Today’s Wisch List column from the Kankakee Daily Journal …

Return to reality? It’s harsh for Cutler, Bears

The WISCH LIST

Nov. 28, 2009

As I sat on my couch last Sunday night watching Donovan McNabb whisper sweet nothings in Jay Cutler’s nationally televised ear, I couldn’t help but wonder if perhaps the Bears could find a way to trade their quarterback to North Korea.

Because, right now, Cutler could overthrow a dictator.

Yes, that was Chicago’s would-be football Messiah tossing unintentional Hail Mary’s over his receivers’ heads time and time (and time) again as the Bears forsook a trinity of touchdowns en route to a 24-20 loss to Philadelphia that effectively ended their season. (Don’t count on a resurrection.)

As it turns out, remarkably enough, Jay Cutler doesn’t walk on water.

But he can make you whine.

Regular Wisch List readers may recall that back in September after Cutler tossed a quartet of interceptions in the Bears’ season-opening loss to Green Bay, I issued a quarterback caveat through this column.

“I’m sorry, but Jay Cutler isn’t the Sistine Chapel,” I wrote on Sept. 19 after the QB was compared to Michelangelo’s masterpiece. “Nor is he Michael Jordan in shoulder pads. Certainly not yet, at least. And no matter how much Chicago has seemed to want him to be.”

At that time, the Windy City was having its first doubts about Cutler’s competency following a summer-long love fest that had reached preposterous proportions. So, I called for tempered expectations while stating that I did still believe Cutler to be a talented quarterback, that trading for him was a good move and that he could potentially lead the Bears to Super Bowl glory.

Regarding those three topics today, though, I’d now have to say, “I guess he is,” “I suppose it was” and “Yeah, not any time soon.”

I wasn’t trying to tear Cutler down at that time, but rather urging fans to hold off on so quickly building the guy up. Because, as I wrote, before deciding on exactly what Jay Cutler is, we need to first let him show us.

And so far, with his league-high 18 interceptions, what Cutler has shown is that he’s a work in progress (or, perhaps, regress).

And not a superstar.

Not now. Not yet. Maybe not at all.

To be honest, at this point, I don’t really know what Jay Cutler is. I’m not sure that anyone does, and I think that includes even Cutler himself.

What we do know for certain about the Bears’ mop-top QB is that he racked up huge numbers with the Denver Broncos, has a cannon for an arm and hasn’t won a postseason game since 2001, when he led Heritage Hills High School to the Indiana Class 3A state championship.

In fact, since his senior year of high school, Cutler hasn’t even played in a postseason game. Not in the NFL, and not in college at Vanderbilt.

Because of this lack of playoff success (or appearances) and his often-dour demeanor both on and off the field, I’m not at all convinced that Cutler is a leader. And I’m concerned as to whether his confidence can survive this season in Chicago, where signal-callers seem to enter as quarterbacks and leave worth a plugged nickel.

Regardless of all that, though, Cutler isn’t going anywhere. He’s Chicago’s property through 2013, so the Bears had better figure out how to best use him.

And with a shaky defense, a receiving corps that often can’t seem to catch H1N1 and an offensive line that’s become, well, downright offensive, the Bears have a lot of work to during the coming offseason.

This week, the Bears’ management situation has been picked apart like a Thanksgiving turkey, and you can certainly argue that both Lovie Smith and general manager Jerry Angelo should get their walking papers (I’d probably agree). That’s unlikely to happen, though, and it’s much more probable that offensive coordinator Ron Turner will be replaced instead. To which I say, it’s time.

For Illini and Bears fans (such as myself), Turner – who worked with the Bears, coached the University of Illinois and then returned to the Bears – has been in our lives for 17 seasons.

That’s three more seasons than even Michael Jordan played here. Think about that.

During Turner’s tenures, the Bears and Illini combined have gone a pedestrian 111-119 with about 111,119 frustrating play calls. I’m sorry, Ron, but the relationship has run its course (if not its routes) and, at the very least, the Bears need to bring in someone new in to teach Cutler how to, in baseball parlance, become a “pitcher” and not a “thrower.”

Besides, the Bears reportedly will have a big-name offensive coordinator option available to them quite soon. His name?

Charlie Weis.

Heaven help us.

