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Notice: All logos on this page are included within the parameters of 17 U.S.C. § 107, which states that the reproduction of a copyrighted work for purposes of criticism and/or comment is not an infringement of copyright. No challenge to the copyrights of these logos is intended by their inclusion here. Posted 2013 July 20 As soon as I saw that the next team up for review was the Brevard County Manatees, my first thought was to work in some kind of "Oh, the humanity!" pun. I quickly decided against it. I couldn't let myself go for such an obvious joke. I couldn't let myself stoop to making bad puns. I couldn't think of a way to work it in. The team, however, did find a way to work it in, and so they named their mascot Hugh (although it was later changed to Manny). Once I learned that, I became determined to work some horrible pun into this review. But "humanity" had been done, so I had to find another word. There was just one problem: I couldn't think of one. Well, there's "inhumanity", of course, but that's not really a different word, seeing as how it's just the same word with a prefix tacked onto it. Fortunately, you can find anything on the internet, and "anything" is a category that includes "website where you enter a series of letters and it shows you all words in the English language that end in those letters". Figuring that any other word that fit the bill would end in either "-manity" or "mannity", I plugged those two sequences of letters in. And indeed there are two other words that end in "-manity". Unfortunately, they are "supermanity" and "aldermanity". Okay, so they're not the same root (believe it or not, the words "human" and "man" are etymologically unrelated), but they're still not different enough. And besides, how the hell do you work "aldermanity" into a sentence? So I laid aside the "manatee" inanity, and turned my attention to actually critiquing the name and logo. There's no doubt that manatees count as native fauna along the Florida coast (the stadium where the manatees play is less than five miles from the water), but...well, it's not the meanest looking animal in the ocean, is it? I suppose there is a certain intimidation factor in its sheer size (roughly 1,000 lbs), but it's got to be the least scary-looking thousand-pound creature known to man. In fact, it is so not-scary that in pre-Columbian times (this is true) people used to hunt it by luring it close to a canoe, at which point they would hit it over the head with a big stick. Cows weigh about 1,000 pounds. Would you try to hunt a bull by luring it close to you and hitting it with a big stick? Not more than once, you wouldn't. As for the logo, you might assume that the Manatees are affiliated with the Washington Nationals thanks to the similarities in their logos (red, white, and blue color scheme; logo that includes the name of the team obscuring a BIC and featuring a red banner). The Nationals do in fact play their spring training games in the stadium that the Manatees use during the regular season, but the Manatees are not and never have been affiliated with the Nationals. They were, however, affiliated with the Montreal Expos until the year the Expos moved to Washington. But the Expos logo looked nothing like the Nationals logo, so I can only assume the similarity is coincidental. They've gone out of their way to make the manatee in the logo look cute. Real manatees don't. I suppose I can understand why the logo designer did this: they needed to find some way to make a manatee look more appealing than it really is (they really are ugly creatures), and any attempt to make the manatee look fierce was doomed to failure. It's not like most people really have a good handle on what manatees look like anyway. They could have drawn a damn mermaid and a lot of people wouldn't have known the difference. Indeed, some theories are that the legends of mermaids started when sailors on long voyages saw manatees. All I can say is that it would have to be a really long voyage for me to get a manatee confused with a mermaid. Long enough to be measured in decades. Long enough for me to lose my eyesight. Really, there's just not a lot of similarity there at all. Anyway, in addition to making the manatee look cute, they've given him a baseball cap and a bat. Well, I hope it's a bat. If it's not a bat, then it's one of those sticks the pre-Columbians used to whack him over the head. And if he's got it, that means he took the stick from them and is after revenge. I'm not sure he would be much of a threat with that stick, but all in all I'd rather not chance it. If he took the stick away then he's not the pushover that manatees used to be. And a thousand-pound sea creature that is actually a threat and is carrying a stick big enough to hit him over the head with? I don't want to be anywhere near that.
Final Score: 125 points.
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