All About the Benjamins

This kills me: the FBI can't pay its phone-tapping bills!

Can you script it better than that? Nope. Reality is stranger than fiction, and perhaps full of more poetic justice than poetry.

It reminds me that when I lived in southern Illinois they opened a museum to coal mining in the state. The whole region had been savaged by the closing of coal mines. Illinois coal, as I recall, was too sulfurous. It produces too much pollution, thus requiring expensive scrubbing systems at power stations that use it. When I was a freshman in college, they were either still using Illinois coal to power the campus or had recently stopped. (It was state law that state coal had to be used for state campuses.) A major faculty lot had been spit upon repeatedly by sulfurous luggies from the power station stacks. It burned the paint on their cars.

So the coal industry in southern Illinois wasn't long for the world then. It collapsed. A museum was built in an old mine to remember this once-vibrant (though rather dirty) industry.

Not long after it opened, the museum closed. It couldn't pay its power bills.
-cK