Mister Bohn

Come on, step right up and help yourself to a nice big bowl of steaming dog shit.

What do you mean it's bad for you? You're just saying that. Maybe you've been conditioned since childhood to believe things without question. But are you sure dog shit is bad for you? Can you name a single scientific study that says you'll get sick from eating dog shit? And even if you could that wouldn't prove anything. Except maybe that some powerful interests are still trying to brainwash you. Think about it. Millions of people are starving, and here's this delicious, nutritious food source right under their shoes. But they don't dare eat it because they're told it's "bad" for them. Those giant food monopolies are getting rich off of your hunger! But you don't have to let them get away with it! Come on, stick it to the rich agribusinesses, here's a bowl, here's a spoon, now dig in!

Now you're saying it'll taste bad! You haven't even tried it and already you're forming opinions. You need to keep an open mind. You need to overcome your childhood conditioning. Trust me, it'll taste great after the first few spoonfulls.

Of course I eat it. Every day. You don't believe me? You're calling me a liar? Well, I've never been so insulted. Here I am trying to give you free food and end world hunger and you insult me, the best friend you ever had. No, don't try to apologize, I'm used to pain, it's the price of being so smart.

Well if you won't eat my dog shit, will you at least try some cat shit? Chicken shit? Lizard shit? Horse shit?

I told you it tastes good.

Almost 15 hours without nicotine in any form. And I feel great. Giddy, balloon-headed, la-la, 12 inches off the ground. The kind of feeling people pay money to get, and pay again next morning.

I've felt this way before, many times. The many times I've quit smoking. The question is why I hate feeling so good. Maybe it's too good. If you're drunk, you can't function, and I need to function. Maybe it's the fact that this cheap drunk is so curable--just light another ciggy, take another chaw. Kinda like those other cheap highs--sleep deprivation, hypoxia--we scorn it 'cause it's too easy to get. You can get the exact same rush from inhaling Scotchguard or holding one's breath, but which is more popular?

But anyway, cheap highs are the only kind I can afford. And they don't come cheaper than this. If I can indeed quit the nicettes today, then that should be $120 I won't have to spend every month.

So far I feel fine. But it's that next day that's gonna hurt.

Strange it may seem, but you cannot find everything on Google.

The other month a friend asked if I could locate the song "Sixteen Teens." He'd heard it on a local oldies station, but couldn't recall anything beyond the title. I couldn't recall it either, but I didn't need a memory when I had Google. I'd been able to find many obscure songs before, and I had confidence I could do it again. Until I typed "sixteen teens" into the search bar and....

I found links to "Sixteen Tons," "Sweet Sixteen" "You're Sixteen" and a load of other sites that had nothing to do with fifties music.

I tried just "sixteen." Or "teens." All I got was a lot more sites that were... irrelevant.

In desperation we phoned the local oldies radio station. The DJ was very friendly. Sure he knew the song. It was by Rolf Harris.

I won't tell you how many hours we wasted chasing down that blind alley. And I don't think it would spoil the ending to tell you that "SIXTEEN TEENS" WAS NOT WRITTEN BY ROLF HARRIS!

Weeks passed. Then months. My friend called his brother, a local expert on everything rock. He'd never heard of the song either.

2010 turned to 2011. I was talking to said friend and he asked, more out of habit, if I'd ever managed to track down that song. I told him he had dreamed up the song, if Google couldn't find it then it never existed. But out of habit I typed in the title one more time and....

It's a rockabilly number written in 1956 and performed by Little Gracie for Band Box Records, and by the Rover Boys, also in 1956 It's available in a couple of compilation CDs. There are two Rover Boys versions on YouTube, while the Little Gracie number can be had as a torrent download. I quickly downloaded them, along with the CD covers. (I won't give the links since they might have changed and I don't want to get in trouble with copyright. You ought to do some of the work yourself.) It's a catchy tune, and now that I've listened to it a few times I can swear I heard it before. Maybe I'm dreaming.

But I still haven't been able to find the lyrics. Maybe they'll be up soon, but I might as well be first. Here's the Rover Boys version:

Sixteen teens

Sixteen teens
Dressed in jeans
Rockin' round the juke machines
Dancin' to their favorite rock 'n' roll.
Kings and Queens.

Sixteen teens
Sharp as nails
Eight crew cuts
And eight pony tails
Dancin' to their favorite rock 'n' roll.
Kings and Queens.
Sixteen teens!

Man alive!
Dig that jive!
Dig that crazy beat!
Come on pop to the record hop.
Don't drag your feet!

Sixteen teens
Dressed in jeans
Rockin' round the juke machines
Dancin' to their favorite rock 'n' roll
Kings and Queens
Sixteen teens!

