I am going to take tomorrow off. That's right, today is my Friday. So tomorrow morning when the sun rises, I do not have to crawl out of the warm womb-like surrounds of my bed into the cold morning air to go and work for 'the man'. It shall be bliss.
I won ten dollars on a lottery ticket. I never play lotto tickets; I consider them an idiot tax. I usually shake my head ruefully when I am standing in line at some trashy convenience store and some obviously poor and dirty person is pulling out the majority of his fast food paycheck and forking it over for lotto tickets. I call it 'poorhouse investment solutions'. Actually, I just made that up. And it's not very funny. Anyways, what really drives me to not buy scratch off lotto tickets is that you have no information on weather or not the prizes have been won. Sure, a ticket might give you a fifty thousand dollar prize, but there is only one fifty thousand dollar prize. Did someone already win it? If they did then your chances of winning is absolutely zero.
So they other day I was at a shit-stop store buying a couple of things, paid cash and put my wallet away, and my change came out to be exactly one dollar. I was actually too lazy to pull my wallet out again, so instead I said 'Give me a lucky seven' which was the first lotto ticket I spied under the glass counter. It was yellow and had big four leaf clovers on it. So you know it was extra lucky. I tossed it in my bag and brought it home and forgot about it for a couple of days. Then one afternoon when I was rooting around for something and I found the ticket. I scratched it off and found out I had won a whopping ten dollars. I was rich.
I still have not cashed in the lotto ticket. I am still simply amazed that I have a winning ten dollar lottery ticket. I figure these are my choices:
1) Continue my poorhouse investment solutions and buy ten MORE lotto tickets.
2) Buy a bottomless supertanker of beer at the west end.
3) Use it on sensible items like food or house repairs.
4) Buy a bottomless supertanker of beer at the west end.
5) Stuff it into a strippers thong
Going along the trends of my free stuff, yesterday google sent me a Christmas present. I manage our company's adsense keywords, so google sent me a promotional item, a digital picture frame with a google logo on it. I smuggled it out of the building as fast as I could because the year before my boss had stolen my google present. It is a sort of neat little item. You stick an SD card in it and it will rotate through the pictures on the card. For my own amusement I downloaded a bunch of naked lady pics and giggled as they flashed across it's LCD screen. It can also play MP3's through a tiny piezo speaker or via a headphone input. That is sort of cool because it displays a little spectrum analyzer as it plays. Finally, it can play 'MP4' files; however every file I tried downloading would not play. It's a neat little unit, but I do not think I would actually buy one.
Maybe ill write a program that downloads an updated image of the Florida Doppler image so I can always see what is going on with the weather. That would be pretty neat.
I keep reading about people going on speed dating. It actually sounds fun. You get to go get drunk and then you have eight minutes with a person who HAS to sit and listen to you talk. A captive audience. I could preach about Jesus or the communist manifesto, or I could just open the top few buttons of my shirt and display my chest hair and gold medallion while winking suggestively. And she would not be allowed to leave. Sounds like a grand time to me.
2026 Update
Dialing the furnace for December 2006, when a ten-dollar scratcher made Ed feel like a robber baron.
Ah, 2006. Ed was practically vibrating with the thrill of a ten-dollar scratch ticket and a Google-branded digital picture frame he'd stuffed under his coat like a jewel thief. The frame is the perfect fossil: an entire gadget category whose only job was to display photos, with an SD card slot, an MP3 speaker, and the mysterious promise of MP4s that never worked. Today that thing would be a phone app, and the phone itself would also be his map, his wallet, his dating proxy, and his dancing monkey. Speed dating, meanwhile, has been replaced by swiping on that same phone—less captive audience, more capturable attention span. Ed dreamed of preaching Jesus or communism to a woman trapped for eight minutes. Now we just get trapped by algorithmic feeds for eight hours. The ten-dollar lotto ticket is still an idiot tax, of course, but now the idiot can buy it at a gas station kiosk without making eye contact with a cashier. And the weather radar he wanted on his frame? It lives in everyone's pocket, perpetually warning us about air quality and pollen instead of Doppler-porn. Progress.
“2006 Ed, you won ten dollars and couldn't decide between ten more tickets and a supertanker of beer—how did it feel to sit on that fortune while your Google frame gathered dust? Did you ever cash it, or is it still pinned to your fridge like a holy relic?” — Beelzebubba the Third
2006 Ed: Ahh, Beelzebubba, you sound like my conscience, except funnier and with better horns. That ten dollars? Still sitting on my dresser under a coupon for cat food, like a little yellow holy relic. I keep meaning to cash it, but every time I pick it up I get all philosophical about the idiot tax, then I put it back and go open a beer. So no supertanker yet, no ten more tickets, no stripper thong (sorry). The Google frame, though, it doesn't gather dust—I loaded it with Florida Doppler radar images and, um, some other educational material. It's basically a shrine to weather and bad decisions. And you know, I figure if I cash it, the magic dies. Ten dollars is a beautiful dream; ten dollars in my pocket is just gas money. So it stays. Take that, foul germs.
