The whistles go woooooooo?
Bubb Rubb has already weighed in, friedo.
For NYC laws, pinball machines were illegal here until fairly recently–sometime in the 70s or 80s, I believe. It was an anti-gambling thing, and made some sort of sense when enacted–pinball machines originally did have a great deal of overlap with “gaming” devices.
Fiorello LaGuardia hated the things and was convinced they were gambling devices. The argument was not entirely without merit, as early pinball machines did not have flippers and you basically let the ball go and bounce around until it fell through the bottom. He rounded up machines and smashed them with sledgehammers, like prohibition-era feds going after speakeasies. But the gambling argument was rendered moot once flippers became common and pinball obviously became a game of skill.
It took a City Council hearing at which a genuine Pinball Wizard would testify, playing on a brand new machine which he had not ever seen, before the ban was lifted in 1976.
Apology for not having a cite handy; I’m describing this from memory.
In early 1970’s (Nixon years) there were wage/price controls. Ranchers slaughtered their herds because they couldn’t get enough money to pay for raising them. People had bumper stickers saying “I got no beef with Nixon”.
In California it became known, and a cause of public outrage, that poor people were buying and eating canned cat food because they couldn’t afford real people food. Well, the progressive California legislature wasn’t going to let THAT kind of thing go on! They promptly passed a law banning the consumption of any foodstuff not specifically intended for human consumption.
I don’t know the specific wording of the law, or how specific or general it was. But the intention was clear: It was meant to forbid people from eating dog food or cat food, thereby solving the problem that poor people were eating dog food and cat food. Presto! Problem solved!
Sounds crazy-stupid. But I imagined that there was actually a specific logic to this – and by the logic I imagined, it was still crazy-stupid. See, in this country, we have a bedrock presumption that people are innocent of crimes until proven guilty. So, by making it a crime to eat animal food, we create the presumption that people aren’t doing it until proven otherwise – a presumption that would not have existed prior to the law. Thus, the behavior is no longer recognized as happening, except where a specific individual might be accused and somehow convicted.
I nominate this for the OP’s consideration for the silly-ass logic of it. Not to mention, how would a law like this be enforced anyway? Require pet-food purchasers to show their pet’s registration papers?
Did this Pinball Wizard play on a machine he had never seen because he was, like, deaf dumb and blind? 