DIARY
Confusing
the buttocks out of things
by
Robert LaFrance
It is said that the odds of winning
a million dollars in the Atlantic Lottery – I’m talking about one person buying
one ticket – are 6,359,015 to one in a given week.
I got interested in these odds last
week when I chanced to see Gary Overhill, who is an actuary working for an
insurance company. An actuary is one who calculates the odds so that insurance
companies know how much to gouge – er, I mean, charge - their customers.
“Gary,” I said, “would you calculate
the odds, a ballpark figure, of a person’s chances in this scenario? He bought
a $2 ticket every week since mid-May of 1976, now what are his chances of
winning anything from a free ticket to the big prize of $1 million?”
He scratched his grizzled chin. “If
you’re referring to yourself, how much have you won?” I answered that I was
talking about myself, and I had not won as much as a free ticket in all that
time. He reached in his pocket and took out a hand calculator.
“I would say that you have sunk – if
you will pardon the term – approximately $29,656 in that lottery. The odds
against your paying out that money and not winning SQUAT are 45,231,668 to one.
If you had invested that money in Canada Savings Bonds, for example, it would
now have been worth $127,354.”
“Oh, shut up, Gary. Who asked you
anyway?”
**************************
Tail-gaters – you gotta love ‘em.
Well, maybe not.
Something strange happened to me
last week. I drove about 50 (or more) kilometres and did not have one
tail-gater. Usually the case is this: I get in my Buick and head for town and
by the time I get there I have collected two or three tail-gaters clinging to
my back bumper like so many limpet mines even though I would be driving the
speed limit and not holding up traffic.
I have often wondered what kind of
genetic material, if any, is located between the ears of these creatures. When
I see a car nuzzling my back bumper, that is a trifle disconcerting. Why do
they do it? Is it because they think they will get there sooner? I tried to
imagine the ‘thought’ processes of people who do that and couldn’t.
I have had vehicles cling to my car’s back bumper – for as much as ten
kilometres. I’ve tried speeding up over the speed limit and I have tried
stopping along the road, but at this point the driver behind just pulls over
behind me.
When I look in my rear-view mirror
and can’t see the car’s bumper – although there have been plenty of chances for
her or him to pass – I just wonder, that’s all. Any ideas?
**************************
Still vaguely on the subject of
roads and traffic, I heard a rumour that D.O.T. (now hiding under the acronym
D.T.I.) has applied for an international patent for a process they invented
last year.
If you are familiar with Highway 109
in Perth-Andover, at the Andover side of the bridge, you will remember how the
truck traffic had gouged two grooves into the road going up the hill. They were
a couple of inches deep where the wheels went up the hill.
The logical thing to do, one would
think, was bring over the asphalt trucks and fill in the grooves, but D.O.T.
used an entirely new method of dealing with the problem. They simply moved over
the yellow line so that the trucks and we Buick drivers are no longer driving
in – and making deeper – those particular grooves.
When the current grooves are getting
too deep, the yellow line can be moved over yet again. The downside, of course,
is that sooner or later the driving lane coming down the hill will be in the
ditch, but they can always detour.
**************************
While he was sitting on my front
porch and sipping my lemonade, my friend (against all odds) Flug paused and
said to me: “Bob, people are getting tired of your telling them that all this modern
electronic stuff is keeping you confused. Why don’t you write about things
people understand, like baseball?”
Yeah, maybe I will do that. The only
problem is that I can’t tell what sport I am watching or how many points a
field goal is. People talk about violence in hockey, but then I turn on a
baseball game to see a Texas Ranger guy and a Toronto Blue Jays guy having a
fistfight.
I think I will stick to my
electronic confusion after all. Like yesterday, when I had the air conditioner
going full blast and noticed that my car seat warmer was also set at MAX. My
rear end was getting confusing messages.-end-
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