Lottery games have been around for centuries. A variant of Bingo was invented in the late 1800s, but the Romans played the numbers long before that. The biggest difference between then and now is the cost to play the game and the size of the payoff for winning. Even the staunchest anti-gambling advocate has to admit to being intrigued by the prizes. By risking a dollar a person might win many millions. Unfortunately, as we all know, not everyone is willing to stop at a dollar. Horror stories, and hopefully mostly just stories, abound about welfare families spending their entire income buying tickets.

Who have been the winners? Was it ever anyone who spent a hundred dollars or more on tickets to cut down the odds? I haven’t heard of one, but I do know that a woman won forty million dollars when a clerk refused to change a five dollar bill for her so she could have bus fare. Determined to get her change, she bought a PowerBall ticket. (I hope she went back later and planted a big kiss on top of the curmudgeon’s head.) Did any of the winners read a book telling them how to pick the numbers? How many used their own or their spouses’ birthdate or the two combined? Or did they use their telephone number, or numbers on a fortune cookie? As far as I know, all but one of the winners let the lottery computer pick the numbers for them. The one great