Opening of State Lottery
Californians will soon be wading knee-deep in discarded lottery tickets if something isn’t done immediately to prevent this calamity. Being a deep thinker--and miserly--I leave a lottery ticket for a tip. (If the waitress wins, there’s an instant wrestling match.) Next, I mix worthless lottery cards with Gravy Train and feed the goop to my dog. Fortunately, I have a very stupid dog. Thirdly, I dip the useless cards in chocolate and sneak them into pot-luck dinners.
Losing tickets are too small and thick to use to clean one’s eye-glasses or wipe one’s sweating brow. Of course, in an emergency, one can use a ticket for picking teeth or scraping deceased bugs from the windshield. But who is going to save enough of the useless cards to fill pot holes, shingle roofs, or mold into a handy-dandy cardboard coffin? Yet, a solution must be found for this urgent problem.
The lottery organizers should have heeded my words of wisdom when I suggested that they print lottery numbers on the beaks of chickens. They could have sold each lottery chicken for, say, three bucks. The buyer could, perhaps, persuade the chicken to scratch the plastic coating off the numbers, then eat the chicken and use the feathers to stuff pillows, mattresses, or whatever makes one happy to stuff.
Incidentally, have you heard the loud yowling teen-age couples make when scratching the coatings off the lottery numbers? From a distance, their shrieks are similar to those of cats; you can’t tell whether they’re fighting or making love.
JACK HOUSTON
Northridge