Word: blimps
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...plot revolves around a terrorist scheme by the Palestinian Black September group (Munich Olympics, 1972) to murder a stadium full of football fans at the Super Bowl, 1978, by simultaneously shooting 80,000 steel darts into the bleachers from the underbelly of the Goodyear blimp. The political motives of the principals involved, although necessarily handled mostly as a premise for suspense, are carefully presented so no-one can take credit as a sympathetic protagonist. Bruce Dern, as an ex-POW who was court-marshalled for making a film commending the North Vietnamese cause during his capture and has gotten nothing...
...images go, you can't beat it: the Goodyear blimp suddenly looming large and low-much too low-over the Orange Bowl. To turn that benign and stately symbol of the country in a holiday mood into an instrument of unpredictable menace is a stroke of Pop-cult genius. If the blimp can run amuck, even in fantasy, what is there left that we can rely...
...there are the packed stands, the crunchy action of the game itself, the President in his box, the security people aware that something bad is supposed to happen but not sure what form it will take. In the sky there is nutsy Bruce Dern at the controls of the blimp. He has rigged it with 100,000 steel darts, which, if detonated at just the right moment, can wipe out everybody in the stadium, down to the last pompon girl. With him is Marthe Keller, his mistress and representative of Black September, the Arab terrorist organization that is financing...
...force of personnel and about $5 million worth of equipment: 165 people, 14 of whom?headed by Curt Gowdy and Don Meredith?will appear on home screens; twenty-one cameras, 16 of them the full-size "hard" variety, three handheld, one in a helicopter and one in the Goodyear blimp; five slow-motion "discs" for replays, and a vidifont, a computer-like machine that can instantaneously cough up players' names and statistics. Add to that three miles of video cable, 3½ miles of audio cable, 65 microphones and 100 monitors, then plug everything into 15 giant trailer trucks...
...impossible to imagine Wolfe as a road-show Colonel Blimp, a truculent dandy wowing the provinces. He would quickly have them gasping, and not in pleasure. For his audacity is irrepressible. It has brought much wrath down on his head from more conventional journalists, but this book serves as a reminder of how often Wolfe's refusal to be respectful toward any subject has produced both illumination and laughter...