My first idea was a sort of Jacques Cousteau parody about the "baronshark". I got as far as "Ze baronshark eez a fierce predator, found mainly in ze waters of Lake Erie." No matter how hard I tried, I couldn't come up with anything to follow it.

I then tried a comparison to a Warner Brothers cartoon, suggesting that the "Baron" had been eaten by the shark and was struggling to get out, and the arms you saw were actually the baron's arms poking through the shark's skin. That didn't work, either.

Even taking a cheap swipe at the city of Cleveland by suggesting that this creature was a byproduct of the same chemical soup that allowed the Cuyahoga River to catch on fire back in the 70s didn't come out right.

The problem is that these are all good ideas, and none of them want to take a back seat to one of the other two, so whenever I try to craft the wording for one, the others interfere. And I don't think I'm quite up to writing an explanation of how the baronshark was created by the chemical soup of the 1970s and it is so called because it feeds on barons who try to escape its rubbery skin by punching through it. Even if I could fit all that together, I couldn't do the French accent right. So the hell with it.

The old Cleveland Barons logo, pictured to the left, was much better. It was one of those classic, timeless logos that was never going to win any awards for the best logo around but was also never going to cause people to point and laugh. It would still be a good logo today. It would certainly be better than the piece of crap they're using now, that's for damn sure.

As is so often the case, once you get started with this logo it's hard to stop. There are so many absurdities that I don't know if there's time to point them all out. It's not just the obvious stuff, like the fact that sharks don't wear top hats and tuxedo jackets and monocoles. There's the fact that sharks rarely jump out of the water like this, the fact that hockey is played on frozen water, the fact that hockey sticks don't have diamond tips. It's stuff like this that take the logo out of the realm of mere awfulness and thrust it into a realm of sublime perversity.

Now, some of you are probably wondering why the hell there's a shark in this logo, and some of you are probably waiting for me to say there's no reason for it so you can write me a nasty e-mail telling me what the reason is. For the former group, the reason is that the team is affiliated with (and, I believe, owned by the same people as) the NHL's San Jose Sharks. To the latter group, I say that just because they're affiliated with the Sharks is no excuse for this ridiculous logo. Does the Albany River Rat have horns? All right, then. In fact, I went ahead and gave the Baron's the "Offspring" penalty, even though it doesn't technically apply, just because I find this so stupid.

Final Score: 78 points.
Penalties: Cartoon, 17 pts; Anthropomorphization, 10 pts; Irrelevance, 14 pts; Name-logo, 2 pts; Equip-logo (quadruply-egregious), 25 pts; Offspring, 5 pts; Yucky-Logo, 5 pts.
Bonuses: None.