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The yolk turned out to be on them By BILL VARBLE It figured to be drive-time boffo, but the late, great Super Bowl prognosticating contest laid an egg. It happened on radio KZZE at about 7:45 Friday morning on the Meyer and Murphy show. The hosts put eggs representing professional football's Denver Broncos and Atlanta Falcons into a microwave oven. As listeners waited anxiously, they flipped on the power -- and promptly blew the station off the air. "The football gods didn't like us," disc jockey Bill Meyer said when reached on the phone. The idea was to have an egg representing each Super Bowl team, Meyer explained. The eggs would be nuked together, and the one that cracked first -- well, you get the idea. Hey, as Nikolai Lenin pointed out, great endeavors require breaking a few eggs. Problem was, radio staffers brought the microwave from the station's kitchen and plugged it in in the studio. The extra amps it drew were apparently the straw that broke the camel's back. "The studios were drawing enough through one breaker box that that overloaded it just enough," he said. An electrician was called, power was restored, and the station was back on the air after a couple of minutes. It was one of four outages for Southern Oregon broadcasters in less than 24 yours. Jefferson Public Radio was off the air late Thursday night for engineers to work on two transmitters. In addition, JPR's classics and news component, KSRG, 88.3 FM, was down much of Friday with technical difficulties. And television stations KOBI Channel 5 and KSYS Channel 8 were off for part of the day due to a power outage on King Mountain that shut down a transmitter Thursday night. Not to be intimidated -- or maybe they just have a hard shell -- Meyer and Murphy put their swami hats back on and tried egg-conjuring again about 8:15 a.m. "That time we kept it in the kitchen and ran a long microphone cable in there," Meyer said. "We had two listeners cheering their eggs on over the phone." The Falcon egg cracked first. "It started oozing, then exploded three-and-a-half minutes into the test," Meyer said. "It couldn't take the pressure." Meyer is not eggs-actly advising listeners they can take the test results to the bank. "I don't care what the egg says," he said. "I'm taking the Falcons." Egg on their faces, Meyer and Murphy admitted the stunt may have been a half-baked idea. They said the station may conjure up a new predictor for next year's Super Bowl. Like maybe all the king's horses and all the king's men? "Were we going to use goat entrails?" Meyer called to Murphy. "We were thinking of putting kittens in a dryer," she said in the background. He added, "Or maybe emu eggs." It sounded like a yolk. Mail Tribune Copyright � The Mail Tribune 1999, Medford, Oregon USA