Who I was hoping would win the jackpot

(610 words)

If you think by me blogging the day after the $1.6 billion drawing means I didn’t win, well, you don’t know me very well.

I blog for free. I enjoy it.

Heck, if I’d win the jackpot I’d probably start blogging three times a day.

The only difference between jackpot me and poverty me would be jackpot me would dictate his thoughts aloud to a shapely secretary while he pranced around the room in a purple velvet robe and spouted his pronouncements with a long-stemmed cigarette holder clenched between his teeth.

I’d need the robe and cigarette holder for affluent imagery and the secretary because, gee, typing is the most tiresome aspect of blogging.

But — sorry to disappoint you — I did not win.

So far the three winners are remaining anonymous. If I was in charge they’d have until lunchtime to come forward or else they’d forfeit.

Anonymity should be a disqualifying factor.

I lay it all out in the “Lottery losers should decide winners” link below. In summary, I say each mega-jackpot should have 10 winners and each should be entered into a “Survivor”-like reality show only with harsher conditions that may or may not include tribal cannibalism.

Then the rest of us get to vote on who’s most deserving.

I’m always rooting for the nut job.

That’s why yesterday I tweeted I was hoping the winner would be Trump.

Imagine the gloating.

I told that to a friend and he said he was rooting for the nation of Greece.

I wonder if any of the presidential candidates from either party bought a ticket or two. It’d be a fun debate question. Of course, the follow-up would be how would they spend the money.

How many votes would it secure if one of the candidates said he or she would donate the entire sum to veterans organizations?

I’d vote for that.

Ellen would have been a fun celebrity winner, but not Oprah. In fact, if I have my numbers straight Oprah should be required to fund the next mega-millions jackpot from what she keeps in her purse.

A friend of mine said if he wins he’d buy the Pittsburgh Penguins, which are currently for sale for $850 million.

I initially liked the idea, but have decided it’s stupid.

Because eventually my friend — any of us — will bring ruin on the team and wind up despised in the city we love. It’s nearly impossible to satisfy home team sports partisans who exhibit more braindead inanity than even political ones.

It’d be better to buy a rival team and announce you’re doing so with the intention of deliberately ruining them and punishing their loutish fans

That would be such gleeful fun. 

Imagine the reaction in Pittsburgh today if you announced you were going to buy the Cincinnati Bengals with the intention of making them the worst team in NFL history. You were going to draft the worst players, bring in despicable felons and make the team a national laughingstock.

Like Cleveland!

They’d hate you in Cincinnati, sure.

But, oh, how they’d love you in Pittsburgh. You’d never pay for another meal or drink again.

I wish I’d have won but I’m one of those naturally contented people who fears so much money would drastically and for the worse alter my happy little life.

I’d rather someone kind and sweet like you, dear reader, had won.

You know, someone who enjoys a really good blog.

Someone who’d spontaneously decide a blog like mine was worth a measly .05 percent stipend from the winnings.

I find greed so distasteful and me and my secretary could squeak by on just $750,000.

Related …

Lottery losers should pick winners

Lottery robbery suspect runs across frozen Pittsburgh rivers

Tips on tipping

Who’ll take on Trump and what Cher has to do with it

Re-run Sunday: How old will you be in heaven?

Some of these re-runs are doing quite well and that bodes poorly for the blog's future. I've since 2008 posted more than 500 original essays. We'll soon reach a point where I could for every day of the year find something topical and timely that I've already written. But I think re-running old favorites helps me highlight to new readers some of the early ones I believe still resonate. This one about how old we'll be in heaven is from November 2009. Enjoy your Sunday!

Do you ever wonder what age you’ll be in heaven? I do.

I hope I live a good long life, but not if it means I get to heaven and am stuck being something like 89 decrepit years old for eternity.

The speculation is presumptuous for me, I admit, but I like to think I’ll make the cut. I’m kind to children and old people, never hog the passing lane for extended periods or send annoying ALL CAP E-MAILS. Sure, that’s setting the heaven bar pretty low, but by today’s standard’s it amounts to near saintly behavior.

I wonder about the demographics of heaven.

Right now, the life expectancy is nearing 80. But that’s only a recent trend. Just 200 or so years ago it was not uncommon for someone to expire at around 40 and for his friends to say, “I’ll misseth Miles, but he didst live a goodly long life. Now, let’s thou and I go burn a witch.”

