Lottery Fever

I didn't win the $640,000,000 million Mega Millions lottery yesterday. That's okay. I had 5 quick picks and didn't feel the need to buy more than that.

The odds are long. 1 in 176,000,000 if the news stories are to be believed. When the lottery is $640 million there is a sure fire way to win. Buy up 176,000,000 lottery tickets. That would cover every possible number combination. It could only really be done by a billionaire with a lot of time on his hands or some hedge fund as a way for a sure fire return on money spent. You would win.

But there's also a chance that someone else would also have the numbers. The profit would be less and you might not cover the expense of buying every possible combination.

Though I didn't win, it was fun to think about what I would do with that kind of cash. And for $5, that's not bad. Like they say, you can't win if you don't play.

Mix Tapes

I used to make mix tapes to play in my car when driving. Tapes. Not CDs, tapes. Did it for years and years. Then I switched to CDs.

Sometimes I would pick a theme and do a bunch of songs in a certain genre. Like "80's Hair" which was a bunch of late 80's hair bands. Or "21 the Hard Way" which was all heavy metal. Or "Speed" which were great songs to speed down the freeway at 90 mph.

Since I got a CD player in the car years ago I rarely pulled out the tapes. I had a deck of 10 discs at my disposal so the tape deck in the car fell to disuse. But recently I pulled out some old tapes and was playing them as I drove. They were somewhat remembered and a bit of a surprise because I didn't remember what I had on the tapes or what order.

I was hearing songs I haven't heard in over a decade and it took me back to the roads I travelled when they were new in my tape deck. I can't say for sure who some of the artists are. I had to have a tape or a record that the song was recorded from, but I have no idea who these bands or singers are. I remember the lyrics to many of them. Or a guitar riff. But I don't know who did it.

It's kind of cool to go back and listen to the tapes. They provide a window to who I was at the time I made them. Some songs I still love. Others were merely a memory, a phase, a brief obsession.

It may take the rest of the year to listen to them all.

Backstage

I worked recently at the happiest place in Anaheim. It was a commercial for an iconic park. It was a lot of fun. We were there after the park closed. Any other time I had been there it was crowded. So to have the space to ourselves, just the cast and crew was glorious.

Getting backstage was interesting. The place probably has better security than the TSA. We rode in a shuttle van to an innocuous gate that took us backstage. It looked a lot like many other backlots for studios. Large non-descript blocky warehouses. We passed by the metal skeleton of some float recently retired. The fiberglass shape of it in pieces laying on the ground next to it. Someone recognized it as a certain float, but we passed it so quickly I couldn't figure out what it had once been.

Base camp was a stage near Big Thunder Mountain. We hung out until later when the park had almost closed. Rides were winding down and patrons were headed to the exit. A large illuminated helium balloon lit up the area in a diffused white light. We went to work. They had us, the "atmosphere", do crosses and walk away from the camera. When they got what they wanted we walked back to base camp and got our stuff together to move locations.

I learned from talking to the cast members which were assigned to hang out with us that they were there to keep us from taking pictures of the backstage stuff. Pictures of things that could end up on Facebook, Twitter, Tumbler, or in a blog like this one. I asked could I take a picture of this? and I pointed to something. Yes, you can take a picture of the castle, but not the balloon. It would ruin the magic of the place.

The van took us along a road backstage that your regular park visitor never sees. Then there was a traffic jam. On a private road. How could that happen? The large balloon from earlier had been tied down, still inflated, to the back of a pick up which would take it to the other location. The truck with the 12' diameter balloon got stuck between the wall of the road and the pillar holding up the monorail. Oops. 3 guys were pushing on the balloon to try and get it thru the narrow space. When the driver figured out this wasn't going to happen anytime soon, we crossed into the oncoming traffic lane and continued on. The balloon eventually made it but had been partially deflated.

We went to the next location in the other park. There is a show which started a year or 2 ago I've only seen once from the side. It takes 30 minutes. I'd seen it before, but didn't get the full effect. I never had waited in line to get a prime spot in front to see the World of Color from the front. But now we got to see about 5 minutes of it repeatedly from the front. 10 of us extras placed in specific spots so the show could be seen beyond us. This is not how it works in the real world. Where we were 10, there are hundreds who see the show in the evenings. It was cool, but I missed the pyro.

So the question is, will the people who work for this company, whose job it is to scour the internet looking for things and taking them down because they ruin the magic, find this and take it down? Hmmm...

America the, uh, What?

Republicans advocate for American exceptionalism. America has to be the best. That's what god wants, right? They say we are the greatest country in the history of the world. Ever. Ever. Ever. But we've fallen behind because of President Obama.

But then Republican candidates are calling a college education as something unnecessary. President Obama was called a snob by Rick Santorum for wanting every kid that wants to go to college to have the opportunity.

Mitt Romney told a student at a recent event that maybe he should look at a cheaper college and not to expect the government to do anything about the debt college would incur. Such a positive message. Don't reach for the stars, settle for "this," and you have to pay the bill yourself.

Education lifts people up. We are told by candidates that America is falling behind other countries in math and science. So that means we should... cut budgets?

How can America be exceptional if we are fucking stupid?