a single-A  baseball team in North Carolina, are lucky enough to call Mr. Moon their own. His head looks more or less the way you would expect it to – it’s a giant moon, of course – with a vaguely creepy sexual predator-type smile, and a blue cap cocked jauntily askew somewhere atop the Sea of Tranquility. That a team called the Tourists boasts a giant moon-headed freak for a mascot doesn’t make a whole lot of sense; the moon has never been a tourist, and if it ever becomes one, then humanity’s days are probably numbered. In that event, you can be assured of three things: Families will embrace each other sorrowfully on their front lawns as they gather to watch the collision; kooky religious groups will drink lots of Kool-Aid while wearing funny hats; and those who would otherwise avoid LSD will ingest it by the pound. I’d join this last group, only because I’ve never had a conversation with a blue-and-yellow garden gnome riding a talking hippopotamus.

This naturally begs the question: Why a moon? Luckily, the answer doesn’t matter. Whatever connection there might be between tourists and moons is irrelevant, because a mascot’s randomness is often the very thing that makes it a giddy pleasure.

Take Wally, for example. If you’ve ever caught a Red Sox game at Fenway, you’ve likely seen this endearing little creature. In Wally’s case, the connection to his team is a little more clear – Fenway Park is known for an outfield wall called the Green Monster, and Wally is, well, a green monster. But when the braintrust over in Soxville sat down to sketch out what Wally would look like, all they had to go by was that nebulous description. Wally could’ve looked like anything. He could have been green with an elephant snout and antennae; he could have been green and looked like a young Larry King. As it turns out, he conjures images of an illicit lovechild between Oscar the Grouch and Pat Sajak. See what I mean? Random.

Of all the major sports, none top baseball when it comes to boasting a wealth of ludicrous characters. Look no further than our own Portland Sea Dogs, a team with brochures and merchandise besmattered with the lovable Slugger, a weird looking fish-dog that could have ruled the seas in any Greek myth. In its most common usage, “sea dog” is a slang term for seaman, and was presumably coined so that middle schoolers could avoid a term that causes uncontrollable giggling during sex-ed flashbacks. In a stroke of artistic reinterpretation pulled from the dreams of hopeless psychiatric patients, the Sea Dogs brass simply took a gray-colored dog and slapped fins on it – thereby birthing a creature that would have given Darwin fits of apoplexy. In statue form, Slugger towers over visitors to Hadlock Field like an angry mutant chasing a terrified throng of black-and-white Japanese people.

This weirdness is a selling point. Every time the Sea Dogs play a home game, the stretches of time between innings – when pitchers warm up their arms, and the sound of palms on buttocks echo throughout the land – are filled with bizarre Slugger antics. In the most common one, a lucky boy or girl from the audience, usually no older than five, is chosen to engage the oddball animal in a  footrace around the diamond; first one back to home plate wins. Invariably, Slugger trips over the third-base bag marking the final stretch, highlighting the evolutionary disadvantages of being a bipedal aquatic mutt. It’s a surreal moment, watching a fish-dog lose a footrace to an uncoordinated toddler. But that’s what makes it so oddly entertaining. For all his offbeat strangeness, Slugger adds a dimension that would otherwise leave us wanting, somehow. He takes the serious business of baseball and makes it silly and self-depracating.

That’s what the best mascots do. Heck, that’s what the worst mascots do. And there are some stinkers out there. Xavier University in Cincinnati is represented by a curious beanbag of a creation called the Blue Blob, which looks like a dinosaur turd wrapped in a frayed Snuggie. Southern Illinois University is home to Saluki, an ancient Egyptian hunting dog, which seems as out-of-place as a Maine black bear in Thailand; and Delta State University in Cleveland features the Fighting Okra. Okra, for the uninitiated, is a flowering plant used in various delicacies. It’s delicious. It’s also a stupid mascot.

But I bet he makes people smile, which is the point. Sports are meant to be a diversion from the seriousness of real life, and these wacky mutant weirdos are a natural extension of that. Part of the fun of building a sports franchise, I would imagine, would be inventing the next great google-eyed misfit. It’s enough to make a guy break out his sketch pad and start working out designs.

Mr. Moon? Meet Mr. Sun.

Grateful bed

Making a bed isn’t the most unpleasant chore in the world. That distinction would probably fall to an odious activity involving a sponge, my hands and knees, and an uncomfortably close proximity to the toilet bowl; it’s always a firm reminder that, no matter how we dress ourselves or assume airs of dignity, we’re still stupendously gross.