Sixteen teens!
Dressed in jeans!
Rockin' round
The juke machines!
Kings and Queens!
Sixteen sixteen sixteen sixteen sixteen teens!

Sharp as nails!
Eight crew cuts!
And eight pony tails!
Kings and Queens!
Sixteen sixteen sixteen teens!

Man alive
Dig that jive
Dig that crazy beat!
Come on pop, to the record hop
Don't drag your feet!

Sixteen teens
Dressed in jeans
Rockin' round the juke machines
Dancin' to their favorite rock 'n' roll.
Kings and Queens
Sixteen teens.

Sixteen teens!
The Rover Boys, 1956

So there. You're free to copy it for your own website, spelling mistakes and all.

For the past few years, I've been using re-usable shopping bags (and re-using them).

They have several advantages, besides being environmentally correct. They're a lot tougher than those flimsy plastic bags they're making today, and their thicker cloth handles don't saw off my fingers.

But they do have one disadvantage: the self-serve checkouts at Safeway don't like them.

Every time you put a cloth bag on the scale and hit the Start button, the computer says, "Unexpected item in bagging area. Remove the item and try again." Then you have to wait until a human checker shows up to clear it.

For the past few years, I've had to wait. Finally, a checker showed me a trick she'd learned from another customer.

Don't put the cloth bag on the scale, at least not yet. Instead, do this:

1. Press the Start button


2. Scan your first item, and put that in the bag


3. THEN place the bag, with the item in it, on the scale.

You can then check and bag the rest of your groceries as normal.

Apparently the system has some fuzzy logic programmed into it, so that it includes the extra weight of the shopping bag with the weight of the scanned item. At any rate, it worked like a top when I tried it. I don't think the system would let you sneak in a can of ham alongside a stick of gum, and I'm not going to try. There are still people watching. And those are harder to fool.

...though you'd hardly knoweth it.

There were adventures, misadventures, and the usual nonadventures too numerous to relate here. But mostly I ate and slept and woke and slept some more. As years go it wasn't so bad, with the memories of worse ones to keep me from complaining. If the next year is as uneventful as this one then I'm golden.

Didn't go to any foreign countries, didn't have too many parties, and best of all, didn't do too much writing. There are a few programs that I'm still proud of, a few websites hanging fire, a few projects that I will be grateful to abandon. And that's enough vagueness.

I haven't gotten any richer, but I'm not much poorer. I read a few more books, gave away a boxload of DVDs, so I probably have less stuff than last year. At least, the shelves look a bit more barren. Not much chance of me appearing on Hoarders, unless they do a series on cluttered hard drives.

In short, my life remains as dull as dishwater. And that's the way I like it. A typical North American in the 21st century. They don't get any softer than that.

Weren't they saying something similar in 1913?

The law, in its majestic equality, prohibits the poor as well as the rich from insider trading, accepting bribes, or claiming a deduction on the mortgage for a swimming pool.

--Me (I think)

To help put into perspective the chance of winning anything in a lottery, here are some of the odds in the Mega Millions compared to odds of other things happening to you in any year. The lottery odds are adjusted to assume you buy 1 ticket every week.

Chance of being elected president of the United States	1 in 800,000,000 NoteIf, like the President, you are a native-born American over 35 years of age who has spent the last fifteen years in the US, then you share that distinction with approximately 200,000,000 of your fellow Americans. The odds have been annualized to reflect the fact that presidential elections happen every four years. Finally, I am assuming that you are at least as capable as some of the others who've made it.
Chance of being eaten by an alligator	1 in 150,000,000 NoteIn this decade there were 10 fatal alligator attacks known to Wikipedia. With both the human and alligator populations increasing, we can expect this number to rise.
Chance of being executed for a murder you did not commit	1 in 20,000,000 NoteThere are approximately 100 executions per year in the US. Although we will never know which, if any, of these people were innocent, deathpenaltyinfo does list over 170 exonerations, or about 10%, of death row inmates. The numbers have been age-adjusted.
Chance of winning a jackpot in the Mega Millions	1 in 3,500,000 NoteRoughly 52 / 175,711,536
Chance of being killed by lightning	1 in 2,500,000 Note"According to the NOAA Technical Memorandum NWS SR-193, the United States average was 0.41 deaths per million people per year from 1959 through 1994"
Chance of being murdered by your significant other	1 in 2,000,000 NoteOf the approximately 150 million married persons in the United States, 760 were murdered by their spouses in 2009. Four-fifths of these victims were women (FBI, Crime in America 2009).
Chance of dying in a car accident	1 in 80,000 Note34,172 fatal crashes in 2008
Chance of winning $¼ million in the Mega Millions	1 in 75,090 NoteOdds of getting a 5/5 (without the Mega Ball) on a single ticket: 1 in 3.9 million.
Chance of earning a PhD	1 in 1500Note"Exact numbers are impossible to come by, due to changes in death rates and graduations, but approximately 3% of Americans over the age of 25 hold a Doctoral or Ph.D. degree" (answers.com).
Chance of winning $1 in the Mega Millions	1 in 2 Note1/(74/75)52

