Gambling in the Newspaper

I live in a city that has three casinos, plus a fourth one right across the river in Canada. That is on top of all of church bingos and the Michigan lottery. However, I have my own kind of gambling addition.

I read the newspaper every day.

Sometimes the news is very good.

Sometimes it's very bad.

Today was one of those days when the newspaper just made me want to crawl back into bed and forget the rest of the world existed. (Unfortunately, I have a job to do so that isn't an option.)

The front page of today's Detroit Free Press proclaims news from Washington, D.C. that a deal on fuel economy standards is near. This is really good news, in my opinion, because it's over due and I believe it will help the American auto industry in the long-term.

It wasn't until I flipped to the local news section that I saw the two articles that made me want to crawl back in bed and stay there.

First, there was the story of Deuntay Miller a 1-year-old boy who died nearly two years ago while in his parents' care. His mother and her boyfriend tried to cremate their dead child in a barbecue grill. When that failed to get rid of all of his remains, they hid his skeleton in their basement and continued to collect welfare payments for their deceased child. Their crimes weren't discovered until investigators began looking at them for possible welfare fraud.

This is troubling on so many levels. The welfare fraud is probably the least of them.

What kind of parent would even think of doing something like this to their own child?

Scratch that - what kind of person would even think of doing something like that to any child?

And how in the world is it that no one seemed to notice that this child had been dead for two years?

Plus, this happened in an urban area. How could it be that none of the neighbors noticed what had to have been a troubling stench when these two pathetic excuses for humans tried cremating their child's remains in a backyard barbecue?

Simple charges of welfare fraud aren't enough for them. I pray that their fellow inmates in the county jail give them a new understanding of what suffering is all about.

Not to be outdone, there was also the news that a crew from the Detroit Water & Sewage Department found a woman's headless torso in a sewage drain yesterday morning. She was clothed in nothing more than her underwear. Her hands and feet had been chopped off. The Detroit Police Department estimates that she had been stuffed there a week ago in an apparent effort to hide her murder.

The only good news is that, at least this time, neighbors noticed a stench coming from the sewer and called someone about it.

Please excuse me. I'm going to finish my work and then I'm going back to bed. I might stay there for a few days.