Conference hbahba::cam_sports

    
    Ya mean I'd have to pay to see the Swedish bikini team?  Beer ads are
    among the better ones on TV.
    
    brews

    I received a mailing from Don Sutton (ex-pro athelete) and the Beer
    Drinkers of America the other day.  Now that they successfully defeated
    the 400% increase in the tax on beer (or so they say), they have set
    their sights on a new goal -- defeat legislation to add warning
    messages to beer ads on TV.
    
    BDA claims that the warning messages, which could comprise at least 10
    sec. of a 30 sec. slot would cause the beer companies to pull all of
    their TV ads (if they aren't just legislated out of existence like the
    hard liquor and cigarette ads were) and that would accelerate the move
    to Pay per View sports telecasts since beer companies are the prime
    sponsor of major sporting events.
    
    The BDA will be lobbying against this legislation and is trying to get
    folks to sign a statement that will be sent to local senators and reps
    to help defeat the bill.

    
    wha happened?

�    wha happened?
    
    I realized I wanted to add something else to my original reply, so I
    deleted it, edited it, and reposted it.

    Mac how did you end up on the beer_drinkers_of_America.dis list 8*)
    
    Jimbo

    	Hey I got the same thing Mac.  Obviously this is a very
    distinguished mailing list.
    
    				/Don

    No big deal since I received one too.

    
    Don Sutton as Beer Drinkers of America spokesman?  Couldn't they have
    gotten somebody a bit more uncouth, like maybe Dick Butkus or Mike
    Dikka?
    
    glenn
    

	Heard on the radio at lunch time that the New Hampshire Legislature is 
	looking into reopening the issue of building a sports complex in southern
	NH to try and lure the Celts and Broons north of the border.

	BIll

    
    Mickey Lolich would fit the model better.

    I figure they got my name from one of the homebrewing supply shops I'm
    buying from.  I can recall giving at least 2 of them my name and
    address.
    
�    Don Sutton as Beer Drinkers of America spokesman?  Couldn't they have
�    gotten somebody a bit more uncouth, like maybe Dick Butkus or Mike
�    Dikka?
    
    Interestingly enough, they didn't mention which sport Don played. 
    Probably wanted to make sure it didn't look like MLB was involved.  As
    far as "uncouth" goes, they went out of their way to point out they are
    a "couth" organization.  They allegedly fund a "Drink Smart" type of
    campaign.  In fact most of the gist of the mailing was that Congress
    considers beer drinkers to be sinners and use that to justify upping
    the "sin" tax on beer.

    
    Beer drinkers are couth.  It's the Jack Daniels drinkers that cause all
    the problems.  
    
    brews

I got the mailing also.

I would think Dale Ellis would be a logical choice.

daryll

re NH building a sports complex

NO WAY.  THis will just bring Mass people up here and it will
mean they will try to take our guns away and make us wear seat
belts and get our teef cleaned and it will mean a global police
state and did I mention they'd take our guns away.

JD_as_NH_Small_town_paper_Letter_to_Editor_writer

Nah, they wouldn't like it up here anyway, not enough guvmit for 
em.

daryll

    
    > As far as "uncouth" goes, they went out of their way to point out they 
    > are a "couth" organization.  They allegedly fund a "Drink Smart" type of
    > campaign. 
    
    Yeah, most of your beer advertising is aimed at the sophisticated,
    one-beer-with-dinner-only crowd.  That's obviously why they're so 
    concerned about such irresponsible advertising laws, cuz most 
    responsible beer drinkers know all about the dangers anyway, and 
    don't want graphiics and stuff blocking the Swedish bikini team on 
    their screen.  Does anybody really believe that beer companies will
    pull their advertising from sports events?  That and Don Sutton is all
    they've got...
    
    glenn
     

�Does anybody really believe that beer companies will
�    pull their advertising from sports events?  
    
    No, but I would believe that legislation could be passed that would
    prohibit them from advertising the same way tobacco and hard liquor was
    forced to stop advertising.
    
    I imagine the same gloom & doom warnings over no more free sports
    broadcast came about when the Marlboro man was banned from TV.

    
    I think Glen is right.  Maybe Steve Howe could be the spokesman.
    
    brews

    	I think a Garden in Cow Hampshire would be great.  The parking
    and concessions would probably be cheaper and the people in Boston
    who think it's a divine right to have teams and make obscene profits
    off them would be in for a huge comeuppance.
    