So if it came down to a choice of how I wanted to spend my afternoon – making the bed or cleaning the bathroom – bed-making wins every time. Unlike a bathroom’s stark assertion of reality, a bed (if done right) is a pillowy, sweet-smelling fantasyland, helping us forget that, a few thousand years ago, the closest you’d come to a Sealy mattress was a bale of hay that smelled like goats.

Advances in bed technology notwithstanding, society is still overdue for a robot that’ll put sheets on the stupid thing – because of all the chores that exist, from dusting the bookcase to polishing that bronze replica of William Shatner’s original toupee, making a bed from scratch takes way more time than it ought to. A guy working alone to make a queen-sized bed is like someone who’s color blind trying to solve a Rubik’s Cube. It can be done, but only with perseverance, and maybe a handle of bourbon for the headaches.

Now when I say “making the bed,” I’m talking about just after a wash, when you have to re-layer it from the ground up with various sheets and comforters and whatnot. Everyday bed-making, the kind you do in the morning when you get up, is no big deal – especially if you’re a person like me who’s decided to just not do it. If I lived at the zoo, and my bed was in the middle of that faux jungle where the tigers live, then yeah, for the public’s sake, I’d probably make my bed (all the while wondering why the hell I live at the zoo). But my bedroom doesn’t typically draw that kind of an audience, and so I decided long ago that I would merely leave the sheets as-is in the morning. That’s one of those moves you make when you’re a bachelor and want to save some time. It’s the same reasoning that explains why I walk around with the kind of three-day beard growth that makes me look like a Sherpa guiding mountain climbers to base camp.

When you do a wash, though, you’re faced with the inevitable. Carrying a fresh load back to the bedroom embodies such a stark dichotomy of emotion: On the one hand, there is perhaps no smell more heavenly, no bundle more pleasantly warm and inviting, than a pile of freshly-washed bedsheets. On the other hand, knowledge of the impending fiasco transforms the walk back from the dryer into a kind of death march, laden with concerns over how to get the corners just right, and how sheet-wrinkles are the great unspoken scourge of humankind. If only we could sequester that glorious odor from the chore it foreshadows. One of these days I’ll open a business where people can just come in and smell dryer-fresh sheets for five bucks a sniff, then be on their merry ways.

Again, this is mainly a problem if you’re flying solo. The lucky ones are the couples who do chores together; they can dress a bed in about five minutes flat, while cartoon bluebirds perched atop the bedposts sing selections from various Disney movies. It’s a simple thing when there are two. One person grabs one end, one grabs the other, and the next thing you know the deed is done and they’re sacked out on the couch watching “Storage Wars.”

Meanwhile, I’m crouched over my mattress like a feral wolverine, trying desperately to keep the corners of my fitted sheet from popping up. The problem with fitted sheets in particular is that you can never differentiate between the long and the short sides; in a perfect world, the corners of the sheet would be color-coded, with giant arrows pointing the way, and large text that reads, “This part goes under the upper-left-hand corner of the mattress, dufus.” As much as it might sting to be called a dufus by my bedsheets, it would be worth it to avoid what’s currently inevitable: Tucking the wrong corner under the wrong part of the mattress, and then watching it pop back up and curl in on itself about halfway through the ordeal. It’s enough to make a guy go back to goaty hay bales.

And of course, with my severely limited skills in this department, the uppermost sheets are just a smoldering train wreck. Uneven, lumpy; there are oatmeal cookies that have smoother surfaces than my bed on laundry day.

It’s because of hapless dopes like me that they need to invent a bed-making robot, and believe me, I’m the first to complain about the overabundance of gadgets and thingamabobs. Most are unnecessary, like smartphones with apps that show you the proper way to shave superhero insignias onto your dog’s buttocks. But every once in a while, these tech manufacturers get it right. We’ve seen it with those weird-looking automatic vacuuming contraptions, and beds seem like the next logical frontier.

Anything to facilitate a decent-looking setup. My bed may be hidden from the world for now, but it seems wise to plan for the contingency that I do somehow end up in the tiger cage.

Hey, it could happen.

Spaced out

Whenever I hear someone complaining about NASA’s budget, I feel like clobbering them with one of those Marvin the Martian dolls you win at state fairs. And then I don’t, because that would be dumb.

