Stadium Woes

Reasons I hate the downtown stadiums (now plural):

• They were paid for with tax dollars, so they represent the worst kind of corporate welfare—welfare for billionaire team owners and millionaire employees.
• They have killed off the restaurants I actually went to downtown (no, of course I don’t know if they were the actual cause; but given my changes in behavior it seems quite possible).
• They cause parking rates to be randomly sky-high throughout downtown.
• They cause random horrible traffic jams.
• They caused extra taxes to be imposed on customers of downtown businesses.  (For these three reasons, I’ve stopped going downtown as much as possible. )
• The whole American obsession with professional sports (which seems to be mostly gambling-based) pisses me off.
• The obsession trickles down to university and highschool sports, where it does severe damage (wasting resources, sending the wrong messages about what’s important, dividing students).

Today, for the first time, both stadiums have a game at about the same time. They’re warning people to leave work early if they can, and predicting bad traffic problems. Gosh, somebody should have thought of this earlier!

I’m especially pissed off at MPR who gave the warning, but gave no indication of what game time was or when the actual traffic jams were likely to happen.