Quite simply, it’s a joke to see a Top 10 team playing a I-AA team. These games are glorified exhibitions. I can understand a weaker I-A team needing home games and scheduling I-AA teams, but a BCS conference school shouldn’t be playing a I-AA team, ever. Sure, you may have to pay a bit more to get a Sun Belt team to play you than it would cost to get someone from I-AA, but last time I checked your average college football powerhouse was doing okay from a money standpoint.

What I’d like to see is a ban on games against I-AA teams, or at least a rule that wins can never count toward the bowl eligibility total. Perhaps in conjunction with this we might also need a rule capping teams to seven home games, forcing a team that plays eight games within its conference to play at least one non-conference road game every season.

* Yes, I know I-A teams sometime lose these games. But a top team (and no, Michigan doesn’t count) isn’t going to lose to a I-AA team except in an absolute freak occurrence.

One problem I have with “next level” is the fact that it implies that progress in whatever field is being discussed is quantized and split into discrete steps. This may very well be the case in certain circumstances, but in many, it’s nonsense.

So please, don’t ever use this phrase again.

Then you die a little on the inside.

“I’ll have a Coke.”

“Is Pepsi okay?”

GAH! Well, it’s okay. I don’t really even dislike Pepsi. If I open up the fridge and see a Pepsi, I don’t mind drinking it. But wanting a Coke and having to settle for a Pepsi is an incredibly frustrating feeling. Some may say that the drinks don’t taste all that different. Trust me, they do. And when I’m really, really thirsty, a fountain Coke is quite possibly the best thing in the world. But to seek that thirst-quenching goodness and then have it ripped away from you by a restaurant’s exclusive contract with Pepsi can be a terrible, terrible feeling.

I admit I don’t know what the economic factors are involved in whether a restaurant decides to serve Coke or Pepsi. Obviously, some national chains have deals with one beverage company or the other. And I’m guessing Pepsi must be cheaper because why the hell would anyone choose Pepsi if it weren’t cheaper? I’ll admit that most people probably don’t scratch a restaurant off their list just because it serves Pepsi—I don’t—but sometimes I really find myself wondering why a restaurant skips out on Coke to serve Pepsi.

And no Coke means no Barq’s Root Beer either. I love Barq’s with a roast beef po-boy or fried shrimp or some other New Orleans-style food—given the regional connection, it just feels right. And Barq’s is so much different from other root beers that there’s really no comparison. I’m not saying that other kinds of root beer are worse; but nothing is really all that much like Barq’s.

So restaurant owners, I realize you’ve got a bottom line to consider, but please give us Coke, okay?

But people need money. It makes the world go round. And in some cases, the best way to get money is to ask for it. The homeless guy doesn’t have a job but needs money for beer.* Universities have billion dollar endowments but still need more. And so on. For example, bloggers who can’t make any money with Internet advertising sometimes resort to begging for money. It’s annoying, and you probably would never give any money to them. But I figured hey, I’ll put a little “Donate” button in the sidebar and see what happens. Do I need the money? No—I’m an unemployed Latin teacher, but I’m in no danger of going broke anytime soon. Am I going to stop blogging? No. Do I have more money than the starving college students who make up most of my readership? Probably. To avoid being annoying, I’m only going to bring this up once, and I won’t mention it again. If you feel that you have a surplus of money and would like to direct some to me in appreciation of my brilliant blogging, that’d be great. Or just buy me a drink next time you see. Or let me crash on your couch during my month-long vacation binge.**

While I understand why people beg for money, that doesn’t make it any less annoying. The worst is people who walk up to your cars. Whether they’re homeless or fundraising for a charity or whatever, it’s dangerous and a nuisance. It’s a free country and if someone wants to make a sign and stand on the corner, so be it, but running into the street crosses the line.

* Okay, I admit, this is a gratuitous cheap shot on people who have been dealt a rough hand; many of them are mentally ill. But the average homeless person is not someone you want to trust with money. I’ve heard of people who keep sandwiches in their cars to give to homeless people, and I sorta would like to start doing this so I don’t feel like such a jerk when I drive by them. But what kind of sandwich would keep in a car that sits in 100-degree heat? I worry about PB&J because the jelly might go bad somehow, and some people are allergic to peanuts anyway. Wouldn’t that be a horrific headline: “Good Samaritan kills homeless man with peanut butter sandwich.” You’d never do a nice thing again.)