Today’s Wisch List column from the Kankakee Daily Journal …

Where Chicago sings the Blues

The WISCH LIST

Nov. 21, 2009

When it comes to the Blues, there are legends. And there are myths.

And, then, there’s Robert Johnson.

As the story about the famed Mississippi Bluesman goes, one night during the late 1920s, Johnson – the man who would go on to record “Sweet Home Chicago” in 1936 – met the Devil at the lonely intersection of U.S. 61 and U.S. 49 in the heart of the Delta to sell his soul.

In exchange for Johnson’s eternal fate, the Devil tuned the youth’s guitar, played a few songs and then returned it, thus giving Johnson the ability to play the Blues like no other man.

Dead or alive.

Today, only two photographs of Johnson are known to exist. But at Kingston Mines, the quintessential Chicago Blues club tucked along “Blues Alley” on North Halsted Street, a framed pencil-sketch portrait of the musician hangs on the wall.

“Born 5/8/11,” reads the hand-written message scrawled beneath a drawing that shows Johnson clad in a Fedora. “Died 8/16/38 … at the hands of a jealous husband.”

Johnson’s untimely death – allegedly caused by taking a swig from a Strychnine-laced bottle of whiskey – took place 30 years before Kingston Mines even opened. But had Johnson been able to perform there, he surely would have felt right at (sweet) home.

And had a devil of a time.

Chicago, of course, is known as the “Home of the Blues.” And if that home has a playroom, it’s inside Kingston Mines.

In 1968, the original Kingston Mines was established on Lincoln Avenue as a coffee house, but soon was converted into “Chicago’s Blues Center” and became known as the hotspot for hearing traditional Chicago Blues on the city’s North Side.

Twelve years later, Kingston Mines moved to its present location at 2548 North Halsted, where today it bills itself as Chicago’s oldest and largest real Blues club and serves as a popular haunt for both city-dwellers and tourists alike.

“It’s just an international sort of destination,” Chris Dischner, of Roselle, said late last Sunday with a guitar case strapped to his back following a jam session. “Unlike maybe some other places, Kingston Mines is authentic.”

David Graziano, the author of the 2003 book “Blue Chicago: The Search for Authenticity in Urban Blues Clubs,” may take issue, having been quoted as saying, “Nowadays a lot of Chicago blues clubs feel like Hollywood movie sets. On the surface they feel ramshackle and rusty – the barstools are worn out, the plaster is falling off the walls, and the floor seems barely mopped …

“Like Hollywood’s best film noir, these clubs are in the business of producing middle-class fantasies of urban life, thrilling and dark. But in reality, most of these places feel more like Disneyland with booze.”

Whether its shabbiness is contrived, or not (and I’d argue that it doesn’t really matter), Kingston Mines, with its rollicking music and rich atmosphere, is undoubtedly a Chicago treasure.

And on Sunday, I paid the $12 cover to rediscover what the message just inside the club’s front door describes as a “Return with to the Southland of Yesteryear where the Blues was born.”

Inside Kingston Mines are two spacious rooms, featuring two stages, two bars and about 200 Jack Daniels whiskey signs. Above the main stage hangs a wooden sign with the misspelled reminder: “DANCING ALOUD,” while fliers hawking fried green tomatoes, fried okra and Seafood Gumbo Ya Ya food specials dot the hallways.

In both rooms, intricate murals cover the walls, displaying images of sprawling cotton fields, a riverboat floating down the Mississippi and streetscapes evoking New Orleans’ French Quarter.

Beyond the ambience, though, what Kingston Mines really is about, of course, is the music. And if it’s true that “the Blues ain’t nothing but a good man feeling bad,” then Kingston Mines’ performers are awfully good at feeling bad.
On Sunday night, Blues artist Charlie Love stood onstage, spilling stories of heartache backed up by his band’s guitar riffs and drumbeats, as well as his own harmonica.

“She left me for a man with a job,” Love sang, playing to the crowd. “She said Charlie Love is a no-good so-and-so. You know that ain’t true … Play the Blues, man.”

At times, Kingston Mines is as much comedy club as Blues club, which Bluesman Linsey Alexander displayed upon taking the main stage a few minutes after 11 p.m. and promptly apologizing to the crowd for his band’s tardiness.

“Sorry, we’re a little late,” Alexander said wearing a smirk and a cream-colored outfit. “But we had to go chase some women …

“And they’re still runnin’.”

