Lotteries

I don't buy lottery tickets. The odds of winning such a contest are said to be less than being hit by a lightening strike. So why are lotteries so popular? Recently there was a $365 million power ball lottery right her in the U.S. And Spain and Ireland have annual lotteries far in excess of that. When I travel I see lottery tickets for sale everywhere.
But why do people throw their money at the impossible? Gambling and lotteries are often called the seducer of the poor, because in desperation, poor people disproportion ally buy lottery tickets in far greater proportion than wealthier persons. Well, after I thought about writing to you about lotteries, I looked up some stats about lotteries to give you an idea of the odds.
What I found was that in the U.S lotteries the odds of winning range from a low of about 1 in 5 million to a high of 1 in 80 million. Let's say you buy a ticket with a 10 to 1 million odds of winning. To ensure winning, you would need to buy 10 million tickets, which will pay off about half of what you've spent. And since all lotteries are random, there is no way to improve your odds. So it's not smart to buy them. Why the odds of me not writing stupidity in my blog are about the same as winning one of those lotteries!
From the "This must be the end of civilization" department comes word that those nutty Islamic extremists who are protesting cartoons with violence and murder now have another target. It's the noble Danish pastry. The Iranian government's latest manipulation of the protesters a few weeks ago was to change the name of the flaky pastries that Iranians are addicted to from "Danish pastry" to "Roses of the Prophet Mohammed" (Hey! If it is sacrilegious to them to have cartoons about Mohammed, why isn't it sacrilegious to name sweets after him?)
These pastries are not the imported Danish sweets. Those have been banned since the cartoons were shown in iran. But Iranians are notorious for loving sweets and will not give up Danish....err Rose pastries because of a cartoon. Iranian bakers are churning out the Roses ever day to satisfy the believers.
The 'Disgusting Parental Behavior' award of the week goes to a Cambodian couple, Cheng Chhorn, 46, and Srun Young, 37, who apparently have more affection for black magic than for their child. Those two attacked their 12 year old child while she slept, biting off her thumb nails and a small; part of her nose to drink her blood, said Cambodian police official Keo Noea Phy. Neighbors had rushed to rescue the little girl after hearing her screams, and now the girl (who was treated and released from a hospital) is in the custody of other villagers in the town of Kampong Cham. It seems that relatives of the child had taken her parents to a black magic healer to chase away the evil spirit that was believed to have possessed them.
Police say the couple was "normal" before the attack, well known in the town as noodle sales persons in their small village. they speculate that the parents were "driven by the spirit guarding the altar they kept inside their house."
But the altar and black magic is not unusual in Cambodia, where many people in the remote villages are deeply superstitious. Some of them claim to have the ability to communicate with the dead and cure the sick by exorcising evil spirits from their bodies. The police are in a quandary about resolution for the incident. "We just have no idea what offense to charge them with," said officer Phy. I suggest "assault with the intent to kill" as a start.