** You may have seen that on my twitter feed. (If you’re not following me, get on the bandwagon already!) I bought my JetBlue All You Can Jet pass and will be travelling like crazy from Sept. 7-Oct. 6. This is what I like to call the biggest fringe benefit of unemployment: the ability to do whatever the hell I want.

When I first moved this blog from wordpress.com to its own domain, I thought, hey, there’s a chance I could make some money on this. Maybe not a lot of money, but hopefully enough to cover the $20 a year I pay for the domain name. (Fortunately, the hosting is free; thanks again to Rob Heath for the help.) And who knows, maybe it’ll be like the lottery, except with a lot more work involved.

But that’s not how it works. The Internet is made for niches. Find a niche, cover it in detail: obsessively catalog everything about your favorite TV show or sports team or video game. Then watch the search engines direct the traffic to you. I get a fair amount of search traffic (compared to what I get from direct traffic and links from facebook, twitter, and other blogs), but it’s an interesting, very scattered mix.

And that just covers getting people to your website; niche sites also have a huge advantage in targeting ads to their users. If I blogged exclusively about golf equipment, I’d probably have a bunch of ads about golf equipment, and people who searched the internet for information about golf equipment and ended up at my site might very well click an ad. But when you have a site about Glee and Saints football and punctuation marks no computer (and likely no human, either) is going to be able to make any sense out of it. It’s not a good recipe for advertising.

In going through the legalese of the Adsense agreement, I had first thought I couldn’t reveal how much money I make. It turns out that I “may accurately disclose the amount of Google’s gross payments to You pursuant to the Program.” The payments? None, because you have to accrue $100 in revenues to get a check from Google. And even if I decide to cancel, I need to reach $10 in revenue for Google to send me money. Where am I at right now? 76 cents from roughly 7600 hits on my site. 76 cents. Surely my blog is worth more than that, isn’t it?

But let’s face it. People hate ads on the Internet. I don’t know anybody who regularly clicks on the damn things, and yet somehow Google has made $80 bazillion dollars on Internet advertising. I mean, think about it: do you ever click ads? Every now and then a worthwhile one will show up in my Gmail account or on Facebook. After all, they’re datamining everything about my damn life, they had better be able to target ads well enough to get me to click. But on a site I come across either directly or by search traffic? Roughly never. And yet somehow there’s a fortune to be made.

Finally, if I’m going to bitch about Internet advertising, I might as well add in a few pet peeves: I can’t stand pop-ups. Or ads that play sound automatically. (Which reminds me: I need to get a Chrome plug-in to kill ESPN.com’s autopsy feature. That annoys the crap out of me.) Or anything that resizes my windows. Or anything that delays me from getting to the website I want to visit. Or commercials during online TV shows.

P.S. Thanks to the motorcyclist who shook his head in commiseration as he passed by. It almost makes me reconsider the post I made about motorcyclists.

And on a larger scale, they create noise (cars banging over them) and waste gas (people slamming the brakes and then gunning it). They’re just a pain in the ass, and we should spend more time teaching people to be responsible drivers and less time putting in stupid speed bumps that are a pain in everyone’s ass.

P.S. As an interesting aside, in Britain they call speed bumps “sleeping policeman.” Gotta love the way with words they have across the pond.

Up until 2005 Apple insisted on shipping single button mice with their computers. Sure, OS X (released on 2001) could support a multi-button mouse, but you wouldn’t get one with your computer. The day after I bought a Powerbook G4 back in 2003, I headed to CompUSA for a mouse. Now, I wouldn’t expect a laptop to come with a mouse, but I should point out that the trackpad had only one button. So you’d have to control-click to right-click.

It really baffles me why Apple would adopt that policy for years and years in the face of innovation from everyone else. The Performa 6116CD that my family bought when I was eight or so had a single-button mouse, and I believe multi-button mice were well established on PCs at the time. I just don’t get it.

In any case, Apple finally gave in with 2005′s Mighty Mouse (later renamed in a trademark dispute). It had a little trackball for a scroll wheel and supported left and right clicks. I think I’ve used this here and there in a few computer labs and it works okay.

Apple’s newest mouse, however, isn’t so great. The Magic Mouse is a sleek design with some clever capabilities. For example, you can scroll in any direction just by swiping your fingers. It’s an incredibly smart piece of engineering.

