Just like it happened with the "chupacabra" (AKA: goat
sucker), a designer/artist type is hawking a bunch of
t-shirts and other items emblazoned with renditions of a
cryptozoological enigma. This time it's the sqrat -- a
creature purported to be half squirrel and half rat, having
the temperament of a vicious attack dog.
On her new web site, www.scrat.com, The fashion designer, "Ivy Supersonic" --
known in New York City for parading naked people around in feathered hats --
claims to have trademarked the name "sqrat." But how can you trademark a new
species of animal? She hawks sqrat hats and t-shirts. To promote it all, a few
of her associates crashed the stage of a recent rock concert put on by New York
City radio station K-ROCK, and pranced around with banners displaying the
site's URL.
Even though it's nice to see the mystery of sqrats getting more attention, all
in all, Ivy's sqrat site is pretty half-assed. It's just too early for weird
fashion designers to cash in on this phenomenon, especially without devoting
more energy to covering reports of
sightings, or doing any cryptozoology at all.
Furthermore, the sqrat logo looks more like a beaver than a sqrat (back to the
drawing board, please).
To her credit, she does have a couple of short articles about sqrats including,
"Does the Sqrat(tm) Really Exist? Mutant Strain Combination Could be Loose in
New York City," but what she should do is provide a forum for researchers and
interested parties to communicate about sqrats, and inform the web-surfing
public with as much data about the enigmatic creatures as possible.
That's the kind of sqrat site the world needs. Nobody would mind if she
sold a few hats and t-shirts along the way; and I'm sure she would sell tons of
them, and maybe some of her feathered hats too. But this business of
trademarking the word "sqrat" is simply naked greed.
