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October 21, 2005
Tales from the Lottery
Is it just me or are there always interesting stories about the lottery and lottery winners? This week's gigantic Powerball lottery brings a couple more...
How stupid can people get?
Answer: very. I read a story earlier this year about a lottery drawing in which an abnormally high number of people matched all but one number. Fearing foul play, the lottery people investigated. It turned out hundreds of people had played the same lottery numbers because they'd found them on a fortune cookie fortune. (The fortune writers apparently only use a few different sets of lucky numbers when printing thousands of fortunes.) What these lucky second-place winners didn't seem to realize, though, was that had they won the jackpot, they would have had to share it with all the other brainiacs who picked those numbers.
Now comes an even more incredible (actually, sadly, very credible) story about the Powerball lottery. About 840 geniuses played the same numbers -- a mythical set of numbers with great power -- from the TV show Lost. On the show, one of the characters won the lottery using the numbers, and the numbers have become one of the big mysteries of the series. Of course, you knew a bunch of weak-minded souls would go out and bet those numbers. Had the numbers miraculously come up in the Powerball lottery, each of these "winners" would have taken home a few thousand of the 340 million dollar prize.
Finally, in "rich get richer" news, New Hampshire senator Judd Gregg was one of the 47 runners-up in the lottery, winning over $850 thousand. What is amazing, considering his public servant status and his well-known millionaire status, is that he has not yet pledged to give all of the winnings to charity. In New Hampshire, we Live Free or Die, and no one's gonna tell me what to do with my hard-earned lottery winnings.
Posted by JoshHornik at October 21, 2005 12:40 PM