Saturday - April 24, 2010

Forming A New Group Identity

Ok, bowling season is just about over. Monday night is the final round. After a really poor season, where our team sunk from 4th all the way down to 12th in a league of 16 teams, we won all the points last week, so we will face the final round in about 10th, with a chance to win our way into 9th. Middle of the pack, but right below the fold. Better than last place.

On this particular league all the teams are sponsored. That means that some business or group ponies up $25 for the prize fund, and the team is named after them. We’ve been After Dark Design for a number of years, since that’s Ann’s husband’s lighting design company. This past year was poor for them - and plenty of other small businesses, thank you government! - so we each chipped in $6.25 for the sponsorship fee. But we kept the name. Next year we’ll have to all chip in again, but I’m thinking there would be no reason to keep that name. So I’ve been thinking about a new team name.

There is an art to coming up with a good name for a bowling team. For a non-sponsored team I mean. It should have some relation to bowling, no matter how vague. It should also have some kind of pun in it, and if you can work in a mildly sexual or naughty word innuendo that’s all to the better. You don’t want it to be too intellectual because no one will understand it. eg - we named our summer league team Stercus Stercus Stercus one year, and carried that over into Stercus Maximus the next year. Not one person understood that stercus means shit. Oh well. After that we used Revved Up as a summer league team name, followed by Still Revved Up last year. Revving the ball means making it spin, and spin gives you hook, and hook makes for more strikes. Maybe this year we’ll use We’re Still Still Revved Up. And if you come up with a really perfect team name, you can make a graphic based on it, and get awesome team shirts printed up. It doesn’t make you bowl any better, but it gives you a small psychological advantage over the other team because they don’t have cool shirts.

Bowling league is a bit of an unusual mix of people. You have fun, you do silly stuff, you get drunk sometimes, and you compete every week. Sometimes odd words and phrases creep in. Sometimes odd sound effects as well. In the middle of the winter one of the teams was rather plastered one night and started calling each other biscuit. I have no idea why, but my guess is that it was a scatological replacement word. Like ass biscuit. For the next few weeks everything was biscuit. Biscuit this, biscuit that, you’re a biscuit with extra buttermilk. It’s a bonding thing I suppose. A month later it was “it’s bacon!!!” whenever anyone got a strike. It’s fun, and it embarrasses the children who get dragged along when it’s mom & dad’s league night. Cool!

Our team is noted for being especially crazy. We’re talking cartwheels on the lanes and rapid fire jokes and stuff. And sound effects. Once upon a time, Ann had done some international animal relief work, rescuing penguins. In South Africa. Mike and I gave her grief for weeks about African penguins. They don’t exist. They can’t swim. What’s black and black and red all over? African penguin roadkill! We even invented the mythical Inland Siberian Penguin and gave it all sorts of special features and abilities. So she started doing penguin noises at us. Well, it turns out that African penguins actually do exist. They’re also known as Jackass penguins. And we’ve all started doing the penguin sound - oooo-ah! oooo-ah! - whenever anyone gets a strike. Middle aged folks cutting lose. It’s a bonding thing, and it embarrasses the children. Cool!

So now we’re thinking about penguin bowling. After all, what could be cooler than critters that live in the antarctic? Chillin’. So I looked it up, and there is a bit of penguin bowling stuff on the internet. A couple games for your iPod, a few plushy toys for little kids. And I got to thinking (always a dangerous thing) that the one thing just as cool as penguins bowling would be polar bears bowling. Combine the two and you’d have polar bears bowling for penguins. Hey, penguins sorta look like bowling pins anyway. And then I thought ... what would the coolest possible polar bear look like while bowling? Answer - he’d be wearing sunglasses and an open hawaiin shirt. Like Magnum PB (polar bear) only without the mustache. The seeds of a design were being planted. Still thinking, but now at a far more dangerous level, I realized that these two critters never actually meet. Polar bears live at the north pole, penguins live at the south pole. Lightbulb time! That makes it bi-polar, right? So we’ve got the pun to work with, and although it isn’t sexual or scatological it’s in-your-face enough to offend some folks. And bi-polar describes our team perfectly. On or Off. Win Big. Lose Big. Happy or distraught. Well, more internet research shows that “bi-polar rollers” has already been used as a bowling team name, and is recognized as one of the cooler names. Better than “alley oops” or “spare us”. But nobody has used that name and the polar bear/penguin combination.