Today, most of the people crowding the obituary pages are elderly and pissed off about it. I’ve never known a single senior to sit around and gush about the joys of excessive age.

And what about the sad unfortunates who die in infancy? Do they go to heaven as toddlers, forever in need of parental care? That’s seems terribly unfair, especially in light of them having their earthly lives snuffed out so young.

You’d think in heaven they’d at least be allowed to grow up a little, enjoy the liberty of obtaining a driver’s license and then, naturally, enjoy carnal activities in the back seat.

What about the thousands of souls who die daily of reckless or drunken misadventure? The headlines are full of accounts of hillbillies who blow up themselves or their redneck buddies constructing things like backyard rocket ships to deaden the boredom of their lives.

If they’re not given an opportunity to grow older and wiser then heaven might be full to busting with earthly idiots. That doesn’t sound like heaven. It sounds like an endless tape loop of “America’s Funniest Home Videos.”

Maybe in heaven we can put our ages on in the morning the way we do our clothes. You can wake up and decide that morning you want to be 21, ripped and sure you know everything.

Or maybe occupational considerations prevented you from spending too much time with the kids when they were young. You could say, “Today, I’ll be 38 with nothing to do but play with the kids.”

For many people, me included, that is exactly heaven.

But you’d get tired of that for eternity. And what if the kids don’t feel like being 6 and 4 that day? There could be conflict.

I’m lucky in that I can’t recall a time in my life when I wasn’t really having fun. The indifference of the girls in my awkward years (for me, that lasted from 14 to about 33) was compensated by lively buddies who liked to joke and laugh.

There’d be days I’d love to be young and zooming down Earlswood Avenue on my banana seat bike, bent baseball cards like castanets on the spokes. But there’d be lots of nights I’d like to stay in with Val, a bottle of wine and “Survivor” host Jeff Probst sitting there telling us cool behind the scenes stuff from our favorite show.

I’m finding much to enjoy about what I’m optimistically calling my middle age years. It’s not unreasonable to assume I’ll make it another 46 years to 92. There’s golf, family time and I hope heaven allows for more uninterrupted reading time in the hammock than I have here.

Yes, I believe there’s much to look forward to in the years before the inevitable decline.

Of course, I could have it all wrong. Heaven might not be like that at all. I’ve talked to informed clergy who maintain that heaven is nothing but all the blessed believers praising and worshipping the Lord for all eternity.

Only the heretics would dispute that He is worthy of such enduring adulation, but the description puts to mind Mark Twain who was told heaven’s a place where no one smokes, drinks, eats, reads, or does anything but express joyful contentment.

Twain’s response: “You know my current way of life. Can you suggest any additions, in the way of crime, that will reasonably ensure my going to some other place?”

But I worry about getting to heaven in a me that’s either incomplete or past its expiration date.

My late grandfather lived to be 97. He often said in his sad, last months, “Growing old ain’t for sissies.”

I loved that old man, but he was wrong.

Living ain’t for sissies. This world’s a mess.

We can only hope heaven’s all it’s cracked up to be and that we won’t have to worry about hurt, loneliness or things like male pattern baldness.

I’m going to stop now and go try and do something soulful that’ll help ensure I get to one day find out for myself.

The Great American Beer Fridge

Of all our national extravagances, the beer refrigerator might seem to primitives the most lavish.

It’s a wild guess, but there might be as many as a billion sweaty equatorials on the planet who’ve never even seen ice.

Television they might be able to comprehend as a box full of miniature people whose black magic is interrupted every eight minutes by commercials that remind them of what the tribal medicine men would say if he were sitting naked in a clawed foot bathtub.

But for a world of hunters and gatherers, the ability to reach into a big white box and pull out a meal would be nirvana.

And, indeed, it is.

But the beer fridge takes it all a step further.

The majority of the world has seen and understands refrigeration, but of those only Americans are apt to consider as essential the need for a second refrigerator exclusively for beer.

This occurred to me about a month ago when our main refrigerator crapped out. It came with the house about five years ago and we greeted its demise the same as if it were a cat that had outlived our love.

To hell with it.

