The Lottery

I think it was the HBO doc Lucky where I first heard the axiom that you have as much chance of winning the lottery by NOT playing as you do by actually  playing, and this simulator HERE brings that fact home.

Here's my own "winnings" via the simulator.

You played 1040 games of Mega Millions. It cost $1040. You won $73. 

Ugh. Two tickets a week for 10 years!!!!!! Wow. Hideous.

At least I've always known that the randomness of winning dictates that the few times I've played means I only buy one ticket; nothing's sadder than the poor fuckers buying multiple tickets. Hey, here's some real history - the very first "Things Are Good"!! :)

6) Why do people buy multiple lottery tickets? Don't the laws of such complete randomness tell us that you have the exact chance of winning with 1 ticket as 100? If your odds of winning are 1 in a billion or whatever, you're better off buying one ticket, and using the other $99 on booze to soften the blow. "11 18 23 36 38 43...great. I'm still poor" (glug glug glug)

My favorite ever lottery memories are from my boy Harry, about whom I wrote HERE in what will probably always be my greatest post of all time (and, interestinghly enough, originally posted onGodIHateYourLottery's birthday.)

5:30pm The last hour or so usually sucks, I always hope they go off topic such as “top ten movies.” This is fun cause now Mike has to pretend he’s never seen a movie in color except The Godfather. "Tom Hanks? Who's that?" And Dawg always asks Mike for his lists, never vice versa. Of course the Babe Ruth of these time-wasters is the Ratings Game, wherein Dawg reads out recent games to Mike who then tries to guess that games national and local television rating. At first you think they’re kidding, they GOTTA be putting you on, but you look at Mike and he looks like he's cracking logarithms on the bowl over there. And no matter how far off he is, he always nods his head as if he understand WHY he was off. “Dawg I’m gonna say for Giants/Boys, I’m gonna say 8.2 national, 10.1 local.” “They did a 6.6 national and 8.9 local.” Now Mike starts nodding his head, “okay, okay, I can see that.” And Dawg acts like he’s at a funeral, crestfallen “Mikey, that a tewwible wating! That’s an awful job by CBS, Mikey...just awful...” while Mike nods his head. "Well Dawg, it was the 3rd-to-the-last nice day left in the summer, so I knew that..." Are we supposed to take this seriously, that Mike really thinks he can guess these numbers? This reminds me of a guy I used to work with, Harry. EEEEEVery day Harry would check his lotto numbers from the night before and try to match them with his and see what he did wrong. “Okay, they have a 12, I chose 14...okay...22, I said 28...” I’m like Harry, it doesn’t matter, it’s completely random! But he insisted he was figuring it all out. My secret hope for the stupid ratings game is this is actually an inside joke they’ve been playing on listeners for years and are just waiting for the day someone finally phones in and calls bullshit on ‘em. “This ratings game, you’re fucking with us, right?!” Dude “wins” a weekend at Hooters with Mike, we never hear this stupid game again.

Also, here's memories of me and The Gnat in Shirley Jackson's The Lottery  :)