According to the Los Angeles Times:

• Red Sanders decided to stay on as football coach at UCLA instead of pursuing the football coach/athletic director job at Texas A&M, a job recently vacated by Paul (Bear) Bryant. (Sanders would have a heart attack and die before the start of the 1958 football season anyway.)
• A father of three killed himself in front of his wife after losing his job on Christmas Eve.
• Silent-screen star Norma Talmadge died in Las Vegas. The Times gave her age as 60; according to IMDB, she was actually 62.

On New Year’s Eve Day, 1967, Evel Knievel, some crazy son of a bitch from Butte, Montana, jumped his motorcycle 151 feet over the fountains at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas.

— EvelKnievel.com

And that’s why, when I was a kid, every boy in my neighborhood grew up with a endless progression of scabs on knees and elbows from trying to jump Schwinn Sting-Ray bikes over every natural and man-made obstacle we could find.

Farewell to an iconic figure . . .

See, I thought it was the fact that he’s 13 years old that was making him stubborn.

Probably a good tip for the up-and-coming Feng Shui professional would be to always predict that the client’s teenage children are stubborn. You’re not going to be wrong very often.

And always predict that the client has frequent disagreements with his or her spouse.

The educated coastal public thinks that evangelical Christianity is America’s number one religion. They are wrong. It is the Worship of Unearned Riches, and Las Vegas is its holy city. The belief that it is possible to get something for nothing is more potent in our land than the belief that the Son of God will return to rescue mankind. The Religion of Unearned Riches was established here in the desert by organized crime. It has turned us into a nation of slobs, clowns, patsies, and cravens. Las Vegas is what we have become. Is it any wonder that the rest of the world despises us?

I live a few hours’ drive from Las Vegas. I share the author’s contempt for the place, right up until the last sentence where he suggests that there’s something uniquely American about irrational greed. Other countries don’t have casinos and lotteries?

Actually, anti-Americanism in other countries has a couple of causes:

1. They want to divert attention from their own failures and we’re the most obvious scapegoat for everything that goes wrong in the world.
2. Any admission that the United States provides uniquely positive military, commercial and diplomatic services to the rest of the world would raise the obvious question of why we’re not being paid for those services. Since no one intends to pay, no one makes the admission.