We always buy our appliances at a true Main Street mom ‘n’ pop shop. It may be a little pricier but you can’t beat the service and every time we buy a big new appliance from them we’re raising our middle fingers to all the big box stores that are killing small towns like mine.

They have sales that make it worth the wait.

So for the past five weeks we’ve been a one-fridge family. We’ve had to endure the hardships of walking up and down the stairs for food. Sure, it’s not like we’ve had to take to the woods to kill something frisky in order to eat, but it hasn’t been easy.

And to make room, I’ve had to move all my beer down to my office beer refrigerator.

This is like a dorm fridge. Its entire contents right now are 21 Duquesne beers, eight Leinenkugels, a stray Bud Light, a bottle of ValuTime Italian salad dressing and a small jar of capers.

I often have salads in the office and will on occasion buy a breakfast bagel, some smoked salmon and cream cheese and garnish the sandwich with tasty capers.

What I rarely have here or at home is beer.

I’ll drink a beer or two in the summer after sweaty yard work or while I’m tending to the grill, but I’m more apt to refresh at night with a glass of bourbon on ice.

And I rarely sip even one beer alone at the office, preferring to go downstairs and guzzle it in the company of multiple inebriates.

So why the need for two fridges dedicated to brew?

I guess it’s all because I want to be ready to party at a moment’s notice. I think the mentality’s a leftover from my college days.

College was a place where even idiots learn it’s always a good idea to suggest whenever anyone stopped by, “Say, let’s have a beer!”

Life’s grim. Dance whenever you hear the music.

I’m always encouraging impromptu parties here at the office. I want anyone feeling glum to know they can knock on my door and be greeted with cheer and frosty reminders sobriety’s overrated.

But why a beer fridge at home?

The last thing I’d expect or want is any of my alcoholic friends to show up needing my support.

At the office, they’re interrupting my questionable ability to earn a living. But at home they might interrupt “Survivor.” That’s unacceptable.

What’s odd is how when the fridge broke neither my wife nor I debated for even a second about the need for another one.

It was just, well, bummer. Let’s withdraw about $1,200 from the savings.

The foolhardiness of the mindset is enough to drive a man to drink.

Good thing in America I’m never more than a few steps from an ice cold brew.

When idiots pray

God heard two prayers this week from two devout young men beseeching Him for freedom from what each believed was unjust incarceration.

One was 22-year-old Allah Mohammed Agha, an inmate in a Kandahar prison.

The other is Matthew Elrod, also 22, who’s been praying weekly that God helps him escape Redemption Island, a faux place of penal isolation, on the CBS reality game show, “Survivor.” 

God granted only one of their prayers.

Yes, the Almighty, it seems, opted only to answer the prayer of an imprisoned Taliban soldier. Agha was one of nearly 500 Taliban who crawled to freedom in the outrageous tunnel escape.

“I’d been praying to God that He would free me,” Agha later told reporters. “And tonight He answered my prayers.”

And He continues to ignore my fervent prayer that He cease listening to prayers from devout young idiots.

Elrod studies pre-med at David Lipscomb University, a fundamentalist Church of Christ college in Nashville. 

In show after show, he’s been featured praying the way the Bible says Job did after God laid waste to his every reason for being.

“I don’t know why, Lord, you’ve chosen me to suffer this humiliation,” Elrod’s said. “But if this is the burden you’ve chosen for me, then I shall endure it. I will do your will, no matter the hardships.”

The crucified Christ did less whining.

It’ll once again tonight have me leaping out of my chair to scream at the television, “You’re on a #&$!%* game show! Leave God the #&$!%* out of it!”

I’ll never understand the vanity of praying to a God in the belief that He’s immersed in the petty details of soft lives when He’s apparently indifferent to the prayers of those beseeching Him for justice in a world that too often seems truly godforsaken.

What? Is His prayer spam detector broken?

Want to know what I pray for?

I pray for the sick, the lonely and the sad. I do it every night down on my knees with my daughters.

It’s fun praying with little girls. They ask God for things like help in getting the stupid dog to quit whizzing on the carpet.

Just the other night, the 4 year old came up with a classic mingling of the secular and the sacred when she concluded her Easter eve prayer with “. . . and God bless the Easter Bunny and God bless yourself.”

