I was going to do you something oh so technical about peak oil and global warming, but then Zombizi came to your rescue by sending me this list of The World's Most Ridiculous Sports Team Names. The author, one Christina A, is American, and with some exceptions she sticks to the Transatlantic sports scene. Our Scottish readers may be disconcerted to note that she has omitted Fife and Forfar, but we shall forgive her. They're not funny in isolation, and being American there's no way she would remember the game that finished Fife 4 Forfar 5, or the difficulties it created for the poor man reading out the scores on Grandstand.

No, she is quite right to eschew the delights of lower league Scottish football and focus on what she knows. This mostly means teams from the kind of small town schools and colleges that think they can name their own teams just fine without hiring in some fancy dan sports consultants from the big city. They can't, obviously. There are conventions to the naming of teams, which some get and some just don't. Not getting them at all is bad, but nearly getting them is far worse.

Several teams for instance have the word Fighting inappropriately added to their name. I was especially taken with The Columbia College Fighting Koalas, although apparently that's not as oxymoronic as you might think, according to commenter Sydney Joe. He says, and a cursory check in Wikipedia backs him up, that koalas are more dangerous than we've been led to believe. Koalas have a temper, he says. I've seen the remains (in real life) of a German shepherd dog dismantled, literally shredded, by an angry male koala.

I'm not sure how much that helps with the impact of the name though. And no commenters mounted any such defence of the Scottsdale Community College Fighting Artichokes. The UC Santa Cruz Banana Slugs, on the other hand, seem to have passed up the opportunity to call themselves the Fighting Banana Slugs. Banana slugs look like this, and in my view any lack of menace is due entirely to scale.

Across the Pacific things become more abstract. If you lean to the abstract, and I think you do, the next time you're in Bangkok you might go and watch top soccer team The Thailand Tobacco Monopoly. As Christina says, Being named after a tobacco company would be pretty hilarious in itself. But being named after the concept of the tobacco business being dominated by one corporate entity without any competition, this is truly a masterstroke. Unfortunately, thirty seconds on Google reveals that the Thailand Tobacco Monopoly are in fact a company who have acquired their own football team, but we can all pretend we didn't know that.

I've waited until now to lower the tone, because tone lowering should always be carefully timed, but at last the moment is here. So let's all celebrate the Butte Pirates. And from our lowered vantage point we can also see Peruvian footballers Deportivo Wanka, who were apparently bemused by their reception on their English tour, the more contrived Rhode Island School of Design Nads (whose team cheer is Go Nads!), and my personal favourite, the Chattanooga Purple Pounders.

From the NFL, there's always the Cleveland Browns. Nothing obviously comical beyond the tiresomely scatological, but it's nice to learn that the US equivalent of dropping the kids off at the pool is taking the Browns to the Superbowl.

And I've always had a soft spot for Young Boys Bern, if only because it must be so awkward to say you're scouting for them, but I never knew before that they played at the Wankdorf Stadium. All together now, we are the Wankdorf boys, the Wankdorf boys, the Wankdorf boys ...

My lovely readers. May you all be Wankdorf till you die.