So I ran with the name and did the most important job: design the t-shirt. I can draw, but I am not a cartoonist. Thankfully, the internet is full of great cartoon drawings, and it’s “fair use” to borrow (ahem) them for my own personal group’s use. Or I could pay the artist if the cost is low enough. Like $5.

So, variations on a theme ... see below the fold. Opinions? I’m not married to the fonts, the team names, or the tag lines, but I like the overall graphic. I can move the penguins around too, and I’m thinking maybe I should move their feet down their bodies a bit.

This is the happy penguin from the skuzzo website. Isn’t he just the cutest thing? I’ll name him Skuzzo, which is foreign for “excuse me!”

This is Skuzzo stretched, tapered, turned and snipped to become a fallen bowling pin. Maybe I tapered him too much, but I wanted the shape more than the penguin.

Here he is with as a chubby bowling pin, wings folded, feet lowered. Still not 100% with the feet, but this version might be bowling pin enough, and it’s a lot more penguin. Penguiny? Last version emphasizes the chest stripe, so he looks more like a real African penguin. That’s just an insider’s touch for Ann’s benefit.

The neat part about Skuzzo is that he actually is an African penguin. Look at the “widow’s peak” and the stripe across his chest ...

put him in the graphic and away we go. Hey, 3D is all the rage, so let’s try for a bit of that. It’s adds a little perspective to things (nyuk nyuk nyuk) ...


I like the bear. I couldn’t find a cartoon polar bear in a bowling pose, and I gave up on the sunglasses and Hawaiian shirt idea. I tried the Charmin bears but they didn’t work even when I recolored them. Still, this guy is strutting off the lane in surprised elation at getting a strike, and that suits us to a T. Or to a T-shirt. Right now he’s ice blue, but I guess I could make him white. Some people don’t have the imagination to realize that an ice blue bear is still a polar bear. You have to help them out a bit.

I made the penguin pins and the ball bigger in this version. I’m going to try another one with the lowered feet version. He may not really need to be stretched and tapered to look like a bowling pin so much; you lose the laughing face. I’m also tempted to sneak the Linux penguin in there as well, but he doesn’t seem quite as happy. Not sure about that one.

Ice Down The Lanes ... it’s what you have to do, because we’re so hot. Or it’s the way we bowl, because we’re so cool. Either way. These things have to be brash, otherwise why bother?

( eww factor: a bi-polar roller is also a medical tool used by gynecologists to cauterize internal surfaces. It’s sort of a rolling arc welder on the end of a little stick )



Polar Express was a popular movie a couple years back. Any time a word with an X in gets used in bowling you can put 3 of them in. XXX is a turkey, three strikes in a row. It’s also the symbol for porn, so that adds a small naughty bit.

At first the tag line was “Chillin With XXXtreme Latitude” then “Xtreme” ... since the most extreme amount of latitude you can have is pole to pole, which ties in with the bi-polar pun. Hey, creating cute and funny is hard work! I figure we’ll have to explain that to most people.

Both these designs are shown here on white background, but there are actually transparencies. The “production” version will be limited to 16 or 32 colors for making T-shirt appliques.

I’ve got all summer to work on this, so ideas, comments, etc. are more than welcome.

Oooo ah! Oooo ah!

Posted by Drew458     on 04/24/2010 at 11:28 AM   
Filed Under: • Bowling Blogging •  
• Comments (2) • Trackbacks(0)  Permalink •  

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