Beam Rebrands

Since McGrory took over the Metro Editor post at the Globe, we've only got Alex Beam's column to look forward to for our dose of ridiculous controversy on Wednesdays. Today we took the hook and got excited that he'd be giving us the scoop about Boston University rebranding as Boston's University. With the controversy, and imminent no confidence vote, at UMass Boston we thought he had some juice to share. We were wrong about the fruit from which his juice was squeezed. The best paragraph in the column might be this one:

What? No mention of Bear Week (a bear is a gay man who eschews shaving or waxing body hair), Mates Leather Weekend, or the 21st Annual Golden Threads Celebration for Older Lesbians? We wouldn't want visitors to get the wrong impression, would we?

Of course the pulp of the piece (see, we're keeping up the juice metaphor) was Canada. No, pot. No, beavers. No – okay, we're not really sure. Perhaps it comes down to the absurdity of rebranding and marketing efforts that aim to sell the same product under a different name or image. Whatever it was it's nice to see the Globe define a "Bear." The local newspaper of record caps of the Beam effort by making us aware that the columnist may be reached at his "e-dress" beam@globe.com which is either their attempt to be hip and coin a new phrase (e-dress), be hip and toss a throwback term into the fold, be hip but miss the mark with a BBS era term, or just plain miss the mark.

Image of the Bank Boston logo. A logo that's been retired in favor of Fleet Bank of America. We really wanted a BayBank logo but Google thwarted our search efforts.