Chicago Manly Men

Big news in Chicago this week: apparently, we’re not very manly. 

It was actually reported a couple weeks ago, by Combos (yep, those weird stuffed hard pretzel things, and no, I’m not sure why), but apparently it’s taken the RedEye, the Chicago Tribune’s free daily paper, until now to dig it up.  And here it is: 

We’re ranked 47 out of 50 cities across the country, behind Dayton, behind Milwaukee, behind Buffalo, just barely behind DC, and ahead of NYC, LA, SF, and Portland, Oregon. The article itself is not really worth reading, unless your bus is stuck in traffic and your forgot your book at home… and you’ve already read all the other things there are to read on your phone and checked the weather twice… 

Somewhat interesting, however, are the little factoids of information you can gather from the “man-o-meter” rankings… yeah, there was a man-o-meter.  Things that worked in our favor?  There are obvious ones, like the Sears Tower (though I think we lost some points for the recent “Willis” development) and all of our sports teams… but did you also know that it is a Chicagoan who holds the International Federation of Competitive Eating’s record for hands-free blueberry pie?  9.17 pies in 8 minutes!  (Just so we’re clear though, as impressive as this surely is, if I ever bake you a blueberry pie and you consume it in its entirety in less than a minute, “impressed” is not what I’ll be feeling.)  The same guy apparently also holds the record for chocolate hearts, corned beef and cabbage, grits, and more… I’d imagine some of the blueberry pie skills cross over to other food types.  We also eat a lot of hot dogs – about 100 million Vienna beefs alone are produced and sold in Chicago each year. Apparently – this was one of my favorite tidbits - 

“travelers at O’Hare consume six times more hot dogs than Los Angeles International Airport and New York’s LaGuardia Airport combined.”

Thankfully, all of this bodes well for our manliness ratings.  All you aspiring manly men, eat up!  

Things that ranked against us, however, were our Starbucks-saturation levels (114 in the city), our low numbers of fishing licenses, Hummers, and Harley Davidsons per capita, and our smoking ban.  

Of course there are things to be said about gender stereotypes and the impact these have on the health and well being of not only the readers of the RedEye, but the overall subconscious of society and its institutions… honestly though, I would’ve guessed there were more than 114 Starbucks in Chicago.  Maybe that’s the really disturbing part…

And just so you all know, Mac totally instantly recognized Mike Ditka in that picture from the RedEye, I definitely didn’t have to explain to him who it was.  ;)

Tags: Chicago, wikipedia THIS