Mascot news!

 Because who doesn't love mascot news? Especially here on the Blob, your official Mascot News You Can Use website?

 First, though, here's a quote from "Jaws":

The thing about a shark ... he's got lifeless eyes. Black eyes. Like a doll's eyes. 

Or, you know, like PURDUE PETE'S EYES.

Which would have scared ol' Quint green, because, geez, just look at 'em. A shark's eyes are NOTHING compared to Purdue Pete's eyes. A shark's eyes, by comparison, are merry orbs of merry merriment. They're perfectly lovely eyes.

Purdue Pete's eyes?

Gah. Tell me these aren't the eyes HAL from "2001: A Space Odyssey" would have if you gave him human form.

Soulless, horror-stricken and HOLY CRAP THOSE THINGS ARE CREEPY would be some ways to describe Purdue Pete's eyes. Add in the hardhat he wears and the sledgehammer he lugs around like Jason Voorhees lugs around a machete, and I guess you can see why Purdue Pete was just named the Creepiest College Mascot in America beating out Oklahoma State's Pistol Pete, Stanford's Tree and Lousiana-Lafayette's Cayenne.

Which looks like this, in case you were wondering.

Personally I don't see how this mascot didn't make the podium, or this mascot, or this mascot.

All of them are way creepier than Pistol Pete or the Stanford Tree, the latter of which is just weird, and therefore sort of cool. Cayenne has the demonic smile going for it, but it doesn't quite follow you down into your dreams the way the Wichita State Shocker does, or the Providence Friar, or whatever the hell the Western Kentucky mascot is.

Or the way Purdue Pete and his soulless eyes do.

Of course, we're used to Purdue Pete in Indiana, the eyes and the hardhat and the hammer. So he's not nearly as creepy to us as he is to the rest of the country, probably.

Especially when you know the story one of my sportswriting buds once told me.

Seems he was down in Bloomington covering the Old Oaken Bucket game during one of the many years when the Hoosiers looked like they'd never seen a football before, and Purdue had roundly thrashed them the way the Boilermakers tended to do in those years. And here came Purdue Pete marching triumphantly around Memorial Stadium, until ...

Until a bunch of IU fans surrounded him, took his hammer away and started chasing him with it. 

Purdue Pete didn't look very scary then. In fact, according to my friend (who may or may not have been embellishing this tale), he looked pretty comical running around with his big ol' head wobbling to and fro.

From that day on, I thought about that whenever Purdue Pete's eyes lit on me during one of my many trips to Ross-Ade or Mackey Arena through the years. 

Kept me from being, you know, creeped out.