I do on rare occasion pray for myself to be a better father, a better son, a better husband and, yeah, the essence of those prayers revolve around more success and more (some!) money.

In this way, my selfish prayers are not unlike the fictional rail bird the legendary New York Times sports columnist Red Smith once conjured. I remember it so well from Ira Berkow’s outstanding 1986 biography of Smith.

The bettor, Smith wrote, beseeched God to help his horse break the gate strong and, please, God, let the jockey be wise in going to the whip. Lord, I beg thee, he said, help the pony sense he’ll need strength at the final post. He prayerfully coaxed the horse around the entire track into a commanding stretch lead.

That’s when the bettor said, “Thank thee, oh, Lord, I’ll take it from here . . . Go, you son of a bitch! Go!”

I wonder if all our pitiful little lives aren’t really just part of some reality game show God enjoys watching the way I enjoy “Survivor.”

I’m fascinated by the interactions and the treachery, but no matter what they say or what I wish, there’s absolutely nothing I can do to change any of the outcomes.

I just sit there and watch the show.

My TV reality

I invited 20 complete strangers into my home on Wednesday. Some are surly, some are stupid, and all of them stink.

They will inhabit our home and insinuate themselves into our consciousness for the next three months. I’ll find out which ones are divorced, gay, have bowel problems and which ones are so carefree about their grooming that they think nothing of letting their toenails grow long and sharp enough to spear rabid armadillo.

Yes, “Survivor” is on CBS again and again my life has meaning.

Our 10-year-old daughter is the same age as the popular reality show -- and please let’s not demean fatherhood or TV viewership by giving me some Sophie’s Choice -- Josie or Jeff Probst.

There’s room in my heart for both.

My wife delivered Josie during the September week when the first season was in frenzied nightly re-runs to capitalize on the blockbuster success of TV’s first and still finest reality show.

Against her will, I forced my wiped out wife to watch as she lay in the hospital bed breast-feeding a baby so new we’d yet to name her. Val protested, but was too weak to reach the remote. She said she was sure she wouldn’t like it. It would be boring. It would ruin our lives.

She’d said the same thing about motherhood.

Ten years later, she’ll concede she was wrong both times.

She loves “Survivor” and she loves being a mom.

Me, there are days when surviving the perils of fatherhood make me want to vote myself off the family island.

Mostly, it comes down to TV. I just don’t get enough of it.

We tell our children that commercial television is evil. It’s boring. It kills braincells. It turns us all into vapid morons easily manipulated by the most base influences of soulless consumerism.

Yeah, right. We also tell them supportive fables to convince them of the Tooth Fairy’s existence.

In truth, I love TV. If I could I’d watch it round the clock.

I’d watch old movies, documentaries, mindless sitcoms, political shoutfests -- you name it.

Yet the rules we impose on our children we must impose on ourselves.

Because we don’t won’t let the kids watch too much TV, we can’t be hypocritical and watch too much ourselves.

It goes against my every instinct.

That’s why I so revel in any rare home alone time. So does Val.

I remember my mother watched the kids for one slim night last year. Val and I went to a great music festival, but left early so we could, ahh, watch adult TV.

Sure, we did all the other things loving couples do when they have time alone, but I guarantee the TV time meant more to my wife than any of our randy antics.

And that’s certainly no reflection on my romantic skills, she swears.

C’mon, how could it be?

Even so, how could I compare with guys like Tony Soprano and vampires Bill and Eric from the “True Blood” town of Bon Temps?

If we watch shows like that now, we have to wait until the kids are sound asleep. In order to watch shows about vampires we have to live like them.

So the programs that dominate our viewing are children’s movies and Disney Network shows sickly sweet enough to cause cancer in lab rats.

I need to hear someone other than myself spewing profanity.

So last night I snuck down to the basement to watch the 2007 Simon Pegg movie “Hot Fuzz,” maybe the funniest movie ever made. Ever. I mean it. Top critics give it a cumulative 91 percent on www.rottentomatoes.com

I’ve watched it 50 times and it gets funnier each time. If I watched it once a week my mood would improve. But Josie came down and busted me with, “How come it’s okay for you to watch something over and over and over and you yell at me for watching Hannah Montana once or twice?”

She’s right and now I’m thinking about constructing a basement below the basement.