Rob Cockerham, whose site I've often imitated but never equalled, produced an Incredibly Depressing Megamillions Lottery Calculator. And since I've written a few gambling emulators of my own, I thought it would be kinda cool to try my own lottery program. Of course I wouldn't copy Rob's simulator exactly; that would be wrong, and besides, it's in PhP. No, I would use javascript to save my creaky server, and I would add a few enhancements because I have the abundance of time that only the unemployed can enjoy.

So I wrote out a little simulator for the 6/49, because that's what we play up here. It took about two days.

Naturally, like all my other posted programs, it needed an introductory page. This would be called, creatively enough, gamble iv. And then I thought, wouldn't it be cool to add another program for calculating lottery odds? I'd done the math years ago, so it was a snap to put the algorithms into js. Add a pair of drop down lists for the different lottery types (such as 6/49) and now anyone could get the odds for winning the different payouts on any kind of lottery. The whole thing took a couple of days. I was pretty pleased with it. For a couple of days.

But many lotteries use bonus numbers and powerballs. I would be doing only half a job if I didn't include them, especially since the odds are so easy to calculate. The interface was another matter. That took another week.

And then I thought, wouldn't it be cool to have another drop list with different types of lotteries from Europe and the USA? Just select your lottery and watch the numbers show your chances of winning a 3/6 or a 0/54+Powerball. Of course I would need dynamic drop lists to show the changing categories, but that would also look cool. And I would need dynamic checkboxes, because not all lottery categories can win. But it would look cool. That took another week, give or take a week.

And then I thought, wouldn't it be cool to to also extend the lottery simulator to include other lotteries? It was hard-coded to play only the 6/49, but it shouldn't be too difficult to add more dynamic drop lists and an expanding number-selection grid, and put it all in a half-decent interface. It only took a couple of weeks, give or take a month.

There are a few differences between my simulator and Rob's. But the one identical feature is the bottom line. Both his and my programs show that, if you play the lotteries, you can expect to win back about 30% of your wager. All countries have the same math.

And now I think I'm finished with it. But every time I post it I find some nagging flaw, or think of some cool new feature to add. I guess that's how they developed Windows.

I just finished the latest version of the lottery simulator and sent it to an unsuspecting friend for beta testing. It took longer than expected to finish, like most programs--or at least the ones I write.

Is there anything less lucrative than a fake lottery? Except maybe a real one? I must have played 100,000 simulated lotteries and lost about 70,000 simulated dollars, so I suppose there's some solace that I didn't risk any serious coin.

Of course there are the weeks subtracted from my life, weeks in which I could have been earning some real money. But money is for buying fun, and if I had fun with this thing, then it was worth the opportunity cost. Until the beta testers uncover the bugs.

And now the Internet has been graced with one more lottery simulator. It won't be as popular as the real ones, and it won't earn me a dime, but at least I know a bit more about JavaScript. Now if I could just get someone to hire me.

Why would I waste time writing a program to calculate lottery odds when there are sites like the Lotter that already give this info? I'm glad I asked that for you.

As a matter of fact, I did use the Lotter to check if I was on the right track. And that's when I began to lose handfuls of hair.

Because this is what the Lotter and my program say are the odds for the 6/45 Irish Lotto:

	The Lotter		My program

6/6	1 in 8,145,000		1 in 8,145,060 

5/6+	1 in 1,357,510		1 in 1,357,510 

5/6	1 in 34,808		1 in 35,724 

4/6+	1 in 28,579		1 in 14,290

4/6	1 in 733		1 in 772 

3/6+	1 in 1,755		1 in 579 

3/6	1 in 45			1 in 48

Notice the discrepancies between 5/6 and below. At least one of us must be wrong.

Usually I check the lottery company's website, but lotto.ie didn't seem to have the odds anywhere, which somehow didn't surprise me. More numbers were crunched and more hair was lost, especially when the Lotter gave different odds for an identical 6/45 lottery in Austria.

After digging again at lotto.ie I found this 1.5 megabyte PDF booklet called "How to Play Lotto." And right on the second page it gives the 6/45 odds as:

So there. It's nice to be right for a change.