Kind of like Kingston Mines itself, which you’ll find open until at least 4 a.m. every night.

Including Thanksgiving and Christmas.

Because the Blues takes no holidays.

Today’s Wisch List column from the Kankakee Daily Journal …

To cell in a handbasket

The WISCH LIST

Nov. 14, 2009

Three years ago during Major League Baseball’s Winter Meetings, Chicago Cubs general manager Jim Hendry – a man famously addicted to his cell phone – famously signed free agent pitcher Ted Lilly to a $40-million deal while strapped to a hospital bed in Orlando.

And hooked up to an EKG machine.

Well, this week, another notorious cell phone addict (that would be me) had no problems at all with his ticker.

Until my iPhone flat-lined.

And about gave me a heart attack.

Yes, last Sunday afternoon, I shut off my phone, tried to turn it on again and then tried to turn it on again.

And again.

But I found the thing less responsive than Sammy Sosa in front of Congress (although not as pale).

And, so, for nearly 24 hours, until I could visit an Apple Store to get the phone reset, I was without phone service. Or a watch. Or an alarm clock. Or the billion other things that my cell phone serves as these days.

As a result, I was reminded once again just how much I’ve put myself at the mercy of a fickle 4.5-inch-long hunk of glass, plastic and metal that lives inside my pocket.

Do I own my cell phone, or does it own me?

(Don’t answer that.)

Now, mind you, there was a time when I refused to fall victim to my cell phone’s siren calls. That was back in 2003, when I moved into a new apartment in Ottawa, Ill., where I was working at the time, and my brother suggested that I ditch my landline to go strictly cellular. I brushed that notion off, and instead acquired a new home number and a fancy new cordless phone.

Within a week, I regretted it.

Just days after getting the new number, I came home to find two calls from the “City of Ottawa” on my caller ID, along with a pair of hang-up messages on my answering machine. My new neighbor from across the hall soon stopped by to inform me that police officers had been pounding on my door that morning.

“Excuse me?” I responded.

He said the officers claimed that 911 calls had been made from my place, and that he had to convince them I wasn’t home. Upon hearing this, I immediately phoned the police dispatcher, who said she had just come on duty but led me to believe that the 911 calls had originated from a different apartment.

Very odd, I thought. But I shrugged off the incident, until two days later when I came home for lunch and found three more “City of Ottawa” calls on my caller ID. Once again, my neighbor said the cops had barged into the building and beat on my door.

(By this point, they must have just loved me.)

This time, a dispatcher told me that a trio of 911 hang-up calls had indeed been made from my apartment. She asked if someone else had been there (no one had) or if I had any pets that might have dialed the phone (they make pets that smart?)

She then suggested that I call the phone company. So I did, and the woman I spoke with told me “that sometimes when cordless phone batteries get low, the phone will automatically dial 911.”

Since when?

Regardless, my phone had never left its charger. And so, at this point, fed up with a haunted landline that I was barely using, I canceled it and began an exclusive relationship with my cell.

Which opened up its own Pandora’s Box.

Last summer, for example, while running back to my apartment in a torrential downpour following a rainout at Wrigley Field, my Motorola Razr phone suffered catastrophic water damage.

While inside my pocket.

I didn’t know about that until the next morning, though, when I awoke to a technology wasteland worthy of the 1940s, as I discovered that my TV and Internet had also been wiped out the day before.

Imagine, if you can, what it’s like realizing that you’ve lost phone service, cable service and Internet service simultaneously. You can’t find the right phone numbers to call for help, because, well, you can’t get online. And even if you could get the numbers, you can’t call them anyway because – oh! – you have no phone.

So old school was my apartment that morning that I felt an urge to turn on the radio, sit down Indian-style in front of it and twist the dial in search of “Little Orphan Annie.”

If only my phonograph player hadn’t been in the shop.

Last month, following its annual online survey to determine the priority level that people give their cell phones, Samsung reported that 3 out of 10 Chicagoans said they’d give up sex for a year rather than sacrifice their mobile phone.

“A couple years ago, we asked about the cell phone versus chocolate,” Samsung spokesperson Kim Titus said. “The cell phone won that year, too.”

I’m not surprised. And I would write more, but I have to go.

I think my cell phone is calling me.

So, what exactly am I growing for charity?

