Tailgating...or Moving Your Living Room Outside?

Alright, so this weekend, like a good Purdue student, I attended the Purdue vs. Notre Dame game. And of course, I tailgated the entire day before the game. While I was there, I was looking around in complete awe at the amount of technology that can be found while tailgating! I'm not talking about the normal grills with the little propane tank. We're talking about satellite dishes hooked up to 32" flat screen TVs. I guess that is the sign of a committed tailgater nowadays. I literally walked by an RV that had a TV that was in the side panels of the vehicle, a TV sitting outside on a table, and a TV inside. It was ridiculous, why on earth would you need 3 TVs at a tailgate? (To watch multiple games and see how the competition is doing is the obvious, though ridiculous, answer.

I passed one guy listening to the game on a radio, it seemed so primitive even though that's relatively young technology if you think about it, I mean, the first radio broadcast was in 1915, which is less than 100 years ago!

Our own tailgate was comparatively lacking to others in the technology department, but it was still pretty amazing if I do say so myself. For a bunch of college kids and recent alumni, I was impressed, though I think it was those alumni that really made it happen. We had 2 tables full of food...pasta salad, buffalo chicken dip, deviled eggs, brownies, chips and salsa, potato chips, a veggie plate, pretty awesome. Then there was the meat! Of course we had hot dogs, burgers, and brats. But Devin smoked an 8 lb. pork butt and a 7 lb. brisket. It was DELICIOUS! He smoked it for about 8 hours and it was just fantastic.

This is (some of) the group of people at our tailgate.

One last little blip about technology, in case I haven't fulfilled my requirements for class yet. My brother came down for the game with some of his friends. One thing that I cannot get over is the fact that they got down here by telling me that they "had a general idea of where they were going." What does this mean? That they had a Garmin and just put in "Purdue" to get here. No maps, no written direction of any kind. Just a little mechanical contraption to direct them the entire 2.5 hours that they were in the car. Did they get here without a hitch? Of course not because Garmin can't tell you that there are policemen all over the place directing traffic and since they didn't have a map they didn't know where to go when they were redirected and silly little Garmin lady couldn't figure things out as fast as traffic was moving (not very quickly through campus, but still quickly enough that she was lost). So the epic failure of Garmin of course led to the inevitable use of cell phones to figure out where they were going...again, no map, not that they would know how to read it anyway, what could they possibly ever use that skill for now that they have Garmin and GPS and MapQuest to give them step by step directions? So up the hill and down the road I was running to try and catch up with their car while they tell me their each and every move over the silly cell phone that slips out of your hand as you run because the creators never imagined that you would have to try to catch a car while using it, just marveling about the fact that this is all just nuts. Completely pistachios.