The Cubs' New Mascot Is A Nightmarish, Perverted Furry

In an apparent effort to get the public to stop paying so much attention to their tenuous connections to the traditional baseball experience and start paying more attention to them as a baseball team, the Chicago Cubs have spent the last while systematically eradicating everything that's even remotely attractive about them. First they laid out extensive plans to turn Wrigley Field into a sort of Philip K. Dick version of Wrigley Field by covering it with giant televisions and such. Now they've unveiled a mascot, Clark the Cub, who looks like nothing less than the product of a design competition held at a furry message board. Generally, pantsless anthropomorphic animals pull off a certain sexlessness that keeps them from looking like voracious predators; Clark, with his shirsey covering his allegedly sexless crotch, with his shoes only calling attention to his pantslessness, represents a disturbing new variation on the threat that has always loomed behind the Cubs' seemingly friendly facade. With his arrival, Wrigley will now be known to Midwesterners less as a green cathedral than as a house of nightmares through which a freakish, perverted bear will chase you, forever.

Now go do horrible things to it!