Normally, I would blog a little to the three or four of you about my American, radio life while watching football. That's about as American, radio as it gets. Football = America. Radio equals that WJOB carried the Oakland vs. Kansas City game this afternoon and I listened to it on my own radio station while riding around doing stuff.
Shit, I forgot to turn off the alarm. Too late. Here comes Purdue Cal cops screeching around the corner, ready for action... until they see that it's me.
You again?
Anyways, normally I would blog to the three or four of you while watching Sunday Night Football. It's a relaxing thing to do, except possibly for all of the commercials. There's too many damned commercials during an NFL football game. There just is. It's an abnormal rhythm to watching the game. By the end of the game, you feel overwhelmed, stressed, beaten up... brainwashed. You wake up the next morning wanting an Egg McMuffin and a new car.
I won't watch football tonight because I'm so pissed off at the Bears. They lost to the 3-8 San Francisco 49ers AT HOME... in overtime. Robby Gould missed two field goals in a row that would have won the game. I can't believe it. He's gotten so bald and so old looking and maybe just maybe it's time to move on. I know that it's just one game but it was a big freaking game and they weren't that long of field goals and if he hadn't been such a blunder foot I'd be blogging to you in front of Sunday Night Football instead of sitting on my bed. Stewing.
Yesterday Alexis and I went to a thing called the Indiana Society. You wear a tux to the Fairmont Hotel in downtown Chicago and you run into a bunch of other Hoosiers out for a night in the city dressed like penguins. Not many men bring their wives. The dinners started like a hundred years ago for male Hoosiers who did business in the city and then it grew to include just male Hoosiers who had anything to do with business that might be done in the city. And then it grew to any Hoosier male who wanted to put on penguin suit.
And then one day some guy couldn't come unless he brought his wife and since then the whole damn thing has gone to hell.
I bring my wife because, as she often points out, she's an attorney and she owns a radio station and she's got bigger balls than many of the men in the room. (She doesn't say that last part. I made that up... but it's something she COULD have said, given enough craft beer.) To tell you the truth, I didn't want to go to the Indiana Society at all last night. Through circumstances far outside my control, I was pretty much forced to go as part of the Christmas party for my wife's law office and there's that.
And am I glad I did. Alexis and I had a nice conversation with Indiana Attorney General Greg Zoeller, who's running for Congress somewhere in the southern part of the state. Even if he makes it to Congress, he'll probably never be as famous for that as he is for being a first cousin of Fuzzy Zoeller, the well-known professional golfer. Fuzzy was known on the tour as a real card, a jokester, someone who liked to have a lot of fun. Greg's more of a sincere nice guy. You would have no problem with him taking your daughter to prom, back in the day.
Greg showed us a picture (it took him like at least two minutes to find it on his phone) of his son at the 50-yard-line of Lucas Oil Stadium in Indy. His son, I forget his first name, played for the state champion Indianapolis Chatard team. "He's really fast," Greg said. "He's a wide receiver."
We also spoke to Senator Joe Donnelly, who joked about coming on the air at WJOB. Evidently, we may be the only radio station in Indiana that makes him sit on hold for a while before bringing him into the show. "I get to learn a lot about the backup on the Bishop Ford and the upcoming snowstorm coming to northwest Indiana and Chicago," Donnelly said.
"Traffic trumps all," I told him.
I also had a long conversation with Dan Dernulc, the head of the Lake County Republican party. Now that's part of the theory of you never what the Sam Hill's gonna happen in your life. Danny and I used to throw the ball around at Hammond Jaycees softball games back in the day while our dads tried to prove their athletic mettle. And we waited in cars with our cousins while our dads went in to bars to prove their drinking mettle... and then on the way home proved their verbal mettle. No, not that. They didn't yell at us. They just talked really loud after a couple hours in Jack West Tavern on Calumet Avenue in good old Hammond, Indiana. Jack West is gone. My memories, and I imagine Dan's memories of it, are not.
Dan's also on the Lake County Council. We talked a little about his fellow councilman Jamall Washington, according to the paper, beating up two women. It's always something here in Lake County, the corruption capital of America. I'll probably have to talk about that in eight hours. But what the hell is there to say other than stuff like "innocent until proven guilty" and "isn't that sad" and, in a moment of shameless fundraising, "now might be a good time, if you can afford it, to think about giving a little money to Haven House, a shelter for victims of domestic violence."
Alexis and I talked to a bunch of other people, including a guy name Bill Ciesar. He used to be a judge in Whiting and now he's a big shot with Deloitte, general counsel for a part of their firm or something. He lives in Washington DC but misses the Calumet Region very much. You can tell. He wanted to reminisce about WJOB back in the day, Irv Lewin and the violins. Larry Peterson. John Anastopoulos even. Bill's a Purdue Cal grad, which means he knows how to talk loudly (like my dad on the way home from Jack West) and laugh. He's also important enough that he'll be giving the commencement address for the last graduating class of Purdue Calumet.
Next year, you see, Purdue Calumet in Hammond merges with Purdue North Central in Westville to make Purdue Northwest with like 16,000 students. It keeps growing and WJOB's a little bitty part of all of that, which makes me smile on the bed blogging to the three or four of you instead of watching NFL Sunday Night Football.