Chicago is cool

CHICAGO -- I'm here for the Big Ten football media days. It's a big deal, blah, blah, blah. Hundreds of media, all the Big ten bigwigs, etc.

Who's the preseason Defensive Player of the Year? Is the Big Ten inferior to the SEC or not? Very important stuff, this. But the world needs escapism, and I need my sportswriting  job, so I'm not griping. Just forgive me if I don't care if Michigan State is picked to finish third in the league, ahead of Iowa.

In the immortal words of Bill Murray in some silly movie whose name escapes me, it just doesn't matter.

I'm glad the Big Ten thing is at a hotel just off Michigan Avenue. Because you can walk, oh, 100 yards away to a world that would probably rank Big Ten football pretty low in things that matter.

Michigan Avenue in late July is fantastic. People from all over Chicago and Planet Earth are intertwined, working, playing, walking with quick purpose to their next destination, or leisurely gawking at architectural and human wonders.

A new addition to the landscape blew me away Sunday night when I first saw it. It's J. Seward Johnson's 25-foot-tall (they say 25, but it looked like 50 to me) sculpture based on Grant Wood's "American Gothic" painting.

The sculpture has been It's near Tribune Tower on the Magnificent Mile. It's fantastic. So many people who walk by it stop, touch it, hop on it, have their photos taken on it. Some just stare at it for several seconds. Even minutes.

After I listen to two more hours of coaches and players answering some of the world's most thoughtful questions Tuesday morning, and after I write something about something that probably won't help us understand or cure any of society's ills, I'm going to walk back to that statue.

It's a tribute to Cedar Rapids' own Grant Wood, after all.

By the way, the "American Gothic" painting is in this city, too, at the Chicago Institute of Art.

Chicago is cool.