fortune cookie led to a lottery win ...

there's a folklore about how fortune cookies have led to people winning lotteries and other fortunes, but has this actually happened?

the answer is ... yes!

according to snopes, this occurred during the march 30, 2005 powerball drawing (usa).

although only one player won the $13.8 million jackpot, there were 110 people who claimed the second prize for matching the first five of the six numbers drawn! this second prize was either $100,000 or $500,000, depending on if the entrant paid the extra dollar for multiple wins (power play option).

powerball officials suspected fraud, since usually only four or five second prize winners are recorded, not 110!

however, there was no fraud in this situation. the winning numbers were recommended by a fortune cookie manufactured in queens, ny, a combination including the 1st five correct digits: the 22, 28, 32, 33, and 39. the last number recommended was 40, rather than the winning number of 42 (the red powerball number).

powerball officials repeatedly heard that the second prize winners had gotten the combination from a fortune cookie, & an additional confirmation of the claim came from the lottery tickets themselves: nearly all of them listed "40" (the final of the six numbers given on the fortune cookie slips) as the powerball number, .



that wasn't the first time fortune cookies led to correct lottery combinations! also according to snopes, a decade earlier, exactly on march 25, 1995, two of the three winners who split a $4 million lotto texas jackpot had used numbers suggested by a slip of paper from a fortune cookie, & to make that even weirder, the "fortune" made arrangements so that the two lucky persons were wife & husband!

scotty turnbull purchased his ticket in mission, texas, at united drive in, later that day, wife barbara turnbull bought a batch of tickets at that same shop, with one of the tickets purchased also bearing, as hes husband, the cookie's recommended digits that were 10, 24, 27, 29, 40, and 46.

the story doesn't tell though if there were two different cookies or if scotty & barbara got he numbers from the same slip of paper ...

ok I'm ready! shoot dammit!!!

this story is one of the reactions one-second taser burst ... got, taserman story was related thousands of times & might be a bogus (not my opiniong though), but I think this one is real and original, and it's funny too (& crazy of course), it's related by manfred sideous on outbreak [toxin] forum, now, place to it ...

Some years ago me and all my buddies bought paintball guns. We were wanting to try somthing new we could all do together. So we buy them and cart them back to my buddies house and greedily rip open the packages and assemble everything. None of us ever shooting a paintball gun or be hit by one knew if they actually hurt to get hit by.

So we start prodding each other to see who will take the role as guinea pig. Finnally my pal Bob steps up (as he thinks they wont hurt much). So he goes and stands over at the wall removing his shirt so it wouldnt get paint on it. He faces the wall and puts his hands over his ears. Well by now we are all pretty eager to shoot or guns and we never really worked it out on who was going to take the test shots against him. So anyway were all fooling with our guns when he yells " OK IM READY SHOOT DAMMIT" OMG that was the wrong thing to say. All of us 4 (not including Bob on the wall) Opened fire with a hail of paintballs a mere 10 foot from him. Before I realised everyone else has also fired I must have squeezed the trigger 3-4 times. Im thinking to myself " O poor Bob O poor Bob hes gonna be pissed".

I swear the first paintball hits him dead center in the back on the spine. All you can see is paint splattering on his back Bob cussing and yelling and him dropping like a rock to the ground. After the first F * U * * * was yelled out everyone stopped firing. Bob is cussing and yelling and cussing more I think he used every cussword in the book and told us he would kill us all. At this point were all laughing so hard some of us are on the ground laughing and my buddy larry is laughing so hard he pees his pants ( yeah larry did that from time to time).

So after we all get control of ourselves we get Bob up and take him in the house so he can shower us and get the paint off him. When he came out of the shower thats when it hit us we felt so bad. Bob had about 15 2inch round welps on his back and they were starting to bruise and blister badly. LOL poor guy.

checkout discussion here

welcome to cursed club member n° three

if you didn't read the post about cursed club member 02, check it out here: welcome to cursed club member n° two

now what happened next?

what I didn't say is that the so called wizard was banned from the forum I'm moderating for 14 days, as they passed, now he's unbanned, at least in theory, because what happened is, just few hours before or after that, or maybe few minutes, seconds & maybe in the same moment (why not?), what happened is he suffered from the same curse I & member 02 got!! scary huh? & weired coincidence if you don't believe in those things

here's a quote of a post of him in his own forum:

all members read please very important

hello Dear Freinds...
Iam So sorry iam sorry again
iam very very ill i cant open the internet but i open and make this theard coz i know many ppl will say ***** is scammer ,, please wait for me only 2 days i'll back :( and make all paymnets and akll bounss
so please wait for me i have a good suprises for my members please wait
i hope i come better soon:(
please dont say ***** scammer only 2 days maybe less but no more thanks.
*****

& that post is from 06/03/2007, & there are no changes till now ...

some theories

don't know, what came to my mind was maybe his spells suffered from a bug because the reason for cursing me had vanished, so they returned against him ...

if we leave sorcery, curse & wizards theories, & say the strange timing for his unbanishment from my moderated forum & his banishment from the whole internet, was a coincidence, then a second theory would be maybe he hired some online racketeers to ban me & member n°2 (don't know how they're able to) then he didn't pay so they did the same to him ... I like this theory! :D

about me, things are a bit better but I'm still having troubles, and for most of them I only found temporary ways to work around using proxies & other tricks, but I'm pretty sure cursed club member n°3 will have much more trouble to find similar ways & I don't feel sorry for him at all!

