Fort Wayne Komets

39

Comets look cool.

Okay, that's a totally subjective statement, but I think most people would agree with me. Here, look at one. This is Hale-Bopp, the comet that I saw myself back in 1997 when I took a break from my third-shift job to go outside for a bit. I don't know if the double tail effect is typical of comets or not, but even with a single tail they'd still look pretty cool. The only people who don't look at this and think it's cool are people who still consider comets to be omens from some god. Any such people alive today also probably think the earth is flat and that communists invented rock and roll music to warp the character of our youth, so their opinions can safely be ignored.

(Is there an updated version of that fear? Does anyone take the once-associated-with-blacks-but-gaining-popularity-among-whites music of today and combine it with the political bogeyman of today? In short, does anyone blame Al Qaeda for rap? Laugh if you want, but you know the parallels are actually fairly strong.)

But getting back to the topic at hand (I must write some variation on that phrase an average of once per review), all right-thinking people agree that comets look cool. This is why I don't understand Fort Wayne's logo. It would be so easy to make a logo that looks like an actual comet, and it would be a really cool logo. Instead, we get a sawblade. Huh? Come on, guys, I know you can do better than that.

Of course, this mess from the late 60's over at the left shows, they could also do much, much worse. The moon may not be made of green cheese, but there was clearly a lot of cheese involved in that old logo. The current logo may include inexplicable power tools, but at least there's a certain elegance to it. There's the name of the team and a background element. Nothing special, but I can easily think of a dozen teams whom I wish would get rid of their cartoony logos and go with something like this. But frankly, a team named after Comets can do better.

Of course, there is that one minor issue with the name, which is that the team name is "Komets" instead of "Comets". You may be wondering why they did that. It turns out that the original owner's wife was named Kathryn; the owner thought that since she spelled Catherine with a K instead of a C, it would be a good idea to do the same with Comets. He was wrong, of course. But that's not all he was. He intentionally misspelled the name for his wife's sake? If I pulled a stunt like that, my friends would all say I was whipped. And I would deserve it. And so did this guy. He was whipped, people. That's the only explanation.

But never mind that. That was decades ago, and for all I know he's dead now (if not, he's calling his lawyer to sue me for libel). The owners today are sticking with the name out of a sense of tradition (tradition isn't always a good thing), and are using this new logo because...well, I'm sure they have their reasons. At least they got rid of Smiling Jack the Astronaut.

There's just one problem: Comets are not fireballs. In fact, one of the main ingredients in a comet is ice. This means the orange thing isn't just irrelevant, it's positively ironic. So now I feel the need to actually rule the "Irrelevance" penalty egregious, and tack on another seven points.

I know that's not what MJ was intending, but what can I say? Sometimes things don't work out as planned.

Final Score: 39 points.
Penalties: Misspell, 11 pts; Irrelevance (egregious), 21 pts; Name-Logo (quadruply egregious), 7 pts.
Bonuses: None.