YOU KNOW cross-platform marketing synergies have gone too far when a Virginia outfit launches NASCAR Ballet!

The Seattle Times preview special is all about pitching; a major change from as late as 1994, when Mariner coverage was all about short-field home runs.

The section also lists where 23 of this year’s Ms live. Three spend the off-season in Seattle; two call the suburbs home. Three live in Arizona; two each in California, Florida, and the Dominican Republic; one each in Pennsylvania, Louisiana, Oklahoma, New Jersey, Colorado, Illinois, Puerto Rico, Venezuela, and Kobe, Japan (guess who?). So, when Griffey moaned about wanting to live closer to his family, he might have either been less than sincere or was behaving as a stuck-up diva. (Not that I’d wish his injury-plagued post-Ms career on anybody.)

THE PORTLAND AREA’S been stricken lately with an economy even worse than Seattle’s, a basketball team filled with ungrateful bad boys, and lower-than-expected levels of Lewis & Clark Bicentennial tourism.

But, like the clever and hearty pioneers they are, Oregonians always find some new economic hope. This week, it’s in the form of joining the same-sex-marriage bandwagon.

Multnomah County’s officially invited girl-girl and boy-boy pairs to rush to the Rose City, pay modest license fees into the local gov’t. coffers, get their simple declarative ceremonies, and freely spend their honeymoon bucks at the region’s hotels, restaurants, shops, and entertainments.

I predict it will only be days before enterprising entrepreneurs offer weekend package tours geared for non-heteros in love. Amtrak or Horizon Air fares, accomodations at a fine downtown hostelry, a prepackaged ceremony in one of several styles, two-for-one meal coupons, maybe even a Powell’s Books gift card to start your no-sales-tax shopping spree.

And, of course, a complementary video of My Own Private Idaho for the gents, or Personal Best for the ladies.

(Actually, it turns out the Portland tourism people already had a web page, even before the gay-marriage thang started, promoting their town as a cool destination for the GLBT set.)

P.S.: Why hasn’t Wash. state joined the bandwagon? For one thing, same-gender marriages are more explicitly forbidden in Washington’s legal code than in Oregon’s. To change this would require legislative action, a ballot initiative, or a thorough court challenge.

The Miss Budweiser hydroplane team will be disbanded at the end of this year’s boat-racing season, along with the beer giant’s whole 41-year sponsorship of the sport. The move follows the death of Bernie Little, a promiment regional Bud wholesaler and owner of the Miss Bud operation. In the past, us hydro lovers have complained on end about the Bud team’s Yankee-esque dominance of the circuit. Now the question is can the sport survive without its prime benefactor?

THE SPORTS PAGES have long been newspapers’ last bastions of passionate writing, so it’s a natural that there’d be a new wave of lively, provocative baseball blogs.

…to buy the team before. But Patrick Sheehan has a particularly impassioned plea for Gates to buy the team and out-deal Steinbrenner.

…the Damned Yankees just add more superstars. As I’ve said before, rooting for the Yankees is like rooting for Microsoft.

MIKE PENNER BELIEVES the National Football League has become a greying institution that “thinks old and tries to act young, never a flattering combination.”

Someone at Slashdot, in a comment that seems to have scrolled off the site, wrote:

“In a country where it’s okay to fry mentally ill people to death, let any eejit carry a gun, consume a huge proportion of the world’s resources and invade a country for dubious reasons, exposing a bit of human flesh is greeted with the sort of outrage that you’d think would be reserved for the end of the world.”

Of course, that’s the whole point. The right-wing sleaze machine loves violence (physical, verbal, emotional, etc.) and loathes sex (especially pleasurable, loving, or otherwise “girly” sex).

And the youth-marketing industry, which devised the Super Bowl halftime and most of the Super Bowl commercials, loves everything hard and “edgy” and hates anything soft and subtle. Faced with record-low TV viewership levels among the corporately-prized young male demographic, marketers are trying to outdo one another in vulgarity and desperation. It’s not that their audiences want this; it’s what they, the marketers, want their would-be audiences to want.

So, in the commercials, we got “jokes” about the following: A farting horse, little children saying a bleeped-out cussword, a wheelchair crash, a dog biting a man’s testicles, a talking monkey hitting on a woman, an old man beating an old woman, a football referee refusing to talk to a nagging wife, a man getting an unexpected bikini wax, and the very idea that a skinny man could love a heavy woman. All of these were just fine-‘n’-dandy with CBS and the NFL. (As were the two erectile-dysfunction-drug commercials, one of which included explicit language.)

