Lottery Update: "Even senators can be lucky!"

Our mystery lottery winner is still rummaging through his trash looking for his ticket, but one of the second-place winners (a players who matched all of the numbers except for the powerball) has come forward--New Hampshire senator Judd Gregg!

The millionaire politician has won over $850,000. And while the IRS will get about 25% of that, New Hampshire has no state income tax!

Read the CNN story here.

photo by srish

Someone in Oregon Had a Great Day

So, someone in Orgeon won 340 million dollars yesterday in the Power Ball lottery.

The winner beat 1 in 146 million odds. The winner hasn't come forward yet. I wonder what that person is doing right now. Probably talking to a lawyer, I imagine. Or maybe rummaging through the trash because he can't find his ticket. Now that would really be a bummer.

I love reading or watching morning talk shows when lottery winners are featured. Do you remember the bowling team who won together? Or what about the group of elementary school teachers? There was the homeless guy. And what about the person who won TWO lotteries a few years apart?

What would you do with $340 million (or $340 million dollars minus taxes)?

Stuffing the Ballot Boxes

Iraq has voted for a new constitution...or have they?

On the Today Show this morning, I heard that some officials in Iraq are complaining that in certain polling locations, there were more "Yes" votes for the constitution than there were voters!

And we thought the "hanging chad" debacle of 2000 was bad.

Here is today's New York Times story about the controversy.

photo by fortune cookie

Rocky Wins the 'Olden Gloves

Could I really be ahead of the curve? Remember my Rocky 6 celebration a week ago?

Yesterday, the Associated Press reported on the Rocky 6 sequel. Turns out that instead of "Yo, Adrian." It's "NO Adrian." In the new sequel scheduled to begin filming this winter, Rocky will be a 60 year-old widower who takes on the current heavyweight champion in the ring.

According to a story in today's Daily News, Stallone said:

"I am drawing on a lot of my feelings that are in synch with many people's feelings about facing the last chapter of their lives and how they want it to be written. Rocky goes through the skepticism of trying to go against the tide, to go against common sense."

Yeah.

Well, the character of Rocky Balboa was never the sharpest pencil in the box. It's actually something that I liked about him when I saw my one and only Rocky movie (the original). I thought it was great that even a dumb guy can live his dream. But this new plot is kind of bizarre, don't you think? Rocky deals with the "skepticism of trying to go against the tide?" I guess that "going against the tide" is one way to put at it....

The thing I really take exception with in this quote, however, is the idea that a person who is 60 is in the "last chapter of their lives." Huh?!?! I hope my father isn't reading this right now. I think he might have a few choice words for Mr. Stallone.

But that leads me to something I've been thinking about for a while now...

Did you ever notice how every morning you look in the mirror, you look the same to yourself? It's difficult to notice yourself aging, right? But, now that some television actors from classic television shows of the 60s, 70s, and 80s are back on network television, I am reminded of the passage of time. Have you seen Henry Winkler (the Fonz) on the new show, Out of Practice?

or William Shatner (Captain Kirk) on Boston Legal?

Alec Baldwin, who used to be a hottie (remember the movies Prelude to a Kiss and Beetlejuice?) is looking positively geriatric on Will & Grace.

Even Doogie Houser, MD is looking a little long in the tooth in the new show How I Met Your Mother.

Time Marches on.

Laundry Karma

Reading this note found in a dorm laundry room in Bronxville, NY (Sarah Lawrence College, no doubt), from foundmagazine.com brought back a flood of memories. Of all the things about dorm life thatI disliked as an undergrad, "doing laundry" topped the list. Is there anyone reading this right now who survived life in a college dorm who doesn't have a laundry room horror story to tell?

At the University of Massachusetts, there is a dorm complex called Southwest. It is so large, that it has a city council representative all to itself. I had heard once that it even has its own zipc code, but I don't think that's true. Anyway, doing laundry there must be a real drag.

When I was an undergraduate living in the dorms, I dreaded laundry day. You literally had to camp out in a damp, dank, basement to babysit your laundry. Once, I left the room for a few minutes to get a soda out of the vending machine, and when I walked back into the room, some one had pulled my half-dry clothes out of the dryer in mid-cycle, to put their laundry in the machine. It was a dryer hijacking!

I've never been in a cat-fight, but I got close that day...

Would You Mind Watching My Stuff for a Minute?

In the Sunday Times Magazine, there is a great column by Randy Cohen called the Ethicist. Do you read it? Basically, readers write into Cohen and pose an ethical question. He answers. Oftentimes, the questions are really something to chew on. The answers could go either way. But here is a question from today:

A woman sitting near me in a local coffee shop asked me to watch her things for a few minutes while she went across the street to her home. She said she wouldn't leave anything valuable. She was gone for over an hour, returning as I was about to ask someone else nearby to take over the surveillance and then leave myself. Would I have been wrong to do so? Melinda Campopiano, Pittsburgh

We've all been asked to "watch someone's stuff for a minute," and we've all asked people to do that, right? So that we can go up to the counter to buy a cup of coffee...or run out to our car because we forgot something? But for over an hour??! Of course, Cohen told Melinda that she was absolutely under no obligation to continue to babysit the woman's stuff.

I think of myself as a considerate person. But, if it were me, I would just bring the stuff up to the counter and tell the person behind the counter that I had to leave. When the woman comes back, isn't that the first place she would go if she didn't see you?

The fact that Melinda was even worried about this woman's stuff just goes to prove one thing, though...

Pittsburghers are way nicer than us.

photo by karlcow