Normal CornBelters

143

Like many teams, the baseball team in Normal, Illinois held a name-the-team contest to settle on what the name would be. There were a couple of attempts (more on this in a bit) to run the contest, and the options changed between attempts, but a complete list of options that existed in at least one of the contests is as follows:

Normal CamelBacks
Normal Coal Bears
Normal CornBelters
Normal Fellers
Normal Nighthawks
Normal Nutz

Camelbacks? Fellers? Excuse me, but how did this city ever come to be called "Normal" in the first place? Was it intended ironically, like calling a large person "Tiny" or a bald person "Curly"? Or is this the town equivalent of Network Decay, wherein a cable channel starts out with niche programming (history, documentaries, music videos...you can pick your niche because basically every single cable channel whose niche wasn't sports has fallen prey to this) and over time descends into showing nothing remotely related to what the channel is named after? Or maybe I'm so weird that I have no idea what normal is and thus don't realize that these are in fact normal team names. The latter is a possibility, because I admit I don't have the best grasp on what normal is (if I did, I might undrstand why people watch Duck Dynasty, Keeping Up with the Kardashians, and basketball; believe me, I have no idea). Except then I look at these team names again and...no. Just no. No way are these normal team names. The city's name must be ironic.

As I said, not all of these options were available at the same time. At first, the options were the Coal Bears, CornBelters, Nighthawks, and Nutz. The problem came from "Coal Bears". That name was suggested by fans of Stephen Colbert (think about how "Colbert" is pronounced if you don't get it). After one day, "Coal Bears" had something like 95% of the vote, but then "Nutz" surged ahead to take roughly three quarters of the vote. Fans of the "Coal Bears" name alleged some kind of conspiracy, so the owner announced he was starting the poll over, this time removing the "Nighthawks" option on the grounds that it apparently is a term used by the Klan, and adding Fellers and CamelBacks. The website for the poll was also modified to make it harder to stuff the ballot. This worked about as well as you'd expect. In any case, in the end "CornBelters" was named the winner, which is just as well because it's not like any of the names it beat out were any better.

And then it was time to design a logo for this team, and what can I say? Apparently someone figured a name this dumb should have a logo to match. As a result, we get an ear of corn that looks like it's been smoking pot and hasn't combed it's hair in three days. Oh, and it has eyebrows (a neat trick in and of itself) which somehow manage to go past the edge of the, um, face? I'm hesitant to make hyperbolic statements like "This is the most ridiculous logo ever", but if I was the type of person to say such things, I'd be saying it right now. If you want to say that this is the most ridiculous logo ever, I don't have a counterargument. I can't think of any logo more ridiculous than this, and I'm not inclined to go looking because if there is one out there, I'd rather not know about it. Let's just say that the logo is even further proof that the city is named ironically and call it a day.

Final Score: 143 points.
Penalties: Ers, 26 pts; Software, 27 pts; Humanoid, 30 pts; Cartoon, 47 pts; Name, 10 pts; Logo, 12 pts.
Bonuses: Local, -9 pts.