Month: March 2012

How the lottery can help build a kickass bar…or not

Okay, it seemed like a reasonable gambit. Ordinarily I’d suggest my parents blow the entire paycheque on booze. I thought the idea of leveraging the money via the lottery was really quite clever.

But my parents ignored me!

I thought they were being dickheads again, campaigning against my happiness.

Like most people, they buy the occasional lottery ticket. Why shouldn’t they buy more lottery tickets, then? Imagine: we could multiply our Lotto 6/49 chances by 10 or even a hundred, and then we’d be awash in booze. The booze of winners!

The Lotto Max jackpot is currently at $20 million—enough for the kickass bar of our dreams…the sort of bar the kids could brag about to their friends at elementary.

When I asked my mum about it, she said she feels like an idiot when she buys a lottery ticket. The only thing that allows her to do it is the knowledge that millions of other Canadians are doing the exact same thing without feeling like idiots. Just for a moment that $5 or even $10 seems like small change beside the chance at new cars, new clothes, new furniture, massive televisions, killer sound systems, whiter teeth, Botox, vacations, cruises—you name it.

Oh yeah, and all the philanthropy they could engage in! We mustn’t forget that, because wasting your money on a lottery ticket involves digging for justifications, the biggest of which is that you deserve to win.

But can you win? I decided to school myself a bit.

Winners who beat 14,000,000:1 odds!

The average North American spends $1000 per year on lottery tickets and recoups a thirtieth, at best, of that with minor wins. Wow! That’s over $900 in spilt money. That’s ten very nice whiskies, 50 decent bottles of wine, or 40 cases of beer. OMG!

So maybe lottery tickets aren’t such a hot idea. Why do people buy them?

If you went to an investment advisor with $1000, you wouldn’t sink that money in a fund that promised to swallow your capital and give you $30-$40 back. Duh. But despite the statistical fact of abysmal returns, we continue to do this very thing at the lottery stand.

Canada’s most popular lottery, the 6/49, carries odds of almost 14 million to one. A toonie doesn’t seem like a big risk. One toonie twice a week=$208 per year, which is fine for anyone who doesn’t mind sacrificing five bottles of Belvedere and getting a mickey of Alberta Pure in return.

If only we were that restrained, though. And actually Canadians are a little more restrained than US citizens—we spend about $600 a year. Which still isn’t restrained—we’re not just spending a toonie on the 6/49; we’re also getting sucked in by scratch’n’wins and the astronomically long odds (28 million to one) of the Lotto Max.

Who’s doing all this buying? It isn’t everyone. Plenty of people walk past the stand without being tempted. Their $0 purchases contribute to the national average—which puts in perspective the lottery addict who spends ten minutes a time at the stand hand-selecting scratch tickets and boring the shit out of the clerk. The Lottery People are closely related to the People of Walmart; they have specific characteristics, not necessarily including visible ass crack but often involving body odor and decrepitude. They like to have rambling one-way conversations with captive listeners such as lottery stand attendants, and they are singularly oblivious of people in line behind them.

The Lottery People actually save us money sometimes. My mother, who already feels like an idiot whenever she buys a ticket, is too embarrassed to stand for more than a minute in the line-up and will bolt rather than be exposed for longer in the queue. While there, she looks furtively around. If someone chit-chats with her, she makes a point of snickering about her own silly purchase and calling it the Idiot Tax. If the kids are with her, she tells them lotteries are stupid and that we don’t do this very often. Yes, my mother has some inner conflict to work out, but she won’t be able to afford a psychologist if she continues buying lottery tickets.

Considerably better odds than government lotteries 😉

Sadly, having less money often translates into buying more tickets. Statistically, lower-income earners hand over more cash for tickets, perhaps because lotteries seem like their only chance to attain wealth.

This represents a striking dichotomy between realism (slim chances of mobility) and utter unrealism (the odds of winning are substantially smaller than the odds of dying from necrotizing fasciitis).

Plenty of things are more likely than winning the lottery:

  • Dying in a plane crash: one in 400,000
  • Drowning: one in 88,000
  • Being struck by lightning: one in 500,000
  • Contracting herpes: one in 950
  • Getting attacked by a bear in Yellowstone Park: one in 2 million

Wow, all those things suck!

So what should my parents buy instead of lottery tickets? Ahhh!

  • Instead of playing 6/49 for a year: two bottles of Glenfarclas 17
  • Instead of Lotto Max for a year: one bottle of Ardbeg 18

Between Glenfarclas for sure and wealth maybe, I’ll take the Glenfarclas.

After another nudge, my parents finally responded.

OMG! They really are opposed to my happiness.

Moobs—the springtime symbol of optimism

My Fellow Inebriates,

We saw our first shirtless man of the year today, rocking his moobs along 66th Avenue.

