2004-02-15 9:30 p.m.
Do You Feel Lucky, Punk?
I took Lauren Noelle up on her dare to buy lottery tickets on Friday the 13th.
I stopped off at a newsstand on my way home and picked up 5 tickets -- 3 scratchers and 2 Super Lotto Plus picks. I hadn't bought any tickets since shortly after I moved back 5 years ago, so I was not up on the lingo of the California Lottery and sounded like a doofus asking for my tickets. (I'd wanted to ask the counter clerk if they sold fewer lottery tickets than average on Friday the 13th because of superstition or more than average because of a perverse defiance of superstition, but since I felt like my dork factor was already off the scale, I wasn't about to go there.)
I felt even more like a doofus when I realized that in order to TiVo the 30-second number drawing on Saturday night (in true gambler fashion, I did not have the patience to wait until this morning for the numbers to show up on the lottery website) I'd have to record 29-1/2 minutes of Hollywood Squares.
The final tally: one of the scratchers won me $4, and I didn't match a single number on the Lotto tickets. So while I didn't win enough money to buy me a new roof, I almost broke even, and that's not bad.
Unless you consider that Precious now thinks I like witless game shows, which could prove to be the worst luck of all.