A new use for the tin-foil hat?

Fortitudine at The Canadian Republic reports the alarming news of the possible connection between cell phone use and brain cancer.

CBC’s lamebrain ‘reality’-TV

CBC’s reality-TV competition, "Canada's Next Great Prime Minister", has been advertised all week and today it’s covered by two newspaper articles.

Rick Mercer is host and the panel of judges consists of three former prime ministerial losers John Turner, Kim Campbell and Paul Martin plus Premier Danny ‘Bigmouth’ Williams.

Only the CBC and its audience of twelve could think this lame idea wasn’t a giant waste of taxpayers’ money.

Free to be idiots

The town of New Denver, BC has apparently voted to ban all cell phones. Now they are perfectly free to do so - there's no law against being an idiot. Though, to be fair, the vote was close - only about half the town are idiots.

Weird Lotto outcome

What a bummer of a Lotto 6/49 outcome! Nobody won the big prize which isn't unusual. But the next biggest prize (ordinarily) for 5 out of 6 matches plus a matching bonus number had a whopping 240 winning tickets (120 in Ontario alone) each receiving a measly $1200 (typically 2 or 3 players win around $100,000 each). Adding insult to injury, players who had 5 out of 6 matching numbers with no matching bonus number won nearly twice as much ($2200 each).

Now you really can't feel sorry for anyone who plays a lottery and wins $1200 on a $2 bet but winning a prize that's about 1/100th of the typical payout would be just a little irksome.

Update (21 Mar): A Lotto retailer informs me that the reason for this outcome is that many players pick consecutive number sequences as a 'strategy' for winning. For example they'll pick a set of numbers in the 1 - 10 range and/or the 20 to 29 range, and so on. In this case players across the country bought 240 tickets (out of more than 5 million) in the 40 to 45 range which matched 5 of the 6 (plus bonus) numbers drawn. The odds of this happening were about 1 in 2.3 million. This seems like a reasonable explanation for an otherwise bizarre outcome.

Tag - Six unimportant things

Having been tagged, I’ll follow the meme: Share six non-important things/habits/quirks about yourself:

I love peanut butter and lettuce sandwiches.

I once voted Liberal.

My wife thinks I’m a grouch - but she’s wrong, as usual.

I occasionally walk in my sleep.

Ed Schreyer was my high school geography teacher. My biggest recollection from his classes was a discussion of the meaning of the word "copacetic".

I once owned a B.S.A. 250 Starfire.

Tagging six:
A Dog Named Kyoto
Half Wisdom Half Wit
Canadian Blue Lemons
Grey Canada
Canadian Sentinel
Exactly Right