Monopoly was big on Homan Avenue when I was growing up. Nobody ever read the rules or anything, it was passed down from kid to kid. We played the variant where money fined by the orange and yellow cards went into the middle of the board, accumulating until somebody landed on Free Parking and they got it all, which I understand is a fairly common variant.
Like all things kids did those days a game of monopoly went on all day. Some kids were knocked off early, but that would leave them with nothing to do the rest of the day while their pals were playing monopoly, and the game was less interesting when there were fewer players, so when you landed on one of those snazzy red Boardwalk hotels and you couldn't pay the tab, the owner would take most of what you had and allow you to owe the rest. With hardly any properties and no money to put up even a shabby little green motel cabin, and the guy you owed money to taking your $200 everytime you passed goal, you had little future, but at least you got to hang with your pals and roll the dice and watch your automobile, or hat, or shoe, traverse the board under the endless blue summer sky, and there was always the hope that a huge fortune would accumulate in the middle of the board and you might land on Free Parking.
I don't recall that that ever happened, that anybody made a comeback that way. The thing is your debt kept growing, and the debtee always had the option to demand payment. At that point you would be doomed to turn in your little car, hat, or shoe, and you could kibbutz, but with the dice never passing into your hands you might as well go down to the alley and kick a can. As we all know power corrupts and so eventually the guy you were in debt to would notice that you were snacking from a delectable sack of bbq chips, and ask for some. Buy your own sack, you would reply, and he would draw himself up and demand some chips or else he would demand payment right then and there, and it was either give up some chips or kick the can, such was the fate of vassals.
A charming story from my youth, but also meant to illustrate our debt to the Chinese. Unlike in monopoly we pay them a certain interest on the debt and there is no mechanism for them suddenly demanding what is owed by a certain date and if we couldn't come up with it we would have to give them say, California. In fact, because they have so much of our debt, they are kind of in our debt because if we go belly up, there goes all the money we owe them.
I have never understood this recurring idea of Beagles' that at some point we gave the Chinese a bunch of money and that was how they became rich. I mean when did we give them that money and how did that make them rich? I assume that it is part of the Birch canon and therefore not to be subjected to the laws of logic or Occam's dreaded razor. I had thought that Beagles had become a Bircher in Chicago, but it appears that it didn't happen until he moved to Alaska Lite. I wonder if the idea of Them (who rule but are unknowable) was an inborn thing in Beagles' brain and led him to the Birchers, or if that was something that he picked up from being a Bircher.
About fewer worms in treated lawns, when I lived in Champaign, surrounded by corn fields I imagined a Disneyesque world inside them with talking bugs and worms but soon learned that nothing is alive within them but corn. I had a friend who bought a house on the edge of a cornfield and he wanted to put in grape vines, but was given a long list, including grape vines of plants that would not grow on his property because of the runoff from the fields.
That was the only raven I have ever seen. I have my daily finches, and sometimes a dove, sometimes a big fat old pigeon,. once a blue jay, and that is that. There are peregrine falcons on the rooftops across the river but thus far none has perched on my railings.
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