At least “Survivor” is back after a 3-month hiatus. It’s the show we all can watch together. And I do love it. There’s no one in America better at their job than Jeff Probst is at his. The man’s a reality show genius.

But that’s one night a week.

Take this weekend. I’d love to do nothing but sit on my can and watch about 20 hours of college and professional football. All my friends will.

Alas, I cannot. I know the female outcry would be too great.

The tribe has spoken.

And they’ve told me to just sit there and shut the hell up.

Tweet of the week at http://twitter.com/8Days2Amish: “Anytime you hear of someone dying suddenly it should reinforce the need to ensure you're always living suddenly.”

Pun-free egg disposal suggestions

I can’t help but think there’s got to be a game show out there that could use 550 million spoiled eggs.

I’d watch.

Rather than grouse over yet another national catastrophe -- yawn -- and symbol of our steady decline, I see a sunny side of the need to dispose of all these rotten eggs (in an effort to make this egg-pun free, I’ll pass on the sunny side up gimme).

First, we should all be grateful this didn’t happen around Easter. And for a moment, let’s wonder why we have an Easter Bunny instead of an Easter Chicken.

It would take some getting used to, but a visit by the egg-bearing Easter Chicken makes more sense.

But what do you do with all these eggs? Bury them? Are they hazardous?

As the guy who’d always stop for eggs prior to every Devil’s Night escapade, I sense opportunity.

There’s just something about the egg, that shape, so easy to toss. Anything it hits, so sure to slime. In the hands of veteran vandals, the egg is a handy goo grenade.

You’d think the producers of “Wipe Out,” the ABC dimwit gloopfest, would grasp the possibilities. I like the show format which involves pulverizing imbeciles, but the idiot host banter makes it unwatchable with the volume up.

It’s just one more reason to look forward to September 15 and the return of “Survivor” host Jeff Probst, the Robert DeNiro of reality show hosts before Robert DeNiro started making too many Ben Stiller movies.

I think these rotten eggs could be used to bind us in ways more patriotic than the kind of binding that occurs after excessive cheese consumption.

I envision communities hosting enormous egg-stacking competitions, egg juggling, long-distance egg tosses. I see enormous egg pyramids being crushed by determined steamrollers.

How about a pay-per-view between warring Republicans and Democrats squaring off in some kind of reenactment of the battle of Gettysburg fought with eggs?

Yesterday may have been the first day in bar history the conversation was dominated by chickens and eggs. Present were three teachers intent on getting soused before being summoned back to educate our community morons.

They were just three stools down from a guy who’d just won $100 at Pittsburgh’s Rivers Casino playing that old county fair standby, the Tic Tac Toe-playing chicken.

When the news about all the bad eggs came on, the teachers immediately talked about the bad eggs they’d soon be charged with teaching things like math. They had a lively discussion of how to rid the world of the bad eggs that make them all sick.

Then the casino patron piped up about his game victory over the chicken.

“The chicken went first and -- get this -- he didn’t take the center spot,” he said. “I couldn’t believe it. So now I got two ways to win . . .”

Had anyone entered the bar in the next five minutes, it would have been understandable if they’d mistakenly thought they were hearing a man recall the time he bested Henry Kissinger at chess. He was very proud of outsmarting that chicken.

The news showed that many of the salmonella eggs came in big cartons of 36 eggs. My buddy wondered who, besides commercial establishments, would ever need so many potentially poisonous eggs.

We concluded only Kate Gosselin and that Duggar family and even the morose teachers’ moods brightened.

Me, I get to enjoy that smug feeling that comes from knowing our eco-sensitivities mean this is one chicken recall I can duck.

We purchase organic eggs from a woman known around the area as The Egg Lady and the superheroic connotation for at least today applies.

She delivers us a dozen delicious eggs for just $1.75 every week or so. How she does it for so little, I do not know.

I do know she’s proud of her chickens and her humane operation. She treats the free range animals with the same dignity and care with which I’d hope I’d be treated if someone oversaw me laying between 250-275 eggs a year, as the average hen does.

Her chickens are so refined that I’ve often thought of visiting these yard birds for a little conversation or perhaps some tea.

But no undignified games of chance. I’d be afraid I’d lose.

When it comes to matching wits with fowl, I’m the chicken.