Before

Monthly Archive: October 2007

City life / Technology

Not thirty yet

So I’m sitting at the Caribou Coffee, here to do some writing and thinking. There’s an incredibly bad guitar singer here with an amp — which never happens. I’m trying to work, but the old man is cranking out bad renditions of the Beatles and the Monkees. (Come on man, pick one and get good at it!)

I am grateful, then, that I at least have my laptop with me so I can listen to my own music. But there’s some terrible problem, and I can’t get the music working! Windows Media Player says it can’t access all of my files, which is bizarre. So I download WinAmp, copy the music to other locations, try Yahoo Radio, reboot multiple times — anything to drown this guy out, but nothing works. It’s a travesty and I can’t think!

Finally, after half an hour of screwing around and NOT writing, I figure out the driver problem, and I crank up the first song that plays: Sedated, by the Ramones. Ahh, sweet blessed peace. I start jamming along, banging my head and really being happy.

And that’s when I notice them. A group of four ‘tweenies, sitting in front of me, giggling. And one of them has a camera phone and is trying to casually hold it over the shoulder so he can video my inspired Ramones performance. The others are dying laughing and trying to discreetly help him point it the right way.

Not wanting to wind up on YouTube, I stop chair-dancing and just stare at the phone intensely. They quit taping me and act like it never happened.

That’s when I turn on the flashlight on my phone, lean over, and take this picture of the little bastards:

Four punks at Caribou

(Perpetrator in blue hoodie.) They immediately melt in mortified embarrassment. Giggling stops, whispering starts. Nobody can stand to look at me after that.

Suck on it, punks. I’m not thirty yet.

Political

The embarrassment of state-run gambling

It’s not often that I get to say this, but I was right and I have proof.

If you have been reading my site forever, you’ll remember that I wrote about Jack Whittaker, the man who won a $314.9 million Christmas Powerball jackpot, back on December 29, 2002.  In that posting, I argued that the lottery was bad for the people of West Virginia, who are among the poorest in the nation, because it lures them into wasting money on a prize they have no realistic hope of winning.  I still believe that huge jackpots like Whittaker’s are dangerous, because they give hope to those susceptible to playing the lottery, and the lottery almost never pays off.

Unfortunately, what happened to Whittaker shows that the payoff isn’t always something you’d want.  Whittaker himself has suffered greatly from the burden of winning all that money, according to a recent AP news story and other reports.

According to the Lincoln Journal Star, July 27, 2007, “his granddaughter died of a drug overdose; he was sued for bouncing checks at Atlantic City, N.J., casinos; he was ordered to undergo rehab after being arrested on drunken driving charges; … and he settled a lawsuit filed by the father of an 18-year-old boy, a friend of his granddaughter’s, who was found dead of an overdose in Whittaker’s house.”  The New York Times reported in 2003 that “[m]ore than $500,000 was stolen from a sport utility vehicle that [Whittaker] parked at a strip club,” although the money was recovered.  But Whittaker didn’t learn his lesson, according to another Times report in 2004, because his truck was robbed again of $100,000.

A lengthy September 2007 AP story, part of which appeared in the Columbus Dispatch, tells the most human part of the tragedy.  “His wife left him and his drug-addicted granddaughter — his protege and heir — died.  He endured constant requests for money.  Almost five years later, Whittaker is left with things money can’t cure: His daughter’s cancer, a long list of indiscretions documented in newspapers and court records, and an inability to trust others.”  He still works, starting the day at 5am, but the story reports on Whittaker’s struggles with “drinking, gambling and philandering,” and by his own account, he has been “involved in 460 legal actions since winning” (some baseless, brought by people who figured he could afford to pay out).  The saddest part has to be that he had hoped his granddaughter would inherit his businesses and fortune, and had structured everything to go to her when she turned 21.  But a year after Whittaker won the lottery, the 15-year-old granddaughter was in Oxycontin rehab, and she died just 17 years old with cocaine and methadone in her system and a syringe and pills in her bra.  According to the article, “Her body was found two weeks later wrapped in a sheet and plastic tarp, hidden in a yard by a boyfriend who panicked when he found her dead.”

Come on, people. Lotteries are bad news.  They hurt those who can afford to waste money the least.  (Interestingly, by all accounts Whittaker was a millionare when he won, owning his own pipeline construction company, so he should have been better suited than most to handle the sudden wealth.)  Most people lose every dollar they bet, or win only token amounts.  No one should play lotteries, and no democratic state should be in the business of profiting off these gambling rackets.  Whittaker’s sad story is just one example why.