The Strangest Day
Mike Smith
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In 2008’s The Power of Critical Thinking, Lewis Vaughn wrote:
“When Evelyn Marie Adams won the New Jersey lottery twice, newspapers reported the odds of her feat as 1 in 17 trillion—the odds that a given person buying a single ticket for two New Jersey lotteries would win both. But statisticians Stephen Samuels and George McCabe report that, given the millions of people who buy U.S. state lottery tickets, it was ‘practically a sure thing’ that someday, somewhere, someone would hit a state jackpot twice. Consider: An event that happens to but one in a billion people in a day happens 2000 times a year. A day when nothing weird happened would actually be the weirdest day of all.”
And, in New Mexico, today, July 24, 2008: was that day.
Today—aside from someone smashing in the window of my car to steal an over-sized purse full of my wife’s childbirth education DVDs and an electric breast-pump; an amazing and miles-long subterranean river of white crystals being discovered beneath Fort Stanton; a mentally interesting Albuquerque man sitting in prison for killing and burying his brother “to save the world”; and Tucumcari—absolutely nothing strange at all happened in our state.
Sorry about that.
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Reader Comments (2)
If I were unwanted, I might yell at my kids, too.