Pass the thesaurus, I've got wood

The first equipment catalogue of the year is out [like Marcus Trescothick, I luvvem] and the language of love is alive again. The first season of the new decade has an unprecedented number of bats available, described in an unprecedented number of ways. The copy writers - and surely they're now employed on this mission - have spared no page of the thesaurus in their search for a lucrative niche.

Bats are objects of fetish, of course, and this year, things have taken a sexual turn. There are bats to appeal to what Tom Wolfe once called 'BSDs' - Big Swinging Dicks: the Willostix Anaconda; the Kookaburru Kahuna Biggest; the Ram Rambow; the Gray-Nicolls Powerbow.

There are bats that sound like condom brands from the 1970s: the Choice Willow Black Prince; the Salix Pod Performance; the Fearnley Magnum Ultimate; the Gray-Nicolls Ignite Pro-Performance; the Adidas Libro Elite; The Bradbury M Players; the Surridge Duke.

There are bats for men who drive 4x4s and bat in the middle order: the Newbery B52 Bomber XL; the Gunn $ Moore Hero DXM; the Newbery Uzi SPS; the Warrior Classic; the Kippax Fireblade; the JMS Attitude; the Redback Surefire. 

There are the counter-intuitive: the San Andreas Fault Premier Willow; the Redback Paradox; the Surridge Enigma; the Duck And Run. There are the unpronouncable: the Salix Praestantia Performance; the Piripiri Naga Jolokia 5 Chilli.

Best of all, there are the incomprehensible: the Puma Iridium; the Adidas Incurza; the Newbery Mjolinar; the Gray-Nicolls Xiphos.

There has to be a champion, though. Some years ago, Viz comic ran a contest to name an imaginary car they'd designed. The winner, brilliantly, was the Satsuma Castanet. So the inaugural Satsuma Castanet Award must go to the choice of the inimitable KP, the Adidas Pellara.

'The Pellara means to beat, banish and push away',' runs the ad copy. 'It features Adidas-specific contours...'

Of course it does. How could you resist...?