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How does radio get its sometimes unfortunate reputation? Some of it is self-inflicted- the moronic contests, the allegedly "wacky" air names ("Boner in the Morning!"), the continued insistence of radio executives that any old celebrity can do a talk show. But then there's an article like this with a headline that reinforces people's image of radio as reckless:

Radio stunts lure listeners but often turn deadly

Oh, really? "Often"? Let's have a look:

1970: the Real Don Steele traffic accident.
1979: guy drowns in a raft race.
2000: the woman killed in a fall when a bunch of people took a Britney Spears hoax seriously.
2007: "Hold Your Wee for a Wii."

That's it.

37 years, four incidents, and you can't necessarily blame the radio station for the raft accident. And nobody would think that the Britney Spears hoax would cause a fatality, so take that out. Two in 37 years? Granted, any death is too much, but does this qualify as "often"?

The original story in the Sacramento Bee didn't carry this headline- it was added by the Arizona Republic. But that's how people make the assumption that radio is an industry filled with careless, stupid people who'd rather kill a listener than have bad ratings. Yes, there are people in radio who do things without thinking them through- the Wii contest qualifies. And stuff like that makes the business look bad, no question. But it's neither true that the contest is representative of the industry as a whole nor that this kind of thing happens "often." Radio does deserve some of the bad rap it gets, but not like this.

On the other hand, anyone who calls himself "Boner" or "Free Beer" or "Stench" is pretty much asking for whatever he gets.

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It's Super Bowl week, so let's go to the bookshelves and see what I have that's appropriate... ah, here we are, a couple of 32 year old media guides:

Exciting, huh? (The Bears must have had some budget for graphic design) What's remarkable about these is... absolutely nothing. The Bears were 4-10 that year under Abe Gibron, and the COlts were even worse, 2-12, with Howard Schnellenberger fired after losing the first three games by scores of 30-0, 20-13, and 30-10 (and Joe Thomas' first game as replacement was a 42-3 shelling in New England). These were awful teams, the Colts falling hard and fast- they were 11-2-1 and win the Super Bowl in '70, 10-4 in '71 and lost the AFC Championship to Miami, then 5-9, 4-10, and finally the '74 disaster. The next year? Bert Jones ascended to starter and the club went 10-4 and into the playoffs, with Lydell Mitchell and Raymond Chester stepping it up. After a few good years and one-and-out in the playoffs, they sucked until they moved to Indianapolis. The Bears were terrible until some guy named Payton showed up and ran them into respectability. There's nothing interesting in these media guides, though. Sorry.

This one's way more interesting:

O.J. rates three pages in the guide, none of which involve homicide. It does mention having shot "The Towering Inferno," and his then-wife Marguerite with kids Arnella and Jason, and that Ernie Banks is a second cousin, which I did not know. Ahmad Rashad's bio- a paragraph- is on the page before O.J. Nick Saban's older cousin Lou was, of course, the head coach.

But where's the Super Bowl stuff? Patience, my son. I do have Super Bowl stuff. Old Super Bowl stuff. Stay tuned.

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Continuing with this week's theme, let's go back to the game program from January 16, 1972:

Pre-Superdome, Pre-Katrina, Pre-Everything New Orleans, Cowboys-Dolphins. Check out the rosters:

Bullet Bob Hayes! Roger Staubach! Lance Alworth! Pugh, Lilly, Adderly, Renfro! Calvin "Father of Grant" Hill and Walt "A Pinch Between Your Cheek And Gum" Garrison! Dan Reeves! Forrest Gregg! The infamous Duane Thomas! Griese throwing to Warfield or handing off to Csonka or Kiick! Buoniconti as middle linebacker, Dick Anderson and Jake Scott in the secondary, Garo kicking! Shula vs. Landry!

And Ditka! Ditka, Ditka, Ditka!

The game was a blowout, of course- Dallas won, 24-3.

But those were indeed different times. Here's a page on the halftime show:

It was a tribute to the late Louis Armstrong featuring Carol Channing. No, seriously. And the pre-game featured marching bands. Tell your kids about that and see if they believe you.

Incidentally, one interesting note in the program was that the game was blacked out in New Orleans. Blacked out! That was before the days when watching the Super Bowl was a God-given right. Nowadays, watching it in HD is a God-given right. At least, I believe it is.

