Not the Super Bowl -- The Philadelphia Oink Bowl

Speaking of potentially offensive ad campaigns. It would be hard not to qualify the ad-campaign-faux-terrorist-plot yesterday in Boston as anything but ignorant. So it is with some amusement that a story today in the Philadelphia Inquirer has the folks who run their local belchfest -- sorry meant Wing Bowl ... complaining they don't get enough national attention. The Wing Bowl is no small event -- 25 contestants eating hundreds of pounds of Buffalo chicken wings in front of 20,000 paying onlookers. (Last year's winner Joey "Jaws" Chestnut ate 173 wings in 30 minutes.) And there are plenty of local advertisers, the article says, but event organizers are looking for the big score: Pepto-Bismol. Or Tums. Or ExxonMobil, like Wing Bowl a major producer of gas, the article says. The people who run the [eating as sports events] have been trying very hard to make it safe for corporate America, and they've gotten halfway there, said Jason Fagone, the author of Horsemen of the Esophagus: Competitive Eating and the Big Fat American Dream. It could get to a point where it's family-friendly enough to attract decent crowds and make the advertiser feel safe enough to invest, Fagone said. Or you could have somebody choke and die. It's happened a couple of times in Japan.