    				/Don

           <<< HYDRA::DISK_NOTES$LIBRARY:[000000]DAVE_BARRY.NOTE;1 >>>
                       -<  Dave Barry - Noted humorist  >-
================================================================================
Note 728.0                    Truth in Advertising                     4 replies
CIMNET::RENNIE                                      104 lines  16-FEB-1992 10:43
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
                        ADVERTISING YOU JUST CAN'T BUY

               by Dave Barry, Pulitzer Prize winning columnist
            Copied from The Boston Sunday Globe, February 16, 1992

        I like beer.  On occasion I will even drink a beer, to celebrate a
    major event such as the fall of communism or the fact that our refriger-
    ator is still working.

        So you'd think I'd be receptive to TV beer commercials.  Most of
    these have the same plot:  Some guys open some beers, and instatntly
    the commercial is overrun by friendly seminaked young women resembling
    Barbie but taller and less intellectual.  If you just got here from
    Mars, you wouldn't know, from watching these commercials, that beer is
    meant for internal consumption.  You'd think it was a chemical Hot Babe
    Attractant, similar to what moths use to locate each other so they can
    mate.  You'd think that the Swedish Bikini Team was constantly prowling
    the sountryside, sniffing the air for a whiff of Old Suburbs Of Cleve-
    land Beer, or whatever brand it is they're allegedly attracted to.

        What bothers me is, in more than 20 years of opening beers with
    guys, I have *never* seen the Swedish Bikini Team show up.  Almost
    always, the teams that show up in beer-drinking situations consist of
    guys who have been playing league softball and smell like bus seats. 
    Maybe, to avoid misleading consumers, the beer manufacturers should be
    required to make realistic commercials.  For example:

        (As the commercial opens, some guys are sitting around in the
    woods, holding cans of beer.)

        FIRST GUY: You know guys, it just get any better than this.

        (Nothing happens.)

        FIRST GUY: (raising his voice): *I said, you know guys, it just
    doesn't get any better than this.*

        (Nothing continues to happen.)

        SECOND GUY:  There sure are a lot of moths around here.

        THIRD GUY:  This beer tastes like llama spit.

                                    * * *

        Speaking of realism in advertising, Michael Jordan should be re-
    quired to make a commercial in which he tries, and fails, to jump over
    the pile of money that Wheaties pays him to pretend that breakfast 
    cereal has something to do with his basketball ability.

        And while we're at it, I want somebody to explain the current
    magazine ad campaign for Timex watches.  You probably remember the old
    Timex ads, starring John Cameron Swayze, in which professional watch-
    abuse technicians would strap a Timex watch to a boat propeller, or a
    jackhammer, or a British soccer fan.  The watch would then be subjected
    to a severe beating, after which the technicians would hand it to John
    Cameron Swayze, who would hold it up to the camera and say, in a
    dramatic voice:  "It broke."  At least that's what I assume happened
    the first 35 or 40 times.  But eventually they'd get a watch that was
    still working, and John Cameron Swayze would say:  "Takes a licking and
    keeps on ticking!"

        That was an advertising campaign that I could understand without the
    aid of narcotics, in stark contrast to the current Timex campaign, sam-
    ples of which have been sent in by a number of alert readers.  These ads 
    consist of photographs of people wearing Timex watches; superimposed on 
    each photo is a paragraph telling you about some horrible thing that has 
    happened to the person.  For example, one ad features a photo of an at-
    tractive woman, with the following paragraph, which I swear I am not 
    making up:

        "Louisa Murray was eating a snadwich when a bowling ball fell off a
    ledge three stories above and hit her in the head.  Doctors gave her a
    one in a million chance, but she fought back and last spring graduated
    from college.  The ball did leave 'a little dent' in her head.  Louisa
    is wearing a striking Timex women's fashion watch.  It costs about $50."

        When you, the consumer, read this, a number of questions naturally
    come to your mind, including:

        >There was a bowling ball on a ledge?

        >Was this a suicidal bowling ball?

        >Or was she eating the sandwich at some kind of new theme restaurant?  
    ("The Eat 'n' Get a Skull Dent Cafe.")

        The ad offers no explanation.  Other Timex ads feature a rock
    climber who "fell 85 feet and landed on her tailbone"; a man who "was
    attacked by a 1,200 pound Great White Shark" that "tore open his entire
    upper torso: and a scuba diver who "was sucked into an offshore water
    intake pike for a nuclear power plant."  Each victim is modeling a
    Timex watch.  I don't know about you, but the message I get from these
    ads is: "Wear a Timex watch, and *something very bad will happen to
    you."*  At the drugstore, I find myself edging away from the Timex
    display case, which I fugure must be a powerful disaster magnet.  Any
    moment, a Great White Shark could come lunging out from behind the
    counter, holding a bowling ball.

        I don't mean to suggest here that all advertising is misleading or
    incomprehensible.  There are many informative ads for excellent
    products, especially the products advertised in this newspaper, all of
    which I personally recommend and endorse and use in my home.  So do my
    frequent houseguests, the Swedish Bikini Team.

