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And
the Winner is...
a Loser
by Mad Dog
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This past week
someone became a winner and loser when they didn’t bother to cash in a
Florida Lottery ticket worth $50 million within the allotted time and
—whoops!— is now the proud owner of a very nice piece of paper. |
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It’s not easy being a
winner and a loser at the same time. While this may appear to be an
oxymoron, like jumbo shrimp, military intelligence, and Academy Award
winner Tori Spelling—okay, that’s actually an impossibility—it’s
more common than you think. Just this past week someone became a winner
and loser when they didn’t bother to cash in a Florida Lottery ticket
worth $50 million within the allotted time and—whoops!—is now the
proud owner of a very nice piece of white paper with pink printing, not
even suitable for flogging themselves with should they discover it in
the pocket of the jacket they wore during their vacation at Disney World
last March. And they thought the dog they had their picture taken with
was Goofy.
Maybe they don’t need the money. I
hear there are people like that in the world though apparently they
don’t hang around the same Goodwill stores I do so I’ve never met
them. Maybe the ticket accidentally went through the wash and wound up
looking like a lint sculpture of a wad of chewing gum. If it did, they
could try to sell it to the Museum of Modern Art or auction it off on
eBay. After all, if people will buy a Hummel figurine of Nancy Kerrigan
skating with a swollen knee they’ll buy anything. The most likely
scenario, though, is that they don’t remember having bought the ticket
in the first place, so they’ll never know what they lost. This would
be the best case since there’s a good chance they wouldn’t have the
phone number of the suicide prevention hotline handy were they to
discover the erstwhile winning ticket hiding under a pile of unpaid
credit card bills.
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While he
lost the ability to have children, he won a free operation, and if
you’ve ever walked into a hospital and heard the meter start ticking
you know it isn’t cheap. Not only that, but I feel certain they
treated his earache for free.
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We all like to think we’re winners and don’t want to consider
that we may be losers, even if we can have the edge taken off by being
both simultaneously. Trust me, it happens. Take the guy in Brazil who
recently went into the hospital to be treated for an earache
but—whoops again!—went home with a vasectomy by mistake. While he
lost the ability to have children, he won a free operation, and if
you’ve ever walked into a hospital and heard the meter start ticking
you know it isn’t cheap. Not only that, but I feel certain they
treated his earache for free. At least I hope they did. I can’t help
but wonder, though, whether he has that worthless $50 million lottery
ticket wadded up in his pants pocket since, according to a manager at
the clinic, “He asked no questions when the doctor started
preparations in the area.” And yes, the area they were referring to
wasn’t his hospital room. Obviously the guy isn’t the world’s most
observant person.
Lawyers in New Jersey are winners and
losers now, thanks to a ruling by the state Supreme Court. The justices
recently changed the ethics code for lawyers, which is an even better
oxymoron than the ones I came up with. One of the things the court
changed is that New Jersey lawyers can now bill you for the time they
spend eating lunch as long as they think about your case, even if that
thought was to compare the bologna in their
sandwich to the bologna of your thinking that you’ll ever see a penny
of the settlement. Just kidding. Actually no self-respecting lawyer
would be caught dead eating bologna for lunch. Unless it was made with
Kobe beef. (NOTE: That’s the hand-massaged beef from Japan, not the
Los Angeles Laker whose beef is with a 19-year-old girl from Colorado.)
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This means we’re
going to have to wait a while longer before we can hear the advertising
jingle, “Rest your mind while we rest your case, with Jones,
Fitzgerald, Jones and Pace” coming out of our radio speakers. |
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Okay. What the court really said was that New Jersey lawyers are
now free to advertise on the Internet and other electronic media. The
lawyers, of course, are ecstatic because they like anything that has the
word free attached to it, as long as when translated into Latin it
doesn’t come out: pro bono. In this respect they’re winners.
The loser part is that the court said they can’t use jingles or
cartoons when they advertise. This is a shame because it means we’re
going to have to wait a while longer before we can hear the advertising
jingle, “Rest your mind while we rest your case, with Jones,
Fitzgerald, Jones and Pace” coming out of our radio speakers, not to
mention seeing those cute little scamps, Larry Litigant and Sweet Sue,
on TV commercials, web sites, Saturday morning cartoon spin-offs, and in
Happy Meals.
Other people are winners and losers
at the same time. Charlie Maher, who lost out as the bachelor of choice
on The Bachelorette is now a correspondent for the TV show Extra,
while Bob Guiney, also a loser on the show, won the slot as the bachelor
on the next edition of The Bachelor. Don’t worry, that sentence
will make sense sometime tomorrow. Probably a bit after lunch.
Dan Knight, who won the first World
Rubik’s Game Championship in 20 years by solving the cube in an
average of 20 seconds, isn’t just a winner, he’s also a
loser—he’s obviously lost his mind, senses, and control of his life.
Even George Bush is a winner and a loser. Just ask any Democrat.
They’ll remind you that he won the election while losing the popular
vote, something they’ll hold against him even longer than the
Republicans will blame Clinton for everything that goes wrong in the
world. If you can imagine that. And then there’s Pauley Shore.
He....well, okay, that’s a bad example. You see, not everyone can be a
winner and a loser. Some people just can’t win.
©2003 Mad Dog
Productions, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
These columns appear in better newspapers across the country.
Read them while waiting to have that earache operation.
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