There aren't too many ads in the program, actually, but here's a particularly disturbing one:

All I know is that this guy appears to be missing some critical parts. Can't imagine why he's smiling.

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Back to the bookshelves for more irrelevant nostalgia:

Super Bowl VII, L.A., the Coliseum, January 14, 1973. The program has that pre-Tron jazzy comuter graphic look that was all the rage in '72, plus that lettering. Dolphins beat Skins, the undefeated season, and all anyone remembers was Garo Yepremian's "pass." The game and the program were boring, but there's one thing- in an ad- that I was surprised to find:

That's a long shot of an empty Yankee Stadium, pre-renovation, in football configuration. I hadn't seen that in a long time. Kids, back in your father's day, the NFL was not the national pastime. No, instead, it took a back seat to baseball, and many football teams played in ballparks built not for football and not multipurpose (the rage in the 60s and 70s) but rather were crammed into baseball parks. The Giants played in Yankee Stadium in the 60s until they closed it for renovation, the Patriots once played in Fenway, the Bears in Wrigley, and so on. This tended to leave one sideline about a mile from the stands and left only distant bleacher seats in some spots where you'd normally have multi-level premium seats. The NFL teams didn't rate their own palaces yet. Looking at this photo, it strikes me that there were very few good seats in the place- the sideline seats were a long way from the action, and the seats in the corner where home plate would normally go were in another area code. Open to the elements, terrible sightlines, zero comfort... it's a wonder that the game survived. Somehow, it found a way.

More shots of football uncomfortably shoehorned into baseball parks: the Bears at Wrigley, the Chiefs at Muncipal Stadium, the Pats at Fenway, the Packers at Milwaukee, the Vikings at Met Stadium (I like this shot best).

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By the way, the world has gone completely insane, in case you were wondering.

The mayor of Boston's calling for the revocation of the license of a cable network that doesn't need a license. The governor of Massachusetts is demanding harsh penalties. Some marketing guy's facing five years in prison. And it's all because people in Boston are too damn stupid to recognize a cartoon character done up on a Lite Brite.

Note that the "Aqua Teen Hunger Force" campaign's been going on in TEN other cities for three weeks without a problem. Only in Boston did it touch off an international incident, because someone panicked. And now, embarrassed, the moron Mayor and Governor are going to go on a witch hunt:

The devices displayed a "Mooninite" -- an outer-space delinquent who makes frequent appearances on the cartoon -- greeting passersby with an upraised middle finger. But the discovery of nine of the light boards around Boston and its suburbs sent bomb squads scrambling throughout the day, snarling traffic and mass transit in one of the largest U.S. cities.

"It had a very sinister appearance," (state Attorney General Martha) Coakley told reporters. "It had a battery behind it, and wires."

So do radios, and flashlights, and a million other things. And bombs don't run on Duracells.

But Coakley, Boston Mayor Thomas Menino and others said the statement offering an apology was not enough, and did not rule out criminal charges or a civil suit to recover the estimated hundreds of thousands of dollars it cost the city to respond to the bomb scares.

CRIMINAL CHARGES? For WHAT? Deployment of a Lite Brite?

Menino told reporters he received a call from a Turner spokesperson about 9 p.m. but had not yet returned it. "I think the city deserves a call, not from a press person, but from somebody in the corporate structure of Turner," he said.

"I just think this is outrageous, what they've done ... It's all about corporate greed."

It's all about politicians and police who overreacted, continue to overreact, and are in too deep to stop overreacting. Somewhere, Meatwad is weeping.

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Here's the game program for Super Bowl VIII:

Dolphins-Vikings, and that tells you who won right there. It was played January 13, 1974 in Houston, but not at the Astrodome- they used Rice Stadium, which had more seats. (Trivia- the Oilers didn't use the dome as their home field until the 1968 season. They started at Jeppesen Stadium (now Robertson Stadium) and used Rice Stadium in '65-'67 despite the dome's availability) The game was a boring blowout; the halftime show featured the University of Texas Band's salute to American music. You'd be forgiven for completely forgetting the game. I have.

