The Times - Serving Waitsburg, Dayton and the Touchet Valley

As most of you did, I’m sure, I bought some Powerball tickets this week. Three, to be exact. I picked the numbers myself.

For those of you living in a cave, the jackpot prize for the Powerball lottery drawing to be held Wednesday evening has grown to about $1.4 billion (that’s “billion,” with a “b”).

So how could I not? But this is the first time I’ve bought a lottery ticket in at least 20 years.

I blame college. I earned a degree many years ago in economics, and in the process I took a lot of statistics classes. Without doubt, the knowledge I gained in those statistics classes has taken a lot of the fun out of my life.

I never took up hang gliding, or free rock climbing or auto racing. I don’t invest in exciting new technologies. Often I find myself assessing my chances of dying by various causes. And I stopped playing the lottery, because the odds of winning are ridiculously low.

The odds that one of those Powerball tickets I bought this week will turn out to be a jackpot winner are precisely one in 292,201,338. So my chances of becoming a billionaire this week are not quite one in 100 million.

To put that in perspective, I got on the Internet and looked up some other long odds:

My odds of being struck by lightning in the coming year are about one in 700,000. Which means the odds of my being struck by lightning TOMORROW, or on any other given day, are about one in 250 million – or a bit better than the odds of hitting the jackpot with one of these Powerball tickets.

The odds that I’ll be killed by a tornado this year are about one in six million, or about 16 times greater than my chance of hitting the jackpot.

The odds that I’ll die falling down some stairs this year are about one in 150,000

The odds that I’ll be murdered this year are about one in 19,000.

The odds that I’ll die in a motor vehicle accident this year are about one in 9,000. (Which means that the odds I’ll be killed in a car crash in the coming week are a little less than one in 500,000 – 200 times greater than my jackpot chances.)

The odds that I’ll die of heart disease this year are one in 517.

Well, none of that cheered me up at all, for more than one reason. But I’m holding out hope on that lottery thing anyway.

I’m thinking that when I win, I’ll buy an Island – and spend my time driving my fleet of Ferraris around it (at a safe speed). So you may not see much of me. But on the other hand, I’ll give everyone a free subscription to The Times.

Anyway, if you don’t see my mug in this space in next week’s issue, that means that I might have become a billionaire and I don’t need this gig anymore. Or perhaps I was killed by a tornado, which is much more likely.