Still, that folks find the space agency overfunded and irrelevant is an irksome fact, particularly if you’re the kind of person that sees a photo of Saturn and starts drooling like a bacon-starved Doberman. Space enthusiasts tend to be a nerdy bunch, and I’m not about to claim exemption from this club; even our relatively small solar system, a mere speck of dust in the galaxy, fills us with a kind of wonder not unfamiliar to small children and drug addicts – perhaps the only two social groups that can stare at a pink nebula for hours without once thinking about work or frilly underthings.

That wonder, by itself, isn’t reason enough to keep the space agency in a decent cash flow. But as it turns out, it doesn’t need to be.

Remember the moon landing? Of course you do. That’s like asking if you remember your first kiss, or the first time you realized Glenn Beck was clinically insane. (I’m not above dated cheap shots.) Even if you weren’t alive in ‘69, you’ve seen that grainy, black-and-white footage of Neil Armstrong taking his first tentative steps. It had an impact beyond just giving Americans license to stick out their tongues and say “neener-neener” to those vodka-swilling commies in the Soviet.

The legacy of the Apollo program was that it inspired young people to pursue careers in science and engineering, which was no small feat considering the myriad distractions of the time, like growing out one’s hair so as to resemble a sasquatch with radiation poisoning. Because we live in a world increasingly populated by technology, having a workforce versed in these fields is almost an economic necessity. Which is a troubling reality, because as it stands now, the science that captivates most young people these days is the science of generating hits on YouTube; while you and I benefit by getting to watch videos of drunken teenagers lighting their farts on fire, few of these geniuses would be able to tell you that the flammable gas in question is methane. (And if these clods knew their geometry, they could get a decent angle going on the lighter.)

I don’t have to tell you about the woefully crappy state of the American educational system. We’re reminded of it all the time. We rank this in math, and that in science, and we stink at reading, and the whole sorry mess sucks cow manure through a straw. We get it. And while there are a lot of systemic flaws that are to blame, and a comprehensive overhaul is obviously overdue, we could at least start by inspiring children to become literate in the fundamental laws of nature and the universe. At its best, that’s what NASA does.

Can I geek out for a minute? Like, massively geek out? I’ve been fascinated, in the last couple of years, by astronomy and physics. Let’s skip over what this implies about my social life – point is, I can’t seem to get enough of this stuff. One of the most mind-blowing things I’ve learned is that a lot of the heavier elements, including the ones that make up our bodies, are actually created on the insides of dying stars. As a star runs out of fuel, it starts losing its battle with gravity; and as gravity crushes it, that pressure starts to “cook” elements like silicon, zinc, carbon, and a bunch of other stuff you find in your morning multivitamin. Then the dying star starts producing iron, and that’s the final nail in the coffin – turns out stars don’t like iron very much. The iron causes the star to explode, spewing all of these newly created elements into the cosmos, and seeding it with raw materials for the next generation of stars, planets, and smarmy game show hosts. Think about that the next time you cook eggs in an iron frying pan.

 Knowledge like that changes the way you see certain things. And it’s information that’s verified, and sometimes discovered outright, by the work of NASA scientists – who, in the course of their research, will often stumble upon the development of new technologies, including laser light therapy procedures that ease the painful side effects of cancer treatments. The cost for all this? According to the Office of Management and Budget, about four-tenths of a penny per tax dollar. Annually, Americans spend thousands of times that amount on Cheetos and rentals of old Police Academy movies.

You know what? Double it. Make it a penny per tax dollar. I’m sure the suggestion would send fiscal conservatives into paroxysms of foamy rage, but hopefully the cooler heads among them – the ones with business backgrounds, perhaps – would be familiar with a concept called return on investment. See, we get something for that money. And I’m not talking about the thrill of seeing a human being step foot on Mars, although that would undoubtedly rank as the coolest event in human history since the invention of the Game Boy.

What we get, my terrestrial friends, is a legion of young adults with a renewed interest in fields that will determine whether the U.S. stays globally competitive. We get a wealth of side technologies that make our lives easier, and in some cases, saves them. But more importantly – at least to us nerdy types – we gain an ever-deeper understanding of the laws governing the cosmos, and the origins of the universe itself. Most of us, to varying degrees, feel that gnawing need to know. Maybe that’s because, on some deep intrinsic level, we see a star or a gas cloud and sense that we’re made of the same stuff; it’s a connection all living things must feel, if they could only tune out the interference. We are the universe. It’s literally in each of us.

Kids and teens, facing an ailing educational system, deserve to know that. In the long run, we can fix what’s broken in a series of small steps. In the short run, we need something more dramatic.

Like, say, a giant leap.

Working out the Bugs

All right. So I have to drag a friend into this with me.

