Trouble Is Brewing at a Local Elementary School

This is definitely a funny story from this morning's DMN: Killian Middle School, which opened in Lewisville this year, ended up with a logo that looks remarkably like that of Killian's Red beer:

The two Killians share a name, a mustang mascot and similar logos. One is a new Lewisville middle school. The other is an old Irish beer.

"It's highly coincidental," Lewisville ISD spokesman Dean Tackett said.

Killian Middle School, which opened in August, is named after retired school administrator Michael Killian. A seventh-grader there noticed the oddity when she saw a six-pack of Killian's Irish Red lager in her parents' refrigerator.

She looked at it and said, 'Hey, that's the logo of our school,' " parent Jim Ross said. "They've got a beer logo as their school mascot. It's unbelievable."

Read the whole thing and laugh. The article notes that the students chose the Mustangs from a list of 14 possible mascots and that there are quite a few differences (mane length, color, head tilt, etc.) between the school horse and the beer horse.

Are they too similar? The two logos are shown side-by-side in the article, so you can decide for yourself. And to the administration's credit, nobody's made an immediate knee-jerk reaction to the similarities:

"Everyone knows who the school's named after," Mr. Tackett said. "Does it really make a difference? I don't know. It's a pretty long stretch to me. Certainly we're not there to sell Killian's beer."

Mr. Tackett said the school district "obviously ... doesn't want any reference to alcohol at any campus."

Still, school officials don't believe the logo promotes drinking and would not push for a quick switch, Mr. Tackett said. It would be up to [principal Alan] Cassel whether to survey parents and consider a change.

And that, sports fans, is the correct way to handle a situation like this. (Still--it's funny.)

And in other embarrassing promotional moments...A grocery store in New York is catching some much-deserved flak for advertising hams as "Delicious for Chanukah." Umm, yeah, in the same way that a Big Mac would be delicious for a Hindu holiday. (The store has apologized and is "reviewing its employee training.")

One more "oops," but this was good for customers: A gas station employee in Wisconsin accidentally programmed his pump computers to sell gas for 33 cents a gallon. (Word spread quickly; they sold 586 gallons of gas in an hour and 45 minutes.)