In a further attempt to attract young nonviewers, CBS turned the halftime festivities over to sister company MTV. It staged a predictably rude and trite affair with mercifully short performances by has-beens Kid Rock, P. Diddy, Justin Timberlake, and Janet Jackson. Aside from Jackson’s reprise of the oldie “Rhythm Nation,” all the lyrics were about rude dudes boasting of their sexual-conquistadory prowess. Again, all that was OK’d in advance by all concerned.

Then, in the last dance move of the show, Timberlake (a mediocre dancer-singer known primarily for his write-ups in the gossip pages as the first boy to spear Britney) ripped open Jackson’s tear-away blouse and, officially “accidentally,” slipped her bra off as well.

This is far from the first “costume accident” on broadcast TV. (Remember Lucy Lawless’s rendition of the U.S. national anthem at a hockey game back in ’99?)

And CBS has been willing to show seminude women in recent years–as C.S.I. corpses, or as Chicago Hope hospital patients. And the network runs the Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show, but that’s all edgy and teasy, the way the Super Bowl was supposed to be.

But, like that other youth-marketing vehicle Maxim, rude-‘n’-crude’s OK, but pure physical beauty’s taboo beyond taboo.

Jeff Laurie at Sex News Daily claims the Jackson flash was newsworthy because “like most breasts, it’s scarce, and seeing it is getting a sneak peak at the forbidden fruit.” Uncovered breasts, of course, are far less scarce than they used to be. They’re in fashion magazines, in Oscar-winning movies, on Emmy-winning cable shows, and all over the Internet. But they’re not in “edgy” youth marketing, which is all about forever teasing and never pleasing.

And they’re not in the right-wing bombast culture, forever stuck in the sixth-grade notion that boys who like to blow stuff up are Real Men, but that boys who like girls are faggots.

So now we have, as a blatantly cynical election-year stunt, the Bush FCC promising a swift and thorough investigation into the incident; all while the Bushies keep stalling about 9/11, the Cheney energy plan, and the lack of real causes for invading Iraq.

What does it all prove? That in a supposedly sexed-up pop culture, one of the purest, simplest forms of sexual expression still threatens certain powerful interests–precisely because it threatens the premises of their power.

HERE ARE the two most important parts of the big football telecast:

• Janet Jackson’s attempt to prove, once and for all, she and Michael are different people.
• The anti-tobacco ad that wasn’t by a tobacco company, TheTruth.com’s “Shards O’ Glass.”

The game itself was a surprisingly tight, action-packed affair, ending with a last-second field goal. And it was won by the northern team (the New England Patriots), barely beating the southern team (the Carolina Panthers). Perhaps it’s an omen that someone from, say, Vermont or Massachusetts might whoop a certain adopted Texan later this year.

BOWLING, BOOZE, and free WiFi–the three great tastes that taste great together! And they can all be found, perhaps exclusively in the world, at the lovely Leilani Lanes in north Greenwood.

That’s where I and over two dozen others were on Wednesday night, for a webloggers’ bowling party.

Pictured above, none other than our Confounded Books pal Brad Beshaw. He wasn’t in our group, but just happened to be at the alley the same night.

Besides knockin’ the ol’ pins down, many of us played the Dance Dance Revolution game. Pictured above, “TYD” and Anita Rowland.

I STILL HAVEN’T FOUND a web page that sufficiently explains the NFL’s “strength of victory” tiebreaker rule, the rule that got the Seahawks into the playoffs this past weekend for the first time in four years. If anyone can tell me what “strength of victory” means (in a non-military context), lemme know.

OF ALL THE RECURRING THEMES in late-’40s film noir, perhaps none is as haunting and foreboding as the films’ repeated references to bowling. Really.

…who still believe against all evidence in all that is right and good in America just keeps getting horrible-er, as the absolute worst outcome of baseball’s League Championship Series occurs and the Evil Empire team gets another pennant, whilst the Cubs and Red Sox both remain cursed. And the Yankees’ game-winning run comes from none other than Aaron Boone, a player the Mariners wimpily failed to trade for in mideason.

I’M COMING TO LOVE the Chicago Cubs’ playoff baseball adventure, particularly the Chicago Tribune’s coverage of the Tribune Co.-owned Cubs. One feature article asks seriously, “Is it OK to pray for the Cubs?” The paper’s website home page also includes a Wrigley Field photolog, including a shot of a guy bearing a banner reading, “CUBS IN OCT. TEMP IN HELL: 32F.”

None of this praise, natch, is meant to slight Wednesday’s other baseball-playoff triumph, the Boston Red Sox’s righteous thrashing of the loathed Yankees.

SOME MORE REASONS TO KEEP THE P-I IN BUSINESS:

• Its unexpected, back-of-the-sports-section history lesson about the day legendary Nat-Am Chief Joseph attended a UW football game.
• Its tell-all headline about the latest city-budget mess, “Cut somewhere else, everyone tells council.”