Power Off
Wondering if you’ve won the lotto? Don’t ask the Iowa Lottery (the drawing originates in Des Moines) or Powerball.com. More than a few people are probably interested in the answer to their $340 million question, but for some reason the lottery folks can only say “Results pending” nearly two hours after plucking the balls (and is that phrase ever fun to say…)
C’mon guys, it takes barely a minute to update a Web page, and the freakin’ TV station already has streaming video of the drawing.
By the way, this offends me as a Web enthusiast and not a lotto “player”. I’ve never actually bought a Powerball ticket, as I tend to see the enterprise as optional taxes…
P.S. Suckers.
UPDATE [Mon 00:36]: Updated now. To be fair, they do add a bunch of additional information (“one Powerball jackpot winner [in Oregon] Wednesday and 4,412,468 additional players won prizes totalling more than $34 Million” — boy, that database must be a monster to manage) but still there is no excuse for not releasing the real info that people want — the damn numbers — right away.
October 27th, 2005 at 4:10 pm
The lottery is economic pornography. The reasons for purchasing or, in the parlance of the Supreme Court, “consuming” pornography are various and multifaceted, but one of the big ones is to stimulate the imagination into creating a desirable fantasy. Who wouldn’t like to get their hands on a big fat bank account, to penetrate the upper class, to ingest all manner of exotic delicacies, to own and ride two or three well-tuned machines, to luxuriate on a big ol’ bed in a nice-if-somewhat-anonymous house (possibly in the San Fernando Valley). Who doesn’t want a shot at that money?
For the most part, I download my lottery numbers from the internet.
But you are right, John, some upright fuddy-duddies turn up their nose when they see people spend their cash on what’s considered “frivolous and dubious entertainments. That’s money that (if saved up for a half-year or so) could be rolled over into a short-term money market!
(Sorry about missing the point of your post and focusing on one or two throwaway sentences.)