Find out below in today’s Wisch List column from the Kankakee Daily Journal …

Hair Ye, Hair Ye … Movember is here

The WISCH LIST

Mov. 7, 2009

Today, your calendar reads November 7.

But mine doesn’t.

Nope, that’s because, this year, I’m celebrating the month of Movember, instead, as I work to change the face of men’s health.

By changing my own.

With a mustache.

(Yeah, yeah, go ahead and chuckle. I’m man enough to take it. After all, my upper lip tells me so.)

For myself, a team of 15 guys in the office where I work, and a bunch of other men throughout Chicago (not to mention, the globe), the month of November is currently nothing but a mere nemory, er … memory.

We’ve opted to instead embrace Movember, an annual charity event where men begin November clean-shaven, but then make like Mike Ditka and spend 30 days growing a mustache (no beards or goatees allowed) to raise funds and awareness for men’s health, specifically prostate and testicular cancers.

Think of Movember in the way you think of October as Breast Cancer Awareness Month. The only difference is that instead of wearing pink ribbons as a symbol for their cause, men wear whiskers.

“I call it our hairy ribbon,” Adam Garone, the co-founder and chief executive of the Movember Foundation, told the Los Angeles Times earlier this week in a story about this (quite literally) hair-brained idea.

As for the Movember movement, it was conjured up six years ago when Garone and a few pals were tipping back beers in their native Australia and joking about 1980s fashion.

Fueled by a little bit of booze – and whole a lot of testosterone – Garone’s group decided on a lark that it was high time to bring the mustache back. Shortly after growing out their Mo’s (Australian slang for mustache), however, the guys realized their new Tom Selleck-styled looks could be used for a higher calling.

It was a way to help stereotypically reticent men start talking about health issues – in particular, prostate cancer, which affects 1 in 6 males during their lifetimes.

“It’s as big an issue as breast cancer, but there’s a significant gap in the level of funding and awareness,” Garone said. “And I firmly put that down to the fact that we, as men, are apathetic about our health, and just don’t want to talk about it.”

To date, the Movember Foundation has raised $47 million globally to fund prostrate cancer, making it the world’s largest charity event for men. But it was only in 2007 that the movement first reached the shores of the U.S. – and the upper lips of American men.

In that first year, 2,000 U.S. participants raised $600,000. In 2008, 7,000 American “mo bros” (and their supporting “mo sistas”) raised $1.1 million for the Prostate Cancer Foundation. And now, for the first time, the funds raised through Movember will be split between the Prostate Cancer Foundation and the Lance Armstrong Foundation, whose namesake famously battled testicular cancer, the most commonly diagnosed cancer for 18- to 35-year-olds. Movember is capped off with a series of parties around the country. Chicago’s is slated for Dec. 4.

Based on the success that Movember has seen in Australia, Garone says he hopes that in the U.S. the “hairy ribbon” of men’s health can reach the mass cultural awareness that breast cancer’s pink ribbon enjoys within three or four years.

I’ll be doing my part to spread the word.

One whisker at a time.

Although, to ease our way into Movember, my team instituted a one-week buffer during which we’ve been allowed to grow out full beards. Come Monday, however, only the ’stache is allowed.

I do have to admit that I’m a bit nervous about launching my own Movember reign. As far as facial hair goes (or grows), while I’ve had sideburns since I was a senior in college, I’ve never had a beard – and certainly not a mustache.

But, really, that’s the whole idea.

Because, as Garone explains, when it’s someone who doesn’t normally have a mustache, that person becomes a walking billboard and “We want them to go home at Thanksgiving and have a dinner conversation; ask their dads and uncles if they’ve been screened for prostate cancer.”

Already this week, one of my Chicago friends taking part in Movember said he caught himself humming the theme song to “Magnum, P.I.”

“Wow,” he said. “This is going to be a long month.”

Yeah. But at least it’s for a good cause.

And, who knows, by the end of it, maybe I’ll be wearing a Detroit Tigers cap and looking to move to Hawaii. Just like Magnum, himself.

Then again, maybe I’ll be looking for a razor, instead.

Either way, it should be interesting.

Help make my Mo worthwhile. Click here and make a donation today to join the fight against prostrate and testicular cancers. All donations — and mustache grooming tips — are much appreciated.

Examining the Beard before the Mo.

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Rumor has it that outfield phenom Trey Magnifique is really tearing it up in the Arizona Fall League.