'Bombardment' and 'dodgeball'

In a recently-aired episode of The Simpsons,* the game usually called "dodgeball" was identified as "bombardment." What startled me about this was that that was what *we called it when I was a kid. We used "dodgeball" for a very different game, basically a version of softball in which no bat was used and a person was gotten out by hitting him with the inflated rubber ball. As I remember the softball variant, it was played only by elementary school children and was not a vicious game, as "bombardment" was.
In one of his autobiographical books, H. Allen Smith wrote of a version of the softball variant of dodgeball in which actual pain resulted, unlike how I remember the game being played. He went to a parochial school and the students took special pleasure striking the fundament of a teacher (or principal), a priest who would occasionally join the game.
I never heard "bombardment" described as "dodgeball" until just the last few years, when it appeared in popular culture in various forms, including in animated series. The only other name I knew for it, used by another school in the same region of Illinois as that in which I lived, was "Blood 'n' Guts."
The *Merriam-Webster's Online Dictionary* at www.m-w.com presents still another game under the entry for "dodgeball." If we ever did that game, I don't remember it.

Raymond S. Wise
Minneapolis, Minnesota USA
E-mail: mplsray @ yahoo . com