As you surely know, hornets live in nests, not hives. So why is the Arena called the Hive when you play there?
Chandler's answer was insufficient due to an easy dodge provided for him by Rose's earlier unseemly fawning over young cheerleaders. But this "hive" thing also troubles me and I would very much have liked to see it addressed.
Rose is also not the first local newsie-type person to raise this issue. Recently, Gambit blogger, Alejandro de los Rios, has been pushing it for at least a couple of weeks now after the following item appeared in The New Orleans Levee
“Now we’ve got the Hornets, which have nothing to do with New Orleans, and they keep welcoming us to the “Hive,” which has nothing to do with Hornets.
They are cheered on by the HoneyBees. Now, it must be said that any self-respecting hornet would sting to death any honey bee any day of the week and twice on Sundays.
The Hornets’ home colors are teal, which is wrong on multiple levels, let alone the fact that it’s not even the color hornets are.”
While this incompatibility between the terms "hive" and "hornets" is annoying, the other quibbles mentioned by the Levee are those of the incompatibility between a relocated sports franchise and its adopted "home" city.
There is nothing particularly reminiscent of New Orleans in the name "Hornets". There are multiple easy fixes for this situation. Certainly this city has a healthy catalog of insects more familiar to locals than Hornets to choose from. (May we humbly suggest "Mumkins" as one example) And ever since the Hornets arrived here, it has been suggested many times that the franchise acquire the name "Jazz" from the city's previous NBA occupant (and the most comically misnamed team in professional sports). But both teams and the NBA frown on such an arrangement. The most often cited reason for this is marketing. The league and the teams claim that changing the name and logo of a team is too risky a disruption in the product's "brand recognition" within its market even though this argument has been applied rather selectively at times. And if professional sports leagues want to argue that renaming a team after something its host city identifies with is any more confusing or off-putting than repeatedly renaming large publicly financed buildings after a team's most recent corporate sponsor then... well... good luck with that.
The unpleasant and increasingly ubiquitous teal is another product of modern sports franchise design which operates under the theory that if these franchises are all basically interchangeable anyway, they may as well all wear the same color. Since arriving in New Orleans, the Hornets have added gold to their color scheme and attempted to play the teal as a "green" to complete a Mardi Gras purple-teal-gold design. Why not just go with green? The old Jazz used to wear purple, green and gold, but they seem to have given up that look in favor of... more teal.
Even as this year's exciting and fun-to-watch from a purely basketball standpoint Hornets open the (interminable) NBA playoffs at home this week, I still struggle to understand how area sports fans can get so... um... "Fanned Up" without engaging in a significant amount of cognitive dissonance. The Hornets are only in New Orleans as the result an act of ill will from the league and the team's current owner toward the city of Charlotte. Recently, this same owner came very close to moving on to Oklahoma as New Orleans struggles to recover from the ongoing effects of the Federal Flood. Currently, this same league is engaged in an act of even more ill will toward the city of Seattle. No one in New Orleans seems to care. I find this very strange.
It's even stranger considering the same New Orleans sports fans who are willing to look the other way now, will soon be screeching indignantly as the one franchise the city truly cannot afford to lose enters into yet another round of brinksmanship against the governing authorities with substantial new leverage. Oh well. Enjoy the playoffs.
One additional note: Obviously sports isn't Rose's regular beat, otherwise he would not have gotten this bit from Sunday's column quite as wrong as he did.
I think most folks around here are divided into two camps: You're either a Mardi Gras person or a Jazzfest person but I fully believe it's possible to be both, to give everything you've got to both of the grand, defining celebrations of our city and then simply while away the rest of the year, reading blogs about one or the other and waiting, just waiting, for the Cubes to be published again the following spring.
Everyone knows that New Orleans's two "grand, defining celebrations" are Mardi Gras and football season. Jazzfest occupies it's own sort of space in the spiritual calendar.... but we've covered this in detail already.
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