It's official now. The Forty Niners have turned a corner and are now a contending team. They beat the Seattle Seahawks by a touchdown yesterday, running their record to 5-5, despite running back Frank Gore's untimely fumble late in the 4th Quarter and Joe Nedney missing a chipshot of a field goal late in the game. Gore had the biggest rushing totals in a single game for any back in team history. Those ex-U of Miami guys know how to turn it up field, don't they?
I had to work yesterday--serves me right--but I caught bits and pieces of the game in the lunch room, and saw the rest on ESPN and the video highlights on nfl.com. It's always good to hear KGO radio veteran broadcaster Joe Starkey's voice doing play-by-play. I think he's doing Niner football since the early eighties or something. Starkey (no relation to Ringo Starr I don't think) seems to have calmed down a bit from the days when he would go into hysteria if the Niners so much as made a first down inside the opponents 30-yard line. Joe is such a "homer" broadcaster. He should go into the college football hall of fame for the way he "freaked out" back in 1982 when the Cal Bears scored that last-second touchdown against Stanford (led by future Denver Bronco QB John Elway) on a busted up, triple lateral kick return and came from behind to win the Big Game. The guy just kept screaming like a little Fay Wray in King Kong's dirty mitt over and over. "Bears Win! Bears Win! This is the most incredible..." He went castrato-falsetto on the his radio listeners. I happened to be driving around Berkeley--where thegame was played--when this happened,listening to the game over the radio on my way to some Conrad Nagel-Kay Francis movie or something at the UC Theater on Shattuck. Then I hear this convulsion over the car speakers. Driving about the fringe of the Cal campus, I saw no Golden Bear Alums acting as freaked out as Joe sounded. Maybe one guy honked a horn.
Anyway, courtesy of You Tube, here is waht is known as "The Play" with some computer-generated imagingto make it look like Cal scored a clean touchdown. I don't buy it--the last lateral looks forward to me--there's people all over the field and they are not just members of the Stanford band either. I would have said "illegal lateral and everybody drive home safe now, good night". Or at least do the last play (i.e.,) the kick over if some refs didn't agree.
But its like the Zapruder film taken at Dallas in 1963; people see what they want to see and as you can see from the credits at the end, the analysis was done by University of California (Bear fans, natch). Anyway, you can hear how Starkey totally blew his cool. He goes full-tilt, like the guy who called the Hindenburg crash for the newsreels. But at least that guy had an excuse; people were dying and a big Nazi balloon full of hydrogen was on fire.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=srpHnRu-RW4&mode=related&search=
Again, it wasn't a Bowl Game even. Not even the Carquest Bowl. But for Joe, it was like V-J Day all over again. You would have thought Cal had won the national title or something. I think the next season of Cal football they had a guy in the KGO radio booth from the Frisco Zoo standing by with a tranquilizer gun to shot Joe in the neck in case he got too excited like that again.
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I guess this may not come as news to all of you, but I was recently let in on a
website from my friend Brook M that is a send-up of Wikipedia. Or, perhaps, in these irony-drenched times Wikipedia is a send-up of the Uncyclopedia. Anyway, it's quite
funny. The current opening page (November 20th) has a nice photograph of Sophia Loren. (I never knew she was a blonde! I must have the contrast checked on the television. I also didn't know she was as tall as the Bank of America Building! Well, you have to look
at the picture.)
But this link I provided will only navigate you to an article on the Great Depression, so you'll have to hit Main Page or somethingto get to the picture of Miss Loren. Those of you in this site with small children, be warned. The picture is PG-13, although the angle admittedly is bordering on "R"
http://uncyclopedia.org/wiki/Wall_Street_Crash_of_1929
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