knightly headgear

This complete monstrosity was sitting in Lowes, in Piscataway, wanting someone to give it - and its two friends - a good home, a snip at 49.99. I particularly like the label of "fragile," for I'm not sure whether this refers to the state of the 1:1 football team, or the heads of the students we saw celebrating Saturday's victory as we drove through New Brunswick last night, or by extension, the profits in a very empty Lowes. (Fragile the object itself certainly must be - look at the dubious stability of that strip of white glue at the bottom of the helmet). Scarlet, obviously, from the school's colors - it was to have been orange, after the Dutch) but scarlet was cheaper and easier to obtain (hmmmm - sounds like RU was true to form back in 1869). And Princeton were stocking up on orange (though I don't know about tiger stripes) around then. Initially, the mascot was to have been Chanticleer, the fighting cock - as in Chaucer, etc. But the Scarlet Sportspeople got fed up with being thought of as Chicken, so the Knights was adopted as the official mascot/name in 1955, thanks to a student poll. I wish it was something more covetable in mascot form - there's nothing much that's simultaneously brave and cute about a knight's helmet. Yesterday's defeated Howard bisons would be much easier to support, when it comes to buying mementos - I really haven't much sympathy with tacky false medievalism of this sort.