#465 Dots Okay

So English is a funny language. No really. Take my wife. Please. The reason jokes like that can work is it only takes a hint of an inflection or a shift of perception to change meaning and intent. The other day I was driving by some low-income apartments. There was a sign out front that apparently Comcast was behind putting up. You know, like electricians, carpenters and plumbers put up their signs when they’re on a construction site. This sign was meant to tell all and sundry that Comcast was on the job providing high-speed cable services to this rundown apartment complex. Now first off let me clarify that low income does not necessarily mean run down, nor does it necessarily mean drug problem. But with the nature of this particular place both of those were fair assumptions. So given the prevalence of Thurston County meth labs in similar locales it seemed like a marketing blunder for Comcast to have a sign out front that said “this complex wired for speed by Comcast.” I mean, what with “wired” and “speed” being associated with that whole meth thing. Just an observation. I saw another sign in the same area. It was at a gas station. You know, where everyone goes for gourmet food. This sign was advertising a triple cheese burger. Sounded good. I was tempted to pull in, top off my tank, get gas on my knuckles, then go in and pile on the condiments. Somehow the combined fragrance of microwaved burger, American cheese, onions, relish, and fresh gasoline just send me to connoisseur heaven. What stopped me though was that I couldn’t figure out from the picture whether it was a triple cheese burger or a triple burger cheese. I mean, were there three slices of cheese, making it a triple cheese burger? Or three patties of burger, making it, more accurately, a triple burger cheese? I figured I didn’t need a huff of gasoline to further my confusion. But that’s just me. I sometimes dyslexify an entire sentence or phrase. Like that old song, “she wore an itsy bitsy, teeny weenie, yellow polka dot bikini. I follow it as far as the first two adjectives. Itsy bitsy and teeny weenie. It’s kind of cool talking baby talk every now and then and “itsy bitsy” and “teeny weenie” are a lot more fun than “small.” But I have never been able to figure out if the polka dots were yellow or the bikini was yellow. If the polka dots were yellow then there’s a fair case that they were also itsy bitsy and teeny weenie and that all the adjectives piled up in the early part of the sentence were modifying polka dots and not bikinis. So the girl in the song could have been quite prim and wearing something very modest and we’ve got the whole skimpy-clad beach bunny slutty image wrong all these years. Poor girl. And another thing. Polka dots. Why? What distinguishes a regular dot from a polka dot? And what do these particular types of dots have to do with polish dances?
America, ya gotta love it

#464 Dust to Dust

The other day I was wondering. I do that a lot. It starts with little stuff, which leads me to other stuff, which gets me even further into what I call obsessive wondering. O. W. for the uninitiated. O.W. is like other obsessive-compulsive disorders except it seems to infect geeks, philosophers, daydreamers, and home inventors. It’s better than O.C. though, cause you can pronounce O.W. OW. As in, my brain hurts from all this wondering. So one of the things I was wondering was: What is the scratch stuff made up of that you scratch off a lottery ticket? As I’m sure you know, every lottery scratch ticket is a multi-colored extravaganza of graphic indulgence. Bright reds, brilliant blues, passionate purples. Lottery tickets are definitely not for kids. And every scratch ticket is actually two layers, the painted on scratch layer and the backing, on which is printed the prize. The paint layer also has two regions. The place where the paint can be scratched off and the place where the paint is permanent. It’s hard to tell which is which till you start scratching. And once you start scratching, here comes the scratch dust. The little flakes of paint that peel off and go who knows where. I first noticed them when I was experimenting with a scratch ticket in my home and I chanced to scratch it on a lighter surface. The little flakes of paint and dye piled up in the area where I was scratching with toxic abandon. When I tried to brush them off afterwards, some of them went easily but others stuck to my table, only to be removed when I wiped them away with a damp cloth. Which promptly got stained with multicolored blobs of scratch paint. So I’m asking the question. Has anyone done a study on the environmental impact of lottery scratch dust? The toxic things that are killing us are in the little stuff we take for granted—lead glaze in Mexican pottery, small-parted toys that children choke on, toothpaste tubes made of lead, Poprocks. Is lottery scratch dust made of lead? It feels and smears like it’s lead-based. Is it acrylic or oil based? The landfills are filled with old oil based paint cans in partial states of deadly decomposition. I mean, I’m not that worried about me. I’m worried about the poor clerks in the convenience stores who have to scratch off all the secret codes on every lottery ticket they take in for redemption. They’re probably sucking in more toxic particles than a dentist drilling out an old mercury filling. All that paint and dye has to go somewhere when you stir it up with vigorous scratching. If nothing else, it’s killing off the friendly dust mites that normally consume our skin flakes and dandruff. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust, and all that, but black lung and asbestosis happened from stuff we once thought was relatively safe to inhale. What next, scratch ‘em-physema? Lotto lung? Give a whole new meaning to coughing up for some lottery tickets.
America, ya gotta love it

#463 Despair of Tickets

The other day, for no apparent reason, I was checking the Washington State lottery website. Okay, I had a reason, I had found an old lottery scratch ticket and was wondering if it had expired. That got me wondering if there were expiration dates ever on lottery scratch tickets. Well lo and be hold em, the Washington State lottery website has a page completely committed to old lottery scratch tickets. It has pictures of all the different promotions, and next to the picture of each one is a breakdown of which prizes are still outstanding. The promotions are arranged alphabetically so even if, say, “Amazing Eights” is older than “League Night” then it’s still above it on the list. Whoever designed the system spent a lot of time and money making it very slick and user-friendly. I mean, when you get right down to it, if you’re going to spend a dollar for a scratch ticket you want to be sure the latest winning information is up to date and arranged in a graphically attractive spreadsheet on the world wide web. In case you’d like to know, there are 67 different scratch games with prizes still outstanding—ranging in amounts from 50 to 500,000 dollars. That doesn’t even count all the outstanding one and two dollar winners. There’s enough uncommitted money out there to build a really flashy and graphically-intensive website and pay people a ton of money to keep it up. Of course, if it were me I’d give that money to education. You know, proceeds from lottery sales go to support construction projects for K through 12 or something like that. Or maybe they ought to bring students in directly, to intern at the lotto office in skills needed to fleece the poor. There’s a reason part of the website is devoted to telling people about addictive and problem gambling. Be a smart player, they say, know your limits. If they were smart, they wouldn’t play at all. It’s not about smartness. It’s because the people who can least afford to play are the people who play the most. The poor and the desperate and the behind-on-their-debts who are hoping to score big with that one huge lottery win—which never happens. I found it kind of ironic what they named one of the lottery scratch games. They all have catchy names that high paid marketing people have thought up. Like Money Tree and American idol and Cash Crusader. The one I thought was really ironic was called Big Bills. As in I’m gonna win large denomination currency? Or I’m so desperate because I have big bills to pay? And really Washington State Lottery, is it a good idea to name one of your games of chance Money Tree? First of all, it encourages the addictive gamblers fantasy that money grows on trees and secondly, it’s the name of one of the biggest chains of payday cash advance companies in the state. Any way we can divert more of those education dollars into an, um, irony control department?
America, ya gotta love it