Lingerie Bowl Looks Tame in Hindsight; Maybe It Wasn’t Such a Dumb Idea
Business 2.0 magazine’s “101 Dumbest Moments in Business” of 2003 includes Chrysler’s not-so-wise decision to sponsor the Lingerie Bowl at the L.A. Coliseum.
After various groups protested that the pay-per-view football game between models in frilly things was sexist, the promoters agreed to alter the players’ outfits to sports bras and volleyball shorts.
Chrysler withdrew as a sponsor, anyway. Ironically, the Lingerie Bowl -- the name wasn’t altered -- aired at halftime of the Super Bowl and turned out to be less racy than the Justin Timberlake-Janet Jackson show.
Dumbest (cont.): Business 2.0 also published the “Smartest Business Moves” of 2003, none of which mentioned local companies.
A year from now, it will be interesting to see whether the magazine includes the baseball owners’ approval of Frank McCourt’s heavily leveraged purchase of the Dodgers as one of the “smartest” -- or “dumbest” -- moves of the year.
Overlooked: I think that whoever named Eagle Rock was a bit mixed up. As this shot by resident Henk Friezer shows, the town should be named Eagle Tree (see photo).
Which reminds me: Bob Patterson of Alta Loma found a warning sign on top of a rock ridge overlooking a vast valley in Australia (see photo).
“Care to guess what it means?” he asked.
Mystery solved: An abseiler is a rock climber. (No fair if you looked it up on Google.)
A warning you wouldn’t see at the Lingerie Bowl: Australia, a treasure house of unusual signs, also yielded a kind of noise regulation spotted at a youth hostel by Jean and Richard Koch of L.A. (see photo).
Lively TV: I caught a public television special that showed Jack Paar, then the “Tonight Show” host, conducting a 1960s-era interview with Oscar Levant, the pianist, actor and comic.
Asked why he had moved to the West Coast, the chain-smoking, slouching Levant explained that on the Eastern seaboard “the waves aren’t large enough ... I’m a surfer.” Asked what he really did for exercise, he responded: “I stumble and fall into a coma.”
Levant himself was a talk-show host in L.A. in the 1950s, and -- like Timberlake and Jackson -- he got into trouble with his antics on live TV.
His biographers, Sam Kashner and Nancy Schoenberger, wrote that when Philco, the TV/radio manufacturer, withdrew as a sponsor, Levant told his audience: “None of you buy Philco products until it returns to this show!”
Switching channels: When Levant was about to be fired by KCOP (Channel 13), he told his audience he could always get a job as a talk-show host at KHJ-TV (Channel 9) or KTLA-TV (Channel 5) because “they’ll take anybody.”
He was hired by Channel 9.
miscelLAny: The police log of the Saddleback Valley News said that a customer threatened to get violent with a Lake Forest electronics store “if employees did not teach her how to use her voicemail.”
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