           <<< HYDRA::DISK_NOTES$LIBRARY:[000000]DAVE_BARRY.NOTE;1 >>>
                       -<  Dave Barry - Noted humorist  >-
================================================================================
Note 252.0            note 248 before the censors got to it            6 replies
OBLIO::WADE                                         116 lines  12-AUG-1986 15:43
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

My sister sent me a copy of this article from the Washington Post.  I had 
it here waiting  until  I found the ambition to type it in, so when I saw 
this I quickly checked  to  see  if  it  was the same.  NO!  The Carolina 
Observer seems to have cut  it  pretty  heavily,  so  I  have  edited the 
missing parts back in.  We can't have chicken**** papers cutting up Dave, 
can we now.

================================================================================
Note 248.0                     Beer commercials                       No replies
ATLAST::NICODEM "You're never alone with schizophre" 71 lines   7-AUG-1986 09:27
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

    	[Re-printed from the Carolina Observer]
    

		Beer Commercials Inspire Warm, Patriotic Feeling

> [ title in WP ] Shake Hands and Come Out Drinking

				by Dave Barry

	Lately I've been feeling very patriotic, especially during 
commercials.  Like, when I see those strongly pro-American automobile
commercials, the ones where the winner of the Bruce Springsteen Sound-Alike 
Contest sings about how The Pride Is  Back,  the  ones  where Lee Iacocca 
himself  comes striding out and practically challenges the  president  of 
Toyota to a knife fight, I get this warm, proud feeling inside, 
the same kind of feeling I get whenever we hold routine naval maneuvers off 
the coast of Libya.

	But if you want to talk about REAL patriotism, of course, you have 
to talk about beer commercials.  I would have  to  say that Miller is the 
most patriotic brand of beer, "born and brewed in the U.S.A.," and the 
men who drink it in the commercials are American men, the kind of men who 
aren't afraid to perspire freely and shake a man's hand.   That's  mainly 
what happens  in  Miller  commercials:    burly  American  men go around, 
drenched in perspiration,  shaking  each  other's  hands in a violent and 
patriotic fashion.

	You never find out exactly why these men spend so much time shaking 
hands.  Maybe shaking hands is just their simple straightforward burly 
masculine American patriotic way of saying to each other:  "Floyd, I am 
truly sorry I drank all  that  Miller  beer  last  night  and went to the 
bathroom  in  your glove compartment." Another  possible  explanation  is 
that, since there are never any women  in  the part of America where beer 
commercials are made, the burly men have become  lonesome  and  desperate 
for  any form of physical contact.  I have  noticed  that  sometimes,  in 
addition  to  shaking  hands, they hug each other.  Maybe  very  late  at 
night, after the Letterman show, there are Miller commercials   in  which 
the burly men engage in slow dancing.  I don't know.

	I do know that  in  one  beer  commercial  -- I think this is for 
Miller  (although  it could be  for  Budweiser,  which  is  also  a  very 
patriotic beer) -- the burly men build a house.  You see them all getting 
together and pushing up a brand-new wall.  Me, I worry some about a house 
built by men drinking beer.  In my experience, you run into  trouble when 
you  ask  a  group  of beer-drinking men to perform any task more complex 
than remembering not to light the filter ends of cigarettes.

	For example: In my younger days, whenever anybody in my circle of 
friends wanted to move, he'd get the rest of us to help, and as an 
inducement he'd buy a couple of cases of beer.	This    almost     always 
produced unfortunate results,  such  as  the  time that we were trying to 
move  Dick  "The Wretch"  Curry  from  a  horrible  fourth-floor  walk-up 
apartment in Manhattan's Lower East Side to another horrible fourth-floor 
walk-up apartment in Manhattan's Lower East  Side,  and  we  hit upon the 
labor-saving  concept  of, instead of carrying The  Wretch's  possessions 
manually down the stairs, simply dropping them out  the window, down into 
the street, where The Wretch was racing around, gathering  up  the broken 
pieces of his life and shrieking at us to stop helping him move, his 
emotions  reaching  a  fever pitch when his bed, which had  been  swinging 
wildly  from  a rope, entered the apartment two floors below his  through 
what had until seconds earlier been a window.

	This is the kind of thinking you get with beer.  So I figure what 
happens, in the beer commercial where the burly men are building the house, 
is they push the wall up so it's vertical, and then, after the camera stops 
filming them, they just keep pushing, and the wall crashes down on the other 
side, possibly onto somebody's pickup truck.  And then they all shake hands.

