Bossier-Shreveport Mudbugs

54

The Bossier-Shreveport Mudbugs' booster club is called "The Mudbug Boilers". Seriously. There is a group of people in this world who think that the best way to show their support for a sports team is by dunking them in water that's been heated to over 100° Celsius.

It takes all kinds.

From the looks of it, the booster club got ahold of them before the logo designer did, because the mudbug in this logo has clearly been boiled already. Like lobsters, crawdads (mudbugs, crayfish...these things have more names than a two-bit con man) are not red until after they've been cooked. Before cooking, they're sort of blue, as you can see to the left. But give the little bugger credit: despite this, he's not only alive, but ready, willing, and able to grab a set of false teeth, put on a white jersey, grab a stick, and start playing a sport that requires water a full one hundred degrees (again, Celsius) cooler than the water he just came out of.

That's hardcore. Question this creature's intelligence, his common sense, his teeth, or even the issue of whether his heart is still beating, but do not question his tenacity.

Did I mention his teeth? Yeah, I'm harping on it a little, but I've got good reason. It's not just that crawdads normally don't normally have teeth and this one does. It's that crawdads normally don't have teeth and don't play hockey, and here's a hockey-playing mudbug that has more teeth than some real-life hockey players I've met.

Their name also has more letters than some players have teeth. The team plays in Bossier, which is just outside of Shreveport. Apparently the team (which originally played in Shreveport and was simply the Shreveport Mudbugs) is a) scared that they'll get in trouble if they don't put "Bossier" in the name (which, given the reputation Louisiana cops have, may very well be the case), and b) scared that no one from Shreveport will come to the games if they don't have the name "Shreveport" in the name. Fans from around the rest of the league, meanwhile, are trying to figure out where either of these cities are. I know where they are, but that's because a good friend of mine is from there. Well, there's also the fact that The Residents are originally from there, but as you can see from the picture, they now hail from San Francisco, and that's the city people associate with them.

You'll notice that they don't put either city name in the logo. I think it's because it was hard enough writing the word "Mudbugs" the way they did. What the hell is the deal with those letters? I can't make a good joke about what they look like because they don't look like anything, but they certainly look odd.

I have, incidentally, eaten crawdads a couple of times in my life. The first time, I recall, was at a restaurant in town called Tony's Bourbon Street Oyster Bar. My friends and I like to head to the place every once in a while on a Sunday (they have a lot of specials running that night) and have crab legs. One night, my friend Rick joined us. Rick's a nice guy, but he's one of these people who can't stand to be reminded that the food he's sticking in his mouth used to move around of its own accord. He had to shell every damned bit of crab meat sitting in front of him before he could eat any of it. The rest of us had finished (and we're talking a pound of crab legs each) before he had taken a single bite.

So the rest of us (there were three of us, not including Rick) split a pound of mudbugs while we waited. As anyone who's ever eaten one of these things knows, you don't eat the head. You break it open and eat the meat out of the tail. Some people suck the juice out of the head (and thank god the booster club didn't name themselves after that activity), but that's about it. So as you eat these things — and it takes quite a few to make a pound — the crayfish heads quickly accumulate. And what are you supposed to do with a bunch of mudbug heads when you're sitting next to a guy who doesn't like to think about the fact that his food once lived?

It started, if I remember correctly, when David held one up and started singing, "Fish heads, fish heads, roly-poly fish heads! Fish heads, fish heads, eat them up, yum!" It quickly moved onto such classics as "Another Saturday night, and I ain't got no body", "My body lies over the ocean", and I-don't-remember-what-else. I also recall picking one up, looking solemnly at Rick, and declaring, "Miss Scarlet, in the kitchen, with a boiling pot."

Rick said almost nothing for the rest of the evening and hasn't been back with us since.

Final Score: 54 points.
Penalties: Region, 3 pts; Cartoon, 17 pts; Anthropomorphization, 10 pts; Name-Logo, 2 pts; Equip-logo (quadruply-egregious), 25 pts; Yucky-Logo, 5 pts.
Bonuses: Cool-Name, -5 pts; Local, -3 pts.