Local businesses losers in state’s gambling game

Notes & Comments:

- It takes $100,000 in gambling losses to produce $20,000 in tax benefits for local and state governments.

The Daily Herald had a big story on gambling Sunday, and that fact was tucked away where only the most avid reader would find it.

It is very significant. Most of these losers live within 10 or 20 miles of the casinos. The $100,000 they lose would otherwise go to local businesses for groceries and appliances and to restaurants and clothing stores and rent.

- If you or someone in your family buys Nike shoes, you might give a passing thought to the Nike factory in Jakarta, where workers burned and ransacked the offices protesting that the company wasn’t paying them a $2.50 a day minimum wage.

Do Michael Jordan and Tiger Woods ever give a thought to these workers who make their millions possible? I doubt it.

- A year or two ago I wrote about sparrows attacking our bedroom window.

We’ve been spared that noise this spring, but a woodpecker, or some variation of a woodpecker, is attacking the metal cover on our chimney. It sounds like a machine gun firing down the chimney.

We had to cap the fireplace chimney after a raccoon spent the winter in it and came out in the spring with four baby raccoons.

To finish the wildlife report, the neighborhood fox and two local ducks arrived at the same time looking for a handout. They sniffed around the grass. Nobody got hurt. The crows screamed from their perches in the trees.

- The fallibility of the FBI crime laboratory was well known to Daily News reporters 50 years ago.

William Heirens wrote a ransom note after he killed Suzanne Degnan.

The Chicago police tested the note for clues to its source. Then they sent it to the FBI lab for examination. Nothing.

Figuring the note had no clues, the police allowed the Daily News to examine the note. A News graphics artist, Frank San Hamel, quickly found that the note had been written on a pad, and that the indentations in the note showed it came from a University of Chicago dorm. The letters “eire” were even found on the note.

Heirens was arrested shortly afterward.

- Here’s another installment on interesting names, from Daily Herald birth announcements.

Sierra, Devin, Brooke, Jordyn (is that the feminine of Jordan?), Shawna, Chad, O.J., and of course, the ever popular Joshua and Brittany.

- Jerry Springer should be barred from Channel 5 news programs if only because of the statement he gave about his proposed Channel 5 commentary.

He said: “First day. I’ll talk about the controversy of my hiring ... then I’ll go to the Bulls.

“What the hell. It’s only reading a prompter. I mean, they make it seem like it’s journalism.”

Maybe Springer’s idea of journalism is the garbage on his daily network talk show.

I think 90 percent of Channel 5’s audience sides with anchors Carol Marin and Ron Magers in their protest against using Springer.

Springer is an insult to Chicago.

- I got my first invitation to gamble via e-mail.

An outfit in Texas is sponsoring betting pools on golf tournaments. For the Masters tournament they offered $400,000 to whoever picked the winners and won a drawing.

They asked $3.99 to join the pool, plus my Visa or Mastercard number.

I do not send money or my credit card numbers to unknown Texans who promise me riches.

Beware the Internet.