A new year, and already there's all sorts of bad habits being dragged right into the middle of things. Again. Talk about chilblains and the winter of discontent...
For example, resolutions or no, there's the expectation that things make sense every once in a while, if only to keep the Universe somewhat honest, and to keep exercising the head muscles, too, in the rare event something comes along requiring any brain power.
This is like insisting on a periodic win in 3-Card Monte, I know. It's a hard habit to break, having the expectations of logic, fairness, meaning...
But, every year, there's Realitus Interruptus Annoyus, in which pesky facts emerge that drag yards and scads of mud and muck across that nice, clean floor of my mind. So much for the nice, clean slate provided by those first few arbitrary, and always promising, seconds of the New Year, too.
But, like crash-dieters crossing their fingers and booking themselves on a cheese-and-chocolate factory tour regardless, I bought a couple of lottery tickets anyway -- even though I know the chances of winning are in the odds ballpark of getting blasted by lightning, while in a phone booth, while it plummets off a bridge at mid-span, to the arms of a flying, superhero wallaby, or some such.
(I should probably stop here a sec and explain that a phone booth, or telephone booth, was once a metal-and-glass communication kiosk in which one entered, closed a two-panel folding door behind oneself, and then deposited monetary tokens into a slot, in order to call someone located elsewhere. These were abundant beyond belief, and were all but self-replicating, populating every 24 feet of ground space on the planetary crust -- or so it once seemed.)
But, enough of far-fetched realities: Let's talk about lotteries.