The world may be going to hell in a handbasket, but there’s one thing we can give thanks for: the year’s college-football bowl games are finally over. It’s not that the games themselves are a bad thing, though there are absurdly too many of them. The problem, of course, is that the corporatized names of the games sound so silly as to bring modern marketing, if not capitalism in it entirety, into bad repute. The AutoZone Liberty Bowl sounds downright dignified when you compare its name to the Chick-Fil-A Bowl and the PapaJohns.com Bowl. The Meineke Car Care Bowl isn’t a name that exactly sings, either. At least the Bell Helicopter Armed Forces Bowl has a certain martial coherence to its title. My own favorite is the Insight Bowl, which sounds as if it awards the trophy to the team that offers the sharpest aperçus as the game clock ticks down.

—Posted by Mark Dolliver