LONDON-- Please don't think we columnists in Chicago are opinionated and at times verbose in our criticism of things we don't like. Nope. I love the British papers. They go after it. There are some wonderfully expressive and creative writers here in the isle where the English language evolved. Also, in Canadian, which is a form of the same stuff.
To wit: Wenlock and Mandeville, the official mascots of these 2012 Olympic Games. I am on record as having called one of the creatures: ``a blob-shaped thing with an Orwellian Big Brother eyeball for a face, a rhinoceros crown, and testicles in each palm.'' Now that was for the statue in the Village that is, indeed, holding two metallic orbs in its paws.
Here is Harrison Mooney, of the Vancouver Sun, waxing poetic in his take on the mascots: ``These phallic bugbears fitted out in foppish puffery are by far the worst mascots of any Olympics, and I say this while trying to suppress my memories of Atlanta's amorphous blob Whatzit (later remained Izzy), which ushered in the trend of using no creative effort whatsoever on mascot design....It's an embarrassment to a country that gave us Paddington, Ruppert, and Winnie. The best, cuddliest character the masters of children's literature can give the children these days is a walking, talking shard of metal....And thus, the Cyclopean nightmares were born, on a scribbled piece of paper at a stop light and approved by the legally blind Locog organizers...
``Wenlock and Mandeville were the awful designs of a once-creative nation, brought to life amid a stamping frenzy during which Locog green-lit every other heinous design, pattern and color scheme that's been a blight on London this week.''
And that's for a toy.