As always, names will be changed to protect the not-so-innocent. Let’s call her “Mania,” after the Greek goddess that, in myth, helped rule the underworld and personified insanity. Usually I choose an appellation far more benign, but in this case, Mania’s transgression is so grievous, so heinous and villainous and other words that end in -ous, that I had to give her the nastiest moniker possible without outright cursing.

The crime? Talking smack about Bugs Bunny.

The brazenness! The unmitigated gall! Obviously, Mania is out of her gourde.

Now, if you follow my babblings closely – you glutton for weirdness, you – you’ll notice that I’m something of a man-child. In most outward appearances, I seem to be a man. I shave, I pay bills, and I grunt my approval when I bite into a particularly delicious slice of pie. Those are pretty much the prerequisites for admittance into the club, aside from a willingness to scratch one’s self at inappropriate times, like when you’re a groomsman standing at the altar and your buddy’s making his vows. I still owe the wedding photographer a nice steak dinner for that one.

But beneath the veneer of adulthood there lurks the heart of an adolescent. A childish, childish adolescent. This is what happens when you have a hard time letting go of certain things, like Spaghetti O’s and the Ninja Turtles. Although, to be fair, both of those things are extremely awesome.

I consider myself something of a Looney Tunes aficionado, which is like being a wine aficionado, only it results in way fewer second dates. Bugs was always the man, the Michael Jordan of cartoon rabbits. He was, admittedly, kind of a schmuck, but if you’re a cartoon character or a U.S. Senator, schmuckiness is actually an asset. What you want, in any well-constructed seven-minute cartoon, is a troublemaker, someone who can get the ball rolling without a whole lot of preamble. This isn’t King Lear in three acts; this is a pie in the face, a wabbit hunt, and then some kind of comical explosion, all in the time it takes to make a blueberry waffle. That requires an instigator. And, for the creators, probably a lot of beer.

Bugs is the perfect catalyst, because everything he does is for his own amusement. Again, that plays to the whole putz factor, but there’s something admirable about it, too; it gives him a laissez-faire comportment that I think most of us wish we had, to an extent. Not that we actively want to be jerks, necessarily – we can’t all be Tom Cruise. (Oh, snap! Dated reference!) But there’s something attractive about passive confidence, the ability to be an unimpassioned observer to someone else’s farcical follies. It’s possible I’ve given this way too much thought.

Who else, in the Looney Tunes universe, has that Bond-like smirk and swagger? Certainly not Porky Pig. If Mania wanted to rip into a cartoon character, she should have chosen this timid, pantsless priss. Porky’s claim to fame, of course, is the endearing stutter, which I’ll admit is kind of cute. But you don’t base an entire body of work on a single personality quirk, unless you’re Ray Romano, in which case you make your living being slightly dopey. The trouble with Porky is that he’s just too nice. I didn’t tune into The Bugs Bunny & Tweety Show on Saturday mornings to watch a stuttering pig being polite. Maybe that would fly in Canada, oinker, but this is ‘merica. We require a little rudeness from our cartoons.

Years ago, in college, a friend of mine gave me grief for preferring Bugs over characters like Wile E. Coyote and Daffy Duck, who apparently have more street cred, like they’re underground rappers or something. The argument was that Bugs is a figurehead, a mascot of sorts, and is therefore bland and lame. But I can prove he’s not; because if Bugs were real, and caught wind of this silly college boy’s disparaging remarks, he’d burrow a tunnel to Maine (taking an ever-important left turn at Albuquerque), light a firecracker under that wabbit-hater’s butt, and watch as he’s launched into the stratosphere, yelping like a ticklish yodeler. Then he’d munch on a carrot and have Anti-Bugs Boy’s girlfriend fan him with palm fronds. If that isn’t hard scientific proof of Bugs’ greatness, then may an Acme anvil squash me into a human accordion.

Clearly I need to find more important things to get bent out of shape about.

As trivial as this disagreement is, though, I’m caught up in a powerful compulsion to convince Mania of the wabbit’s worthiness. This means one of two things: Either I’m overly defensive of my childhood interests, or I’m dangerously close to going off the rails and doing cartwheels down Main Street while wearing a fairy costume and whistling “Jumpin’ Jack Flash.” Those of you playing our home game can start making bets.

Mania, I implore you to re-think your position – consider this your open letter. The rest of you have been witness to a light-hearted dispute, whose resolution is hopefully near. So let’s break it up, people; nothing more to see here.

That’s all, folks.