it's lotto money

the california lottery is up to $250 million for tomorrow's drawing. i myself do not play the lottery, but i know some people who do. in fact, i was asked to buy some lotto tickets for them not because they were unavailable to buy tickets themselves, but because i live close to bluebird liquor. apparently, bluebird liquor is the second highest selling lottery ticket venue in california largely due to the fact that hundreds of winning tickets have been purchased there. it has become so famous, the liquor store now sells over 5 million lottery tickets annually. even with that in mind, when i arrived at the store i was still surprised to see about fifty people standing in a line with the sole purpose of buying a lottery ticket. this line even went out the door and onto the sidewalk for 50 feet or so. after finding the end of the queue, i was told that if you were to buy anything [like a $0.50 candy bar], you could go to the front of the line. i couldn't believe that these people not only were going there to just buy lottery tickets, but that they wouldn't even spare a couple of quarters to get out of the heat and save themselves 20 minutes of standing in line. these people put fiscal musings to shame. so after getting inside [uh...], i asked a few people why they would come here to buy tickets. an old man simply pointed upwards, where i saw endless records of winnings taped to the ceiling. my guess is that were at least 500 pieces of paper with winning totals on them [by the way, most of them weren't million dollar jackpots, but still significant amounts of money].