A lot of times, when I'm reviewing a team with an animal name, I like to do a little bit of half-assed research by looking the creature up in one of my wife's Audubon Guides. So when it was time to start work on this one, I picked up her copy of the Field Guide to North American Insects and Spiders. I quickly established two things:

First, the title is a misnomer, since scorpions are actually in the book despite being neither insects nor spiders. The book really should be called the Field Guide to North American Insects and Arachnids, since it includes not only scorpions but also ticks (ticks, scorpions, and spiders are all arachnids). Normally I can forgive a slight inaccuracy in the title (for example, it doesn't bother me that my road atlas of the "United States" includes Puerto Rico but not Guam or the U.S. Virgin Islands). But come on...not only is this a fairly glaring (and easily fixed) error, but this is the Audobon Society, for crying out loud! I expect better of them.

Second, this is a fairly icky book to be flipping through. For those of you who aren't familiar with Audubon Guides, the first 300 pages or so are a series of color pictures of the various animals covered in the book (the text comes later, with a cross-reference beneath each picture). Flipping through this book can create some disconcerting images. Imagine flipping the book to a random page, looking down, and suddenly finding your thumb next to a house fly which is as big as the thumb. It takes less than half a second to remember that it's just a picture, but you can feel the adrenaline in your body do some funny things in that half second.

My thumb was not, incidentally, next to a thumb-sized house fly. I should be so lucky. No, it was next to a thumb-sized black widow. And when I say "thumb-sized", I'm not including the legspan.

This is not the first time my thumb and a black widow have been right next to each other, incidentally, and the other time was not just a photograph. My wife had asked me to take some vegetables out to the composter we have in our back yard. So I went out, opened it up, dumped the veggies in, closed the lid, and walked back inside. I lay down on the couch and resumed watching TV. I was lying on my side, and had one hand resting on my side.

I felt something brush against my thumb. I looked down to see what it was, and there, just below my thumb and walking down my pant leg, was a black widow.

Ladies and gentlemen, it is with absolutely no shame that I inform you that I screamed like a little girl at this point. I didn't jump up and wave my arms hysterically, but that was only because I was paralyzed with fear. I wanted to jump up and wave my arms hysterically. I may have even tried to jump up and wave my arms hysterically. I wasn't able to.

I didn't brush it off, either. I was afraid to touch it.

Fortunately, my wife was in the house and came running. "What's wrong?" she asked. I pointed. "Oh, my god!" she said.

"Do something," I said. No, let's be honest: I didn't say it; I whimpered it.

"What?"

"Something." For the record, my wife is scared of spiders, so she wasn't exactly being blasé about this, either.

It should also be noted that all this time the black widow was continuing to slither down my leg (yes, I know that technically they walk, but I'm firmly of the opinion that "slither" is an appropriate word to use to describe any movement performed by an animal this creepy). It was already about halfway to the bottom of my pants left, and I wasn't wearing socks. Unless it turned around, it was either going to start walking across my foot or start crawling up the inside of my pants leg. I think that last option would have given me a heart attack.

My wife quickly reached for a newspaper and used it to knock the spider onto the floor. I inhaled for the first time in about 45 seconds. She then set the newspaper in front of the spider and let it walk onto the paper. Then she carried the spider-laden newspaper onto the back porch.

Normally we just let bugs go. Despite my wife's fear of spiders, we even usually do this with spiders since we know they eat insects. I was not feeling so magnaminous this time. "Kill it," I said.

"But—"

"KILL IT!"

"I don't want it on my shoe."

"And I don't want it under my porch! Now kill the damn thing already!"

"Too late. It just crawled under the porch."

I didn't step on that porch again until the frost came. The next spring, we tore it down and had a new one put in its place. Furthermore, I haven't gone near the composter since. In fact, my wife seems to have abandoned the whole composting thing as well.

So it took a while after opening the Field Guide before I was able to open it again and find the actual picture of a scorpion. And it confirmed what I had already suspected, which is that scorpions don't have teeth or two glowing red eyes. (They have, incidentally, anywhere from six to twelve eyes). Okay, so the designer of the logo anthropomorphized the thing. No big surprise there. But what does surprise me is the sloppy job they did. The lack of a visible nose makes this anthropomorphized face look amazingly inhuman. As a result, the thing just looks goofy.

We also have the broken-stick cliché (I really do need to add a rule about broken sticks). But what kills me there is that the thing has these two humongous pincers, but the break happened between them. It would have made more sense -- and wouldn't bother me half as much -- if it was broken into three pieces, with the two breaks happening where the pincers are located. That would have at least been a new twist on an old cliché. Instead, we get the usual old cliché, looking more ridiculous than ever.

But for some reason, I do like the drop of blood hanging from the tip of the stinger. It is, I am certain, completely inaccurate. But I like it.

Finally, the color scheme needs work. The colors themselves are good. But all the brick red and black must look pretty indistinguishable from a distance.

What makes this so irritating from my point of view is that they could have done so much better with a more straightforward approach. Their name is the Scorpions, for crying out loud. Scorpions look scary even before you know they're venemous. They could have simply used a normal, unadorned outline of a scorpion for their logo and it would have been ten times better than what they have.

That's about all I have to say. But I do want to leave you with a good laugh. So please follow this link to a picture of Stanley, the Scorpions' mascot.

You're welcome.

Final Score: 42 points.
Penalties: Region (egregious), 5 pts; Cartoon, 17 pts; Anthropomorphization, 10 pts; Name-Logo, 2 pts; Equip-Logo, 5 pts; Yucky-Logo, 5 pts.
Bonuses: Cool-Name, -4 pts; Local, -3 pts.