Thursday, September 25, 2003
Someone look up the telephone numbers of Judge Lee R. West and Judge Edward W. Nottingham. Then let's see what those two think about 'free speech' when the 50 million people who registered for the Do-Not-Call-Registry against unwanted tele-marketers call up these judges to complain about their having pronounced the Do-Not-Call legislation a violation of free speech!
Defiance of mathematical odds. I saw it with my own eyes and I forgot to mention it in my last blog.
There were lots of raffle contests going on at the golf tournament fundraiser I helped with the other day. One was a 50/50 raffle at both the 6th and 14th holes. For $5 you got a ticket if you got your ball on the green. If you didn’t get your ball on the green then you had just officially made a ‘donation.’ The winning purse was 50% of the total kitty.
Coming in after a long pleasant day on the course were more raffle tickets to buy. For $5 you had a chance at the "high end" prizes (Celtics tickets, DVD player, etc.). For $10 a Sheri-arm's-length of red raffle tickets, you had a shot at the lesser prizes (bottle of wine, fruit basket, etc.). As I mentioned before, the guys were very generous so their chances at winning were not all that good really. My boss called me up to the stage to be a Vanna-White-fill-in while he pulled out the tickets from a Tupperware bowl and called out the lucky winners. Well, I mixed, twirled, and shook those hundreds’ of tickets non-stop but contrary to what you would think, there was not an even distribution of winners. In fact the opposite happened. The same guy who won Closest-to-the-Pin also won the 50/50 kitty of $290 bucks. The same guy who won the "Most Balls Lost" contest also came up four times more to claim a bottle of wine, a case of beer, five free car washes, and a golf umbrella. One table at the back of the room held a cluster of most of the winners for the evening. Every time a repeat winner came up I shook the bowl even more rigorously. Finally a new face came up to claim the humidor (a hand-made cigar box). Only to find out that not two nights before he had been to my boss's house to smoke a nice cigar from Portugal. "You know I would love to have a humidor at home to properly store my cigars," he mentioned in passing. He bought only two blue raffle tickets the day of the golf tournament. And of the ten raffle prizes he could have won, he landed the humidor.
Things like this scare this agnostic while all of the predominantly Irish/Italian Catholic participants seemed completely un-phased by the outcome…
Defiance of mathematical odds. I saw it with my own eyes and I forgot to mention it in my last blog.
There were lots of raffle contests going on at the golf tournament fundraiser I helped with the other day. One was a 50/50 raffle at both the 6th and 14th holes. For $5 you got a ticket if you got your ball on the green. If you didn’t get your ball on the green then you had just officially made a ‘donation.’ The winning purse was 50% of the total kitty.
Coming in after a long pleasant day on the course were more raffle tickets to buy. For $5 you had a chance at the "high end" prizes (Celtics tickets, DVD player, etc.). For $10 a Sheri-arm's-length of red raffle tickets, you had a shot at the lesser prizes (bottle of wine, fruit basket, etc.). As I mentioned before, the guys were very generous so their chances at winning were not all that good really. My boss called me up to the stage to be a Vanna-White-fill-in while he pulled out the tickets from a Tupperware bowl and called out the lucky winners. Well, I mixed, twirled, and shook those hundreds’ of tickets non-stop but contrary to what you would think, there was not an even distribution of winners. In fact the opposite happened. The same guy who won Closest-to-the-Pin also won the 50/50 kitty of $290 bucks. The same guy who won the "Most Balls Lost" contest also came up four times more to claim a bottle of wine, a case of beer, five free car washes, and a golf umbrella. One table at the back of the room held a cluster of most of the winners for the evening. Every time a repeat winner came up I shook the bowl even more rigorously. Finally a new face came up to claim the humidor (a hand-made cigar box). Only to find out that not two nights before he had been to my boss's house to smoke a nice cigar from Portugal. "You know I would love to have a humidor at home to properly store my cigars," he mentioned in passing. He bought only two blue raffle tickets the day of the golf tournament. And of the ten raffle prizes he could have won, he landed the humidor.
Things like this scare this agnostic while all of the predominantly Irish/Italian Catholic participants seemed completely un-phased by the outcome…
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