Bend it like Spider-man!
QUESTION Was the Doritos sponsorship of Wolverhampton Wanderers the silliest endorsement in football?
The irony of Wolves’ shirt sponsorship by Doritos, an American brand of spicy tortilla crisps, was that it came on board in 2002, the season the team reached the Premier League, having spent 19 years in the lower leagues.
For the previous 12 years, their sponsor was Goodyear, a company with strong links to the city for more than 100 years.
Stevenage Town were sponsored by Burger King, Crewe Alexandra by Mornflake breakfast cereal and Fulham by Pizza hut. Plymouth Argyle, in Devon, are sponsored by Ginsters — which makes Cornish pasties.
In the 2003-4 season, Spanish club Atletico Madrid had one of the strangest shirt deals with Columbia Pictures, which saw them changing their strip every time a new film came out. Shirts included the logos for hellboy, Spanglish, hitch, Big Fish and Resident evil. Their Spider-man away kit looked ridiculous.
When West ham were sponsored by sportswear firm Pony, it caused much amusement with the fans because the phrase pony and trap is cockney rhyming slang for going to the loo.
The winner of the oddest endorsement has to be the Greek amateur club Voukefalas’s 2012 pink strips supplied by the local brothels Soula’s house of history and Villa erotica.
Robert Cowley, Aldeburgh, Suffolk.
QUESTION What is the origin of the expression ‘on the breadline’?
ThIS saying, meaning to be very poor, originates in the U.S. in the 1890s and was a reference to people queuing for bread. It relates to a philanthropic gesture in New York state. The earliest written reference is in the newspaper Democrat And Chronicle, published in Rochester, New York, on April 4, 1898. C.N. howard, president of the Prohibition Union of Christian Men, reported that a banquet had been held with a cost of $100 per plate while 479 poor men formed a ‘bread line’ at a bakery for stale crusts sold off cheaply.
The phrase was popularised in the
Great Depression, where it was synonymous with poverty and degradation.
Bob Dillon, Edinburgh.
QUESTION What’s the worst advice in a song?
FURTheR to earlier answers, I would include Try The Worryin’ Way by the 1960s Florida girl group The Fabulettes.
In the spoken intro, the narrator tells how she is struggling with her weight: ‘Girls, I used to be a little heavy/See I weighed about 184.’ her solution: ‘Fall in love with a man that you can’t trust/One who won’t treat you right.’
Then just spend time worrying because: ‘I don’t count calories/I don’t exercise/I just wonder what woman my man’s been with/ When he tells me he was out with the guys.’
Annie Williams, Derby.
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