Whether too polite or too stunned by his wobbly pallor, my mother failed to take a picture. She said, invoking the usual clichés, that it was adequately seared onto her retinas, that it couldn’t be “unseen,” and all the rest of it. She said if my dad had the decency to confine his teats to the yard and she to cover her jiggly bits during Non-Swimming Occasions, surely this dude could spare us his flapping manboobs.

But I was really taken with his springtime exuberance. It was only 13°C out (that’s 55°F for my American friends)—not hot enough to warrant stripping off and barely warm enough to justify drinking lager over ale. But there he was, owning it, rocking those jouncy bits of his down the avenue.

The world needs more happy, optimistic people like this and fewer negative, critical people like my mum. Don’t you think? Does her smarmy, captious assessment of this, the first shirtless man of 2012, even compare to the joy he must have felt swinging down 66th today?

Even when he’s slathering aloe vera over his lobster-pink tatas this evening, he’ll be able to say, Yes, I’m a guy who lets it all hang loose.

FALERNIA CARMENERE RESERVA (2007)—Better than pain meds (I think)

My Fellow Inebriates,

The grandfather I never knew would have been 80 years old today, something I wouldn’t have learned without snooping in my mum’s e-mail box, where I found an attachment from his sister, my great aunt (who doesn’t know I call her that). The picture she sent dated back to 1943, when my grandfather was 11 in Blitz-torn London. In the event of an invasion by Hitler, the poster was to be distributed to the population.

Sorry, Fluffy, you need more than a vacant stare to keep a girlfriend like Dolly.

I’ve had grandparents on the brain lately, what with Fluffy Bear continuing to haunt our house, albeit with attenuated efforts. I had to admit, reluctantly, that Fluffy hadn’t clogged the toilets with his mind; our cheap toilets just object to the products of constipation. Not only is the ghost of Granny loosening her hold on Fluffy; my girlfriend Dolly has also lost interest in his catatonic personality, which of course makes him seem more benign now. And damn, is he ever cuddly.

In other grandparental news, my Nana (she doesn’t know I call her that) got a new knee today. What a fantastic age to be alive, when you can replace your worn-out knee with a mechanical one. It gives me hope that by the time my liver is fully pickled, I’ll be able to order a new one on e-bay.

Nana didn’t have much to say about the operation. She is probably processing the new reality of being part cyborg. She may even be worried about the knee gathering data, assembling a rudimentary intelligence, and coercing her to take up Nordic hiking.

Nana’s friend very sensibly urged her back into the arms of Morpheus, which meant I didn’t get the skinny on exactly what drugs are in her IV drip. I hope that they’re taking care of the pain and, of course, keeping her calm.

Feeling solidarity with Nana against the post-op pain blitz, I urged my parents to open a bottle of wine. The consultant at the liquor store had recommended a promising Chilean red: FALERNIA CARMENERE RESERVA (2007). But would it be as mind-altering as Nana’s post-op cocktail? I pushed the thought aside.

And what was my fourth grandparent Papa (he doesn’t know I call him that) doing, I wondered? Was he bedside at the hospital? Or had he invited dozens of friends over for a housewrecker of a party? Was our wine going to compete with the martinis I imagined him shaking? That thought, too, I pushed aside.

The FALERNIA winery in Elqui Valley, 300 miles north of Santiago, is Chile’s northernmost wine estate. Interestingly, FALERNIA partially vine-dries the carmenere grapes before harvesting to boost their intensity. Given the resulting 15% alcohol and mouth-filling concentration of the 2007 RESERVA, I have to evangelize this method. If you are a fan of big, juicy wines, this one will appeal to you. But let’s back up—the experience is worth detailing.

FALERNIA CARMENERE RESERVA is a dark, concentrated ruby hue with big legs and a heady aroma of cassis, ripe berries, and plum. The flavor is massive and enveloping—without erring on the side of fruity simplicity. On the contrary, it serves up an orchestra of nicely coordinated tastes. Oak aging rounds out the flavors, adding the suppleness and sophistication that is often lacking in so-called fruit bombs. This is not quite a fruit bomb, but it is a near-orgy. And the finish? Endless.

You might call FALERNIA CARMENERE RESERVA an oenophilic blitz. At $18 it’s rhapsody for the tastebuds, and a respectable 15% wallop for your brain cells. Just right for toasting my grandparents—whether they’re floating around incorporeally, floating in a morphine haze, or in Papa’s case, hosting a wild three-day party during Nana’s recovery.

It’s just as well Nana’s doctors probably wouldn’t allow me to enter the hospital with a paper bag containing this wine. It probably wouldn’t tango so well with Demerol. As for Papa, I’m sorry he can’t share it with me, but let’s face it, that means more for me. As for the ghosts—if they’re here—they’re welcome to it, as long as they keep calm.