	But other than that, I'm in favor of the upsurge in retail 
patriotism, which is lucky for me because the airwaves are saturated with
pro-American commercials.  Especially popular are commercials in which the 
newly  restored  Statue of Liberty -- and by the way, I say  Lee  Iococca 
should get some kind of medal for that, or at least be elected  president 
-- appears to be endorsing various products, as  if  she  were  Mary  Lou 
Retton or somebody.  I saw one  commercial  strongly  suggesting that the 
Statue of Liberty uses "Sure" brand underarm deodorant.
    
I have yet to  see  a  patriotic  laxative commercial, but I imagine it's 
only  a  matter  of time.    They'll  show  some  actors  dressed  up  as 
hardworking country folk, maybe at a church picnic, smiling at each other 
andeating pieces of pie.  At least  one  of  them will be a black person.  
The Statue of Liberty will appear in the  background.  Then you'll hear a 
country-style singer singing:
        
        "Folks 'round here they love this land;
        "They stand by their beliefs;
        "An' when they git themselves stopped up;
        "They want some quick relief."
        
     Well, what do you think?  Pretty good commercial concept, huh?

     Nah, you're right.  They'd never try to pull  something  like  that.  
They'd put the statue in the foreground.        

---------------------------

[  After  typing  in the 30% that got cut, it  seems  like  the  Carolina 
observer    cut  anything  that  might  offend  any  of  their  patriotic 
advertisers or their patriotic country folk!  

I'm getting a glimmer as to why some of Dave's stuff seems wimpy compared 
to the really  funny  (and  occasionally  offensive) stuff.  When was the 
last time you saw anything funny on network TV? ]

VNS COMPUTER NEWS                         
    
 Boston - Mayor Ray Flynn touts Roxbury site for arena
        {The Boston Globe, 14-Feb-93, p. 1}
   Mayor Flynn yesterday touted as "almost a perfect location" for a new Boston
 Garden sports facility a 17-acre site along Melnea Cass Boulevard in Roxbury
 if plans for a new facility at North Station fall through.  In an interview
 after touring the Roxbury site, now occupied by Digital and Stride Rite,
 facilities that are soon to close, Flynn said, "It really is to me the best."
 "If they were to build a new Boston Garden on another location than the
 existing location, this is the location I'd have preferred.  It's almost a
 perfect location," Flynn said.

    	I don't believe a word of it.  It's just mayor Flynn paying
    lip service to the Roxbury community instead of doing anything
    constructive.
    
    				/Don

    
    
    Yea, I read in one of the Boston Papers over the weekend about that.
    The funny thing about it was that the first article on the page had
    to do with Flynn wanting to take DEC to court about the "implied
    contract" with the city to provide jobs, using the Flynn Michigan
    vs GM as precedence.  The very next article was the one about 
    touting the very same site for the new Garden.  Are any of these
    guys for real???
    
    Jerry

	Mayor (for life),(is the camera on) Flynn is well aware that the 
trend in arenas is building them in suburban settings, not in the inner 
cities and the chance of Roxbury being the site for a new Garden is about 
the same as Clinton picking Rush Limbaugh for his cabinet.  But given his 
terrible track record with minority issues he grabs this opportunity to 
grandstand and look like he gives a darn about the economic climate in 
Roxbury.  Now when the Jacobs say no to a Roxbury site (assuming the last 
deal is indeed history), and he will, Flynn can point the accusatory finger 
towards Buffalo instead of the mayor's office.  If Flynn really wanted a 
new Garden he should quit using the issue as campaign material and get to 
work.  Course real work doesn't get him photo ops on the local six o' clock 
news.

				/Don

    
     Yup, it's a win-win situation for Ray. He can't possibly be held
    responsible should the Garden deal fall through. In fact, he might 
    actually benefit politically from the public anger at Beacon Hill.
    And by proposing the Roxbury site, a PR move as /Don so aptly pointed 
    out, he at least proposed a way to keep the teams in Boston and he's
    tossed the minority community a bone - a rubber one, but a bone none-
    theless. If there's enough public outcry, which I think is what Jacobs
    is banking on, thn the lawmakers will *have* to get it done or face
    an out-the incumbents movement on the scale of the post Anita Hill
    fallout in Washington. The Celts and Bruins will eventually end up
    in a new Garden. In Boston. In North Station. They will NEVER have a
    home in NH. Maybe a temporary one in Worcester but never NH.

    Apparently the pols are breathing life back into the New Boston Garden
    plan.

I went out and checked the sky for that star after I heard last 
night....

daryll

    The Garden management is promising some big things once the New Garden
    is finished.  One of the management team was on WBCN the other night
    saying that NHL and NBA All Star games are being investigated.  It
    sounded like the NHL game was pretty much a done deal and they are
    negotiating with the Celtics and the NBA for the basketball All Star
    game.

Won't be able to have the NBA all-star game until the Celts
get an All-Star on the squad.

Ta-boom.

JD