So there’s a marmot named Dan’s Hat.
That’s the name. Dan’s Hat. She’s real, she lives in Colorado, and the Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory calls her “the cool aunt who’s part of Stonehenge’s matriline.”
I read that sentence four times. I’m still not all the way through it.
Here’s the deal. It’s Fat Marmot Week. It’s Fat Bear Week’s little cousin, same bracket, less bear, and a bunch of scientists in Gothic, Colorado are posting pictures of enormous rodents twice a week and asking America to pick a winner. The marmots get named after the marks the researchers paint on their backs so they can tell them apart from far away. Non-toxic dye. Little earrings. (The critters have EARRINGS.) One of them ended up looking like a hat that belonged to a guy named Dan, and that was that. Forever.
The favorite is Open Kite. Open Kite is described, officially, by working scientists, as a “girl boss who runs the RMBL townsite.” She has no male to mate with. So per the lab, she has been able to allocate all of her energy toward self-maintenance.
I’ve never been happier for anybody.
USA Today ran the gallery. USA Today ALSO ran a companion piece with “onlyfans for marmots” sitting right there in the URL, which I’m choosing not to think about, because I have a job and a pig and a limited number of hours.
Okay. Now the other thing.
Same week, the Mascot Hall of Fame announces the class of 2026 on “Good Morning America.” Five inductees. Cocky from South Carolina. Cosmo from BYU, who debuted in 1953 by PARACHUTING into a football stadium and now holds three Guinness records, one of which is consecutive breakdance windmills. Miles the Denver Bronco, who wears Crocs. Mrs. Met, formerly Lady Met, who waited nineteen years to join her husband in there, which is its own essay and I’m not writing it.
And Goldy.
Goldy Gopher. Minnesota. Since 1952. Four national championships, famous head spin, the whole thing.
Except here’s the line in the ESPN piece that made me put my coffee down. Goldy is modeled after the thirteen-lined ground squirrel. Which is a rodent that, and I’m quoting, “bears a resemblance to gophers.”
He’s not a gopher.
He’s a guy who LOOKS like a gopher, and he’s been running that con since Truman, and now there’s a plaque.
So I went looking. Is there a marmot in there? Anywhere? Forty-three mascots have gone in since 2005, and I read all of them.
Nope.
And this is where I got mad enough to write it down, so stay with me. A groundhog is a marmot. Marmota monax. Same genus, same guy, different publicist. Which means Punxsutawney Phil is a marmot. THE marmot. Top hat, handler in a matching top hat, lifetime contract, national weather forecast, hundred and forty years of doing the same eleven seconds and never once phoning it in at a car dealership.
Not in the Hall.
The only other one I could find is Mukmuk. Mukmuk was a Vancouver Island marmot at the 2010 Winter Olympics, and they didn’t even make him a mascot.
They made him a SIDEKICK.
That’s an actual designation. Somebody sat in a conference room in Vancouver and said, “Listen, we love the marmot. We just don’t love him as a lead. Give him to the other three. Let him hold the coats.”
That’s the Ringo slot. That’s Chachi. That’s the little cousin they write in during season six after the original kid hits puberty and gets weird.
Now I know what you’re going to say, because I said it too. Marmots hibernate. Eight months, some of them nine, and you can’t run a mascot who’s unavailable from September through April. Misses the football season. Misses hockey. Misses Bark in the Park.
Great. Fine.
Thirteen-lined ground squirrels hibernate too.
They’re one of the most studied hibernators on the planet. Heart rate drops to almost nothing. Body temperature goes near freezing. NASA people study these things. And Goldy’s out there in February doing a head spin at half court like his relatives aren’t all facedown in a tunnel under a parking lot.
So it’s not the sleeping. The sleeping is not the issue.
And then Miles. Miles the horse, in Denver, in Crocs, climbing to the top of Empower Field. Beautiful. Love it. But Colorado has actual marmots, currently, up the road, being photographed for a national bracket by scientists who gave them earrings, and the Colorado slot went to a guy in foam shoes.
Open Kite is a girl boss. Miles wears Crocs.
I’m just putting the two résumés next to each other.
Anyway. My pitch is a Class-A club in a valley town with one hotel and a cannery, and the mascot is a whistlepig who does not do backflips. He eats. That’s the act. Fourth inning, dugout roof, one hoagie, crowd counts along. Merch is a foam belly shelf and a shirt that says HE’S BEEN AT IT SINCE MAY.
Somebody call the Hall. And I mean CALL it, because the Mascot Hall of Fame is a building. It’s in Whiting, Indiana. Five thousand people, refinery town on Lake Michigan, a BP plant that traces back to Standard Oil in 1889, skyline made of stacks and tanks.
A guy who wore the Phillie Phanatic suit for sixteen years started the Hall online in 2005. Then Whiting put up around eighteen million dollars to give it a real home downtown. Opened in 2018. Kids’ museum, lake view. The whole bet was that Chicago families would drive across the state line for foam.
This is also the town that throws Pierogi Fest. Which has a parade. Which has a lawn mower brigade. Which has men in babushkas.
So a pierogi town next to an oil refinery decided to become the Cooperstown of mascots. Eighteen million dollars. Forty-three inductees. Not one marmot.
I voted eleven times for Dan’s Hat and I’d do it again.
Brian Gerard (Lewandowski)
Brian Gerard (Lewandowski) writes books critics call “aggressively adequate” — better than “aggressively terrible” but somehow more concerning, like a smoke detector that only goes off on Tuesdays.
He once traded a MetroCard for a pitchfork on a subway platform and now uses it exclusively for dramatic pointing. He lives on a farm outside Charlottesville, Virginia, with a partner who smiles politely at his life choices, a pig named Trouble McFussbucket who has opinions about the sofa, and a five-pound dog named Professor Archibald Pickles who appears to be held together entirely by anxiety and unearned confidence.
See his Amazon author page and buy his books before he spends the royalties on the pig.
Inheriting absurdism from Vonnegut and Adams and weaponized failure from Moore, he writes about conflicted everymen stumbling through supernatural chaos. He has published “The 10-Items-or-Less Apocalypse,” “Not Bukowski,” and “Slop and Swill from a Festering Mind,” “Gesundheit Gary,” “The Returnables,” and has two new novels seeking a publisher: “Truth Tastes Like Pennies” (arriving Spetember 1st!) and “Elliot Nessie.”
He remains unconvinced that birds aren’t surveillance drones.
