Evan West

As you might have heard, another big May race, the Kentucky Derby, is coming up this Saturday. For the first time ever, Indianapolis Motor Speedway and Churchill Downs have partnered to offer a special “Horsepower vs. Horsepower” (get it?) ticket promotion to race fans and revelers hearty enough to attempt trips to the Derby and the 500 in the same year.

When you heard The Romantics were on the bill for tonight’s Rev Your Engines concert (Monument Circle, Saturday at 8 pm, free), perhaps you thought the same thing I did when I saw them in the lineup for a music fest I went to last year.

This just in: Indianapolis Motor Speedway will include a historic, unpublished photograph in its 2012 Indianapolis 500 program. May Madness and IndianapolisMonthly.com have an exclusive sneak preview.

“We want high quality of life as long as possible, don’t we?” says Lilly executive Jan Lundberg. “Many of our current diseases are chronic, and they accumulate with age, so there are major demands coming from the aging population.”

Jon Hamm tried to slip past the red carpet at the Playboy party unnoticed last night. But we ran him down. “Don Draper” looked dapper but downtempo. This Super City reporter got the Mad Men hunk to stop for an on-the-run snap by calling out his recent segment on the podcast Sklarbro Country, with the comedians Randy and Jason Sklar, who hail from Hamm’s hometown of St. Louis.

Scattered shots here on sights and sounds at Playboy’s Super Bowl party on Friday night:

A handful of famous retired athletes pre-partied for a cause at Indianapolis Colts Grille early Friday evening. Spotted at the “Big Game Big Give” event, a fundraiser for The Giving Back Fund, were Marshall Faulk, the Hall of Fame running back and NFL Network analyst (and one-time Colts star), big-armed ex-quarterback Warren Moon (the first African-American signal caller elected to the pro football HOF) , and popular former Pacer Derrick McKey.

This morning, Roger Goodell, Jim Irsay, Greg Ballard, Mark Miles, Andre Carson, and Eugene White—for the uninitiated, see their lofty titles below—shared a dais. They appeared at the brand new Chase Near Eastside Legacy Center on the campus of Arsenal Technical High School, made possible by donations tied to the Super Bowl. This was the feel-good portion of the Super Bowl extravaganza.

I. The Vonneguts were here (and still are). The new Kurt Vonnegut mural along Mass Ave has made the likeness of Indy’s most famous author a permanent fixture of the cityscape. And the Kurt Vonnegut Memorial Library, opened in 2011, allows visitors to lay fingers on the very typewriter keys the giant once tapped (and […]

The weekend attendance numbers for the NFL Experience came out today: 42,238 visitors packed the convention center on Saturday (a one-day record for the attraction), and another 35,152 did the same on Sunday.

Normally, I wouldn’t give a rat’s you-know-what about the officials working a pro football game. But when I heard that the crew for Super Bowl XLVI would include Tom Stabile, it made me smile.

Everyone’s doing it—cashing in, that is. Unwitting visitors showing up in Indianapolis for the Super Bowl festivities will find themselves in a fishbowl. With a bunch of hungry cats staring in at them, licking their chops.

“I told my daughter, Angie, ‘I wish everybody would stop talking about the officer, because we don’t know whose lungs these are,” says Cathy Lewis.

Let’s see if we understand this correctly. Indianapolis has the Super Bowl. And the Super Bowl, as much as football, means beer commercials.

Age: 55  Gig: Director and CEO of the Indianapolis Museum of Art  Good showing: Under his leadership, the IMA organized the U.S. Pavilion at the 2011 Venice Biennale, opened a sculpture park, acquired the Miller House, and added a formidable Design Arts collection