Powerball Winners

I'm still battling this cold, bronchitis, junior plague, or whatever it is, so I went home at lunch to eat and take a nap. While eating, I flipped on Fox News and caught about 15 minutes of the press conference with $365 million Powerball winners from last week.

All the winners looked like "down home" types, the kind coastal elites hate. They weren't redneck sassy or cocky, not looking to change the world with their fortune. They were just really happy and incredibly down-to-earth, blue-collar-type workers, the kind you might run into at the neighborhood bar or at your kid's pee wee football game. Hunter types. Each of the eight will take home $15.5 million, after taxes.

Two of the winners, incidentally, were Vietnamese refugees. Both married, one of them with five children. It's a nice story.

We'll see where these eight are in ten years. They seem like normal folk right now. Let's hope the money doesn't wreck them.

Aside: The winners said they had been participating in a pool at work for eight years. Every week, people would put $5 into the pool, and they agreed that they'd split any winnings. Some weeks, as many as sixteen or so participated. Last week, only eight did. Could you imagine being a regular participant who decided not to get in the pool last week? That's gotta be a rough feeling.