Here's a list of things I associate with pigs: Bacon. Ham. Farmers yelling "Sooey!" Animals by Pink Floyd. George Orwell's Animal Farm. Mud. Eastern North Carolina style barbecue (which sucks, by the way. If you want good barbecue, go to Memphis). "Th-th-th-th-th-that's all, folks!".

What I don't think of is hockey. The Rockford IceHogs wanted to change all that, apparently. It didn't work.

I appreciate the color scheme, at least to a point. The IceHogs came along when it was de rigueur to put teal and/or purple in logos. To see a team go with a classic color scheme of red and blue (and black, but I'll let that slide) was a refreshing change.

But somehow, it doesn't work. Making the pig blue would have been absolutely absurd (not this this stopped the Reading Royals from giving us a grey-and-purple lion), but making the pig red doesn't work any better. It looks like they cooked the pig without killing him. This does explain the angry look on his face, but it doesn't turn him into something I feel I ought to be afraid of. In fact, it makes me want to grab some pasta and alfredo sauce so I can make some linguine carbonara.

Upon further reflection, it occurs to me that it would make a lot more sense to make the pig blue instead of red. The team is called the IceHogs after all. I'd be pretty blue if I was wallowing around in ice. Why shouldn't the pig? If they put a just-cooked-while-still-alive IceHog back on the ice, the ice is going to melt.

But while the IceHogs were able to avoid the trend of purple and teal, they couldn't avoid other trends, such as sticking the word "Ice" in the name for no good reason, or sticking capital letters in the middle of the name, or similar name-based errors. They get hit hard for this.

Anyway, I'm going to wrap this one up and go fix dinner. All of a sudden, I'm very hungry.

Th-th-th-th-th-that's all, folks!

Final Score: 57 points.
Penalties: Ice, 9 pts; Compound, 13 pts; Software, 8 pts; Cartoon, 17 pts; Name-Logo, 2 pts; Equip-logo (egregious), 8 pts.
Bonuses: None.