I suppose Jerry Seinfeld could use his animated bee character from Bee Movie as his own personal mascot. Then when he is requested to appear somewhere, he could decline but offer instead to send a guy in a Bee Movie bee suit in his place.

Imagine it, on any given Saturday there could be Seinfeld bees blanketing every shopping mall, kid’s birthday party, and car dealership grand opening across America.

So maybe if you are famous having your own mascot could come in handy. Realistically, though, no one is going to pay an appearance fee for a costumed character version of you to promote their store. But perhaps you could pay someone to dress up as your mascot and take your spot at those painful, obligatory events you hate attending but can never figure a way to avoid. For instance, it could be a distant cousin’s wedding; your court-ordered counseling sessions; the dentist, etc.

There are two reasons why mascots are on my mind this week. One was a news story about a lawsuit in an Italian court that subpoenaed Tweety bird. I know, Tweety isn’t, technically, a mascot, but there are mascot-like Tweety costumes that people can wear at events. The second reason was college football.

The story out of Italy involves a lawsuit over trademark infringement of Disney and Warner Bros. characters. There is nothing unusual about that. What made this strange was that the court summoned Mickey Mouse, Donald and Daisy Duck, and Tweety bird to testify under oath. Officials blame this silliness on a clerical error and are assuring everyone that Italian courts adhere to a high standard of jurisprudence, including making certain, whenever feasible, that witnesses are actually people.

By the way, I have never warmed up to Disney characters. Mickey has a squeaky, whiney voice and Donald Duck spits a lot. I’ve always been a much bigger fan of Looney Tunes: Bugs, Daffy, Elmer Fudd, et al. The Disney versus Looney Tunes preference is one those issues that divides Americans, much more so than political affiliation. Other issues include the ongoing debate over which is better: the Rolling Stones or the Beatles; Letterman or Leno; and Miracle Whip or real mayonnaise. The next national census is coming up. To get a better gauge of what life in America in 2010 is truly like these should be the types of questions asked. Not how many toilets we have.

The second thing that got me thinking about mascots has been all the college football games I’ve been watching lately, thanks mostly to my son Christopher who discovered that during the fall there is a college football game on virtually every minute of the day between Thursday night and Sunday morning.

The thing with college football is that by federal statute each school must have a mascot. And the mascot must attend every football game. There it roams the sidelines with an unchanging expression on its giant, plastic face no matter what occurs. A meteor could crash into the far end zone taking out the entire Women’s Studies department, and the mascot would look on with the same psychotic grin, almost as if enjoying it.

The other thing Chris and I discovered is that there are currently 50,926 Division 1 college football programs in the United States. There are schools no one except alumni have ever heard of before. And some of these schools must have come up with their mascots while the mascot design committee was dropping acid. I swear one mascot I saw had to be the love child of Barney the Dinosaur and one of the Teletubbies.

But when it comes to weird mascots, the Olympics win without a contest. Remember Izzy, the mascot for the 1996 games in Atlanta? No? Good, then therapy worked. For the China games next summer they introduced five mascots, one appears panda-esque and another seems to have its head on fire.

The head-on-fire mascot should be a hit. At least the kids on the acid-dropping mascot design committee should love ‘em.

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