But I'll never forget this:

Electric Football! The single worst game ever released. Absolute crap. And every single male child of the 60s and 70s had one. You lined up the plastic players, flipped the switch, and watched the players all slide randomly in 100 different directions. The ad says "the players move the way they do in the pro game," and, believe me, if that was true for that Super Bowl, I'd remember it. The ad also talks about how "you can control every movemebt of every one of the players with Tudor's all new Total Team ControlTM." That meant you set a little wheel at the base of each player, and ostensibly the player would do what you wanted him to do. Naturally, it never worked.

But you can still get one. Why you'd want it, I don't know. Misplaced nostalgia, I suppose.

Speaking of misplaced nostalgia:

Jean Shepherd did an essay on his New Jersey Public Television show years ago, talking about the strange penchant of New Jerseyans to have a ceramic Mexican stereotype and ceramic burro- "his native conveyance"- on their lawns. And he went on to wonder if in Mexican suburbs, lawns sported little ceramic New Jerseyans with THEIR native conveyance, the Dodge Dart.

Actually, the native conveyance of the 1970s New Jerseyan was the Dodge Dart Swinger, or the Chevy Camaro.

Speaking of the Camaro, here's a paragraph from its Wikipedia entry, exactly as it's written and spaced and punctuated on the page:

Starting in 1967 rumors were going around that Chevrolet had found something to challenge the Ford Mustang. On June 29 1966 the Camaro code named Panther was announced to news reporters, and by september 1966 they were reaching show rooms everywhere.Even though the Camaro was less boxy and drove better. But the Camaros sales were still incredibly less.

I have no problem with the idea of an open encyclopedia written by users. But I'd like it better if the users could use commas and apostrophes. Maybe they could even complete sentences once in a while.

Oh, yeah, the Dart wasn't a very good car.

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This week's All Access newsletter was dashed off between power failures, and reads like it:

The Letter this week is being pre-empted by technical difficulties.

Okay, time to send this before the battery runs out, which could be any second. Enjoy the Super Bowl.

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Got a bunch of e-mails complaining about my position on Electric Football yesterday and, in varying tones, informing me that a) I am an idiot and b) the game rules. I'll respond to everybody when I get some time, but the shorthand is: hey, if you like it, great, and I know people take it seriously and even modify the little plastic players to gain greater control and all that. Sorry, it was just not fun for me and it's still not all that appealing.

On the other hand, electronic football was great. This electronic football. You maneuvered a blip into the end zone. After playing for a while, you learned the patterns and could score pretty much at will, but it was still fun. And every once in a while, Mattel brings it back. Next time they do, I might just have to pick me up one o' those things.

After I get a Wii, of course.

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Oh, yeah, right, another one from the shelf- here's the program from Super Bowl X:

The Steelers- the ones where it seemed like every single player was a star- beat the Cowboys. More importantly, the halftime show was... Up With People. It was their first outing as the halftime entertainment, and they did it three more times. I don't have to explain Up With People to you, do I? Thanks. The show that Bicentennial year was "200 Years And Just A Baby." The program says that they sent a "cast" of 300 clean-cut automatons out there dancin' and singin' and burrowing their way into your heart, where they devoured your internal organs.

Oh, yeah, they're still around. But Super Bowl halftimes long ago morphed into something very, very different.

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Too lazy even to scan anything today.

We're going to take a Super Bowl break from watching what we eat- you can't do the Super Bowl without chili and beer. So that's what we'll be making, my mom's special recipe, beans and beef and beer in a heavenly combination, cooked all day so that it's perfect by game time... and the next day... and the next day.

No, you can't have any. It's all ours.

Anyway, here's where I'd give you my pick for the game tomorrow, except that I really don't care who wins. I can't work up a hatred for either team. In a way, I regret that a team I really hate- the Cowboys or Giants, for instance- isn't in the game so I'd have a rooting interest. But I didn't bet on the game, and I don't particularly dislike either the Bears or Colts, so I'll watch, but in that detached way that kinda puts a damper on things. Maybe the commercials will be good. Maybe someone will do something entertainingly stupid. Maybe I'll pay attention.

Maybe I'll have forgotten everything about the game by Sunday night.

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Oh, yeah, Fran is now officially a docent at the local nature center. She "graduated" today. I am intensely proud of her- it wasn't an easy course, and she's a star. That made it a very good day.

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