It disgusts me that state governments steal so much money from people — mostly those who can’t afford the loss — by dangling before them the promise of $750 million in the Powerball lottery. A lottery is nothing but a tax on those who don’t understand probability statistics. If private parties want to operate gambling systems and if ignorant individuals want to throw their money at them, it’s not my business to stop them. But I’m disgusted that governments piously pretend it’s shameful and exploitive for private interests to run lotteries, but it’s fine and dandy as long as the coercive monopoly called the state gets the profit instead. This is wrong on many levels.
Briefly: Expect the unexpected as my site migrates to new servers this week
Briefly: Death of Mad magazine is a blow to my memories of irreverent humor
Briefly: Living with loss of love hurts, but forgetting real love would be worseBriefly: Alabama debates backing away from Common Core
The Alabama Legislature is in the middle of an effort to repeal federal Common Core standards. Six other states have already rescinded the standards and five others never fully adopted Common Core. Honestly, it’s hard for me to see why it’s a big deal. The idea that there is one size that fits every school across the country strikes me as odd. I’m far more interested in families deciding for themselves what children ought to learn. My personal standards would be far tougher than any legislature or school board would pass anyway.
Briefly: Being back at this table reminds me of my date with a married woman
Briefly: Check out new podcast for fascinating tales of Salem witch trials
Briefly: Fully covered Muslim model in SI ‘swimsuit edition’ is a shamWhat if ‘the Good Old Days’ were never as good as you remember?
When I was young, my father used to tell me stories about growing up in Birmingham. He rode streetcars around town by himself at a young age. (That was typical for kids then.) And he would tell me stories about his early jobs working as an usher for movie theaters downtown.
The best theaters in town were on Third Avenue North. Today, the Alabama Theatre and the Lyric Theatre — seen in this 1955 photo — are wonderfully restored and regularly used for concerts and movies. I’m pretty sure my father worked at both of them in the late 1940s.
He never told me that the years of his youth in Birmingham were “the good old days,” but he was clearly nostalgic for them. He enjoyed his experience of growing up in a bustling and active city, living around a vibrant downtown.
I hear a lot of people longing for the days of their past in similar ways, but many of them take it much further. They openly long for “the good old days.” They believe that the days gone by were great. They believe the America of their memory was great.
This nostalgia — combined with a fear of constant rapid change — makes some of them eager to to return to the past they imagine. To these people, “Make America Great Again” is an emotional call to a past which they imagine was idyllic.
We’re neither friends nor enemies, just strangers who share the past
Society needs storytellers to help make sense of a changing world
My bad teen poetry suggests I’ve always hungered for missing love