(Back From Vacation….)

So we left Naples, Florida for this?!?

I got back in on Friday night, not having talked to anybody (except for Darryl for a few minutes) or read anything. Great weather down there…I understand there was great weather up here. I had to PAY for mine (and you got yours for free).

We snuck away. First time I ever went away for Thanksgiving. It was nice. Except for the expensive Thanksgiving Day buffet that they hose you for. But, what are you gonna do? They got you. You’re away from home. You’re feeling guilty. So they run the prices through the roof.

But the kids had a great time at the beach. So it was a nice time. But it’s nice to be back.

But it’s tiring. I don’t know what it is about travel. I don’t know how the airlines do it. I used to date a flight attendant or two in my day, and I remember that they were always gassed. I remember thinking, “How hard is that job? You take off. You land. You’re a sky waitress.”

I’ve come to know a few things about those who fly a lot. (1) You’re “pulling G’s” all the time, and if you’ve ever seen a senior flight attendant, you know what “pulling G’s” looks like. Everything starts to sag towards the floor.

(Nowadays, that’s all that our local airlines have….shall we say, “seasoned” flight attendants. Back in my heyday, when I was 21 or 22, let’s just say that “everybody else” was 21 or 22. It was a good environment, and I’ll just leave it that, lest I get in some trouble.)

-Why do people put stickers on the back of their windows that say “OBX”? We all know what “OBX” means, right? (Outer Banks).

You’ve seen those oval-shaped stickers, right? Why do people insist on doing that? Does that prove that you drove ALL THE WAY down to the Outer Banks? What do you want me, a fellow driver who sees that on the road, to say? “Good job!” “Nice work!”

(News flash: It ain’t that hard)

And of course, there are knockoffs all over the place now. I saw one the other day that said “OLG”. (Our Lady of Grace)

I don’t understand it.

-Headed out to see Pitt-Louisville today, and I’m taking my kid. He’s been bugging me for months. “Daddy, I wanna see a football game.” He says he’s never seen a live football game. That’s not true. He doesn’t remember, but I remember taking him to see games in a little snugsack. You know, the little papoose thing where you can have the kid facing towards you or away from you.

(By the way, I never understood that. Why would you have your kid facing TOWARDS your chest? I always had my kid facing out, kind of like headlights. If the kid faces towards you, I picture him growing up traumatized, thinking the world is just full of shirt buttons. And people would come up to me and laugh. “That’s funny….your kid’s facing out.” I thought, “What other way would you DO that?”)

Anwyay, I reminded him that he saw Bruce Gradkowski play, back at Seton-LaSalle. Bruce, of course, is now the quarterback for the Tampa Bay Buccaneers in the NFL, so he was on TV for Thanksgiving Day.

But they’ll probably get about 35,000 – 40,000 at the game today. Maybe even less than that, considering the attendance for the Backyard Brawl was inflated a bit by the West Virginia fans. But I doubt we’ll get that many of the Louisville fans to travel up here. It should be a big game, but I don’t know because of Pitt’s annual year-end swoon.

I told my son, “Kid, this ain’t no basketball game. This is gonna go on for a LONG time. And it’s on TV, so it’s gonna go on for a LOOOOONG time.”

And my son is six years-old, so he has the attention span of a six-year old (though it’s actually longer than most six-year-olds.) , which is to say, still quite short.

We’ll see.

-And speaking of Pitt football attendance, why is it that Pitt always announces a crowd that’s usually 10-15,000 more than are actually there. And they think they can get away with it, as if nobody notices that the entire top section is empty.

-And, no, they STILL haven’t turned down the sound at Pitt Stadium. I even made a phone call this week to a very nice lady at Pitt. I told her that I was an old guy, maybe a bit crotchety, but the Panther Growl bothers a lot of people. She said she would, but I didn’t hear a difference.

Maybe I notice because I take the Pitt scoreboard personally. As I’ve mentioned on the radio show, I ran the computer section of the Pitt stadium scoreboard for almost 30 years.

(Neat story. It’s 1974. My company was broke. I was dating, ironically, a flight attendant. Her roommate was dating a gentleman who was actually a muckety-muck with Pitt’s Sports Information (a.ka. P.R.) department. We’re out on a double-date, and he tells me that they’re thinking of putting a computerized scoreboard at Pitt Stadium, and that he heard somewhere that I had a computer company. Well, I did have a computer company. It had no customers, but it was a computer company. So I had told him, “Yeah, my company was JUST getting into that kind of development.”

It wasn’t, of course, but, being an entrepreneur, and one who had no idea what I was doing, I hired a couple of guys out of Carnegie Mellon and created this system out of whole cloth. But Pitt used it for years, until they ultimately replaced it. But we had set it up so that my partner and I were the ONLY ones who know how to run the thing. It was THAT complicated. Many complicated operating systems in place.)

-Not to batter Pitt entirely, but for the WVU game, I’m heading down there with another buddy of mine, and we see this group tailgating in this dump of a parking lot on California Avenue.

(Remember when they HAD an on-campus stadium. And remember when they tore it down? I was interviewed on TV right around that time, and the first thing I said was that they would regret the day they tore it down. I’m still angry about it.)

But these kids were tailgating in a parking lot that was nowhere near campus. And all I could do was think about a school like Penn State. Or even my alma mater, Westminster. The on-campus atmosphere of a big game that was demolished along with old Pitt Stadium. It astounds me that Pitt’s trying to sell this current student atmosphere.

It’s a good school. Don’t get me wrong. I should mention that Mark and Nikki Nordenberg are two of my favorite people.

(And in closing, did you ever think that Mark kind of looks like Peter Noone from Herman’s Hermits? Or was it just me? )