Unfortunately, it’s a complete disaster from an ergonomic point of view. The sharp edges of the top jam into your fingers. The low profile means that your thumb and pinky will drag along the desk; try to lift them up and they’ll be jabbed by the sharp edges. I had to spend $30 at Best Buy for a Logitech mouse just so I could have something comfortable. I really shouldn’t have to shell out $30 on a peripheral after I spent as much money as I did on the computer. (I’d have loved to have used the USB mouse I bought in 2003, but it’s pretty much on the fritz at this point.)

It really baffles me that a company that can be so brilliant screws up so often with its mice. Please, Apple, don’t mess this up ever again.

Now, my point here is not to criticize the guy who goes into the convenience store maybe once or twice a year when the Powerball jackpot is $250 million. If you spend $2 a year on the lottery, you may be losing money—the odds are against you in virtually any** situation—but you’re never going to miss $2 a year. On the other hand, those millions of dollars would be really nice to have if you do luck out. SInce losing $2 a year is essentially equivalent to nothing, but winning a huge amount of money (even at odds of almost 200 million to 1) is really, really awesome, it’s not a bad deal (from a life perspective, not a strict financial perspective) if you play on very rare occasions. My point here is to criticize the people who spend $5 or $10 or $20 or more a week, every week, in the hopes of winning the big prize.

Money like that adds up. $20 a week is more than $1000 a year, which is a fairly significant sum—unless you’re Bill Gates or Warren Buffett, but I’m thinking that neither of those men needs to play the lottery.

And let’s think about this logically: who is most likely to play the lottery? People too dumb to know any better. In other words, the poorly educated. And given the high correlation between education and financial well-being, what group of people is most likely to be poorly educated? The poor.

And do the stats back this up? Absolutely. You can google “lottery demographics” yourself, but if you’re lazy and want to take my word for it, you’ll find that blacks, people who didn’t graduate high school, and people with the lowest incomes are the ones who spend tons of money on the lottery. It turns out that the percentages of people who play are fairly similar across all demographics, but the poor and poorly-educated are the ones who spend vastly more money (as a percentage of their income) on lottery tickets. And in many cases, the lowest income brackets spend more money per capita (even in absolute terms) than the wealthier brackets.

Now, in many cases lotteries fund worthy state programs, perhaps related to health care or education. Many of these programs may benefit the poor; they may even be primarily designed to benefit the poor. But to fund these programs with a program that depends on tax dollars (lottery revenues; the lottery is a voluntary tax) largely collected from disadvantages populations in simply moronic. It leads to what is called regressive taxation. Regressive taxation is taxation paid at a higher proportion by the poorest people in a society. (The opposite is a progressive tax, where the rich pay a higher percentage; when everyone pays the same percentage of income, it’s called a flat tax or a proportional tax.)

It should seem pretty obvious that regressive taxation is a bad thing. And that’s just what the lottery is—a regressive tax. Just because it’s voluntary doesn’t make it any better.

Now, one might argue that if people are stupid and they want to gamble their money away, they should be allowed to. And to be honest, I sympathize with that argument. The poor high school dropout who drops $20 a week on lottery tickets is only hurting himself, and it’s a free country. But just because gambling should be legal doesn’t mean that the state should be in the gambling business.***

Here’s an anecdote: my father used to sell life insurance in poor neighborhoods and drive around collecting the payments. In 1992, when Louisiana came out with the Lotto, business dried up. People who were spending a few bucks on a small life insurance policy (to cover burial expenses and such) spent that money on the lottery instead.

I’m sure there are plenty of similar stories out there. For that matter, I’m sure there are plenty of other gambling horror stories that don’t have anything to do with state lotteries. Regardless of your opinion on whether gambling should be legal, I think it’s clear that the government needs to get out of the lottery business.

* I was unable to dig up the numbers for Mega Millions, but I’d assume they’re similar.

** Obviously, with a large enough jackpot, you’d have a positive expectation on your purchase. But the larger the jackpot, the more people play, and the more likely a split jackpot becomes. And you still have taxes to worry about. I’m not going to bother with the math, but my guess is that you’d need to see a jackpot close to a billion dollars.

*** I realize that states usually negotiate deals with casinos (and other companies involved in non-lottery gambling) and reap enormous taxes as a result, giving the state benefits similar to those that might be earned from a lottery. But I think there’s still a distinction between a state that allows a free market for gambling companies to operate, and a state that runs a gambling company itself. I don’t mind a casino making money, even if the state gets a cut (as taxes). I do mind the state, acting in my name and the name of every other citizen, orchestrating what is essentially a scam that preys on the poor and stupid in the name of benefiting society.