Time Out Chicago looks at "Late-night radio, Chicago-style"

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: Late-night radio, Chicago-style : Is there intelligent life on late-night talk radio? Our reporter stays up all night and finds out. : By David Tamarkin. Illustration by Doug Boehm. : It's 1am on a Wednesday, and it's just me and the Pinker: Geoff Pinkus, a man who spends his evenings talking into a microphone at WIND 560-AM. In sunglasses, if his website is to be believed. : The Pinker's on the radio. I'm on my couch. The plan is to entertain myself all night by trying to find intelligent life in Chicago -- without leaving my house. So far, the Pinker is it. : Although, at 1am, intelligence is relative on local talk radio. The Pinker's show is a place where a guest saying she enjoys black humor is taken as an invitation to speak in a vaguely racist vernacular. Elsewhere, on WGN 720-AM, Steve and Johnnie are playing an incredibly annoying Weird Al song called "Virus Alert." And FM isn't much of an option: Most of it is nationally syndicated music programming with no humans involved. Though I do find one exception: WHPK 88.5-FM, the University of Chicago station. There, at least 15 college students are in the studio, and they're all talking at once. One woman -- she is 20 at best -- is closest to the microphone, trying to tell a story. : I'm tired. I'm desperate for entertainment. I call in. : I say, "Can she start the story from the beginning?" : "This guy wants the story from the beginning!" somebody screams. Chaos ensues. A woman picks up the phone: "I'm going to tell you the story myself. See, she wanted to get a breakfast burrito..." And then she hangs up. : Clearly, radio isn't going to give me what I need. : So I navigate to Craigslist, where people are posting at rapid speed. I post a few messages: "Anybody know where I can get food delivered this late?" Elsewhere I post that I'm "so bored," and I wonder: "Where can a guy have an intelligent conversation at 3am?" : Two minutes later, a gentleman e-mails me a photo of his asshole. : So it's back to the radio. Johnnie is talking about the evil side of the Internet, "the dark side of something people are having a lot of fun with." And the Pinker is talking about the shooting at the Holocaust Museum. "The worst part is, they didn't kill [the gunman]!" he's screaming. "They let the guy live!" Then he puts out a call for listeners to dial in. "Should security guards have guns?" he's asking. : I need no further invitation. I dial, it rings, I'm put on hold. The Pinker goes to one caller, then to another. Finally: : "Let's go to David in Chicago." : I tell the Pinker I don't believe in guns. : "You don't think security guards should have guns?" he asks, though he's not so much asking as accusing. "If somebody opened fire in the Skokie Holocaust Museum and your loved ones were one of them, you'd think differently." : "But if there were no guns..." I say. : "There's never going to be such a thing as no guns." : I don't get a chance to respond -- he's already on to the next caller. But it's the best conversation I've had all night. : It's almost 4am now. The Pinker is about to go off the air. I tune back in to Steve and Johnnie, and they're talking about television antennas. Steve reports that he just dropped his pen. : I return to Craigslist and read recent posts: : "OMFG -- am I the only white middle-aged woman who is sooooooo turned on by Michael Buble???? His singing, His swagger?" : I go back to the radio. At this hour, Steve and Johnnie are the only people doing local talk radio in the entire city, and they know it. They're flipping through the Sun-Times now, sometimes commenting to each other about a story, sometimes just reading silently. As their last act, they play a song called "57 Channels (and Nothin' On)." : Finally, something I can relate to.

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