... to be continued

coming out insurance: be ready to get a gay child!

if you're a parent in the united states, you have 1 chance out of 10 your baby will turn gay, and as gay children are known to be expensive, coa or the "coming out insurance" is a solution for you to avoid any unpleasant surprises, coa will reimburse any "gay related expenses", check out the commercial!

the fabulous destiny of the taserman story

I decided here to relate how I came to post the taserman story, what happened after that then some things I discovered later ...

the reason is the extraordinary success this story got (at least for me) a success I didn't expect at all (below are the details) ..

I first saw the story on statcounter forum in a thread named ignore the naughty words..... it's too good not to share., it was pleasant (I mean great!) so I decided to post it here but unlike for my other posts, I did nothing to promote it on digg & similar places because it was not my work.

only yesterday I submited some of my links to boing boing, to be honest I've never heard of them before & didn't know it was that popular, but half an hour later ... "HOLY MOTHER ..WEAPONS OF MASS DESTRUCTION...@!@$$!%!@*!!!"

checking my statcounter stats I realized the traffic to my blog was soaring! 400 visitors then 1000, I looked for the place they were coming from & found it was this:
man zaps self with taser to test it, regrets doing so

by the end of yesterday according to statcounter, 6058 people had read the story! and the time I'm typing this 956 others added ... visitors are not coming from boing boing alone because now 10s of forums & blogs are linking to it, even a forum in french & another one in hebrew!!

what about the story itself?

1st of all I laughed when I saw boing boing article starting "Mumu bought a 100,000-volt pocket-sized taser as a gift for his wife ...", that's cool but fortunately I had specified it didn't happen to me ...

to have an idea about the age of story, the thread on statcounter forum was posted on 08-10-2006, then I found an older blog post (feb. 2006) when I tried to submit the story to digg (yes, after seeing the great success I couldn't resist, lol!) ... finally I read snopes article mentioned in brian comment below. ;) according to snopes, it has good chances to be an urban legend

quote:

Origins: This Stun gun story about a protective husband trying out his wife's taser upon himself to ascertain its ability to take out a mugger first appeared on the Internet in July 2004. For now its author is unknown to us, leaving the question of "But is it a true story?" up in the air.

This same narrative has landed in the snopes.com inbox numerous times, often altered by small textual differences, such as variations in the storyteller's name (Art, Earl, Tommy, J.J., Clem, Mike), his wife's name (Toni, Kelly, Gisele, Melanie, Gerry, Kathy), the anniversary (18th, 22nd, 30th, 36th, or just "our anniversary"), and even the name of the shop where the item was purchased (Larry's Pistol and Pawn [with or without the "Shop"] or Ski's Pistol and Pawn Shop). In some e-mails the yarn is augmented by one of two endings ... followed by the closing salutation of "Still in shock," a simultaneous use of the literal and figurative ...

full article

I would also mention some of things I came to find, some serious articles or discussions starting around taserman story:

whose logic? which rationality? on acma's random thought site
when criminals will start using tasers on global affairs forum

also this article on a women got tasered by the police:

woman gets tasered on hiredmonkey


back to the my post & the readers it got, I'm just amazed how many times success is all about luck, you may work hard for something but get rewarded for something else you did just for fun, although I agree taserman story is obviously better than my other entries ...

what's crazy too is the traffic a site like boing boing gets, if they sent me over 6000 readers in few hours, how many visitors they have?!

weird associations from google ads

you may know about the latest french vote to elect the new president, nicolas sarkozy was chosen president of france on may 6h 2007.

but the photo above (it's from a blog) was taken the day of elections 1st round on april 22th, the percentage you see is not the final result as nicolas sarkozy won 31 % of the vote, anyways that does not import me (if it's important to you check out the details here).

what imports me are the associations google ads made with the "sarkozy" word

the 1st ad above says:

taser france
official site neutralize without hurting

what you have to know, is that nicolas sarkozy armed the french police with tasers when he was interior minister, he was very criticized because of that, as it seems the same gadgets used in usa caused the death of 10s of people ...

now the 2nd ad, it says:

sarkozy
play & win the green card & go to live in the united states

you may agree this one is even weirder than the first, just imagine the president of france (although he wasn't yet) helping people to quit france! the only explanation I could find to that ad, is that sarkozy is fascinated by the united states, its liberal system but also the way american politicians behave as if they were hollywood stars ...

I wonder if there are real subliminal messages google ads wanted to transmit, if so what they are?

I also wonder what sort of ads will I get on this page ...

it's also strange I posted twice stories with tasers in them isn't it?

the one-second taser burst ...

not mine but a hilarious story! this one is really not to be missed! I won't make any comment, just will let you have some good moment with it & highlight the passages that made me laugh most, place to it ...

Only A Guy Would Do This

Last weekend I saw something at Larry's Pistol & Pawn Shop that sparked my interest. The occasion was our 22nd anniversary and I was looking for a little something special for my wife, Toni. What I came across was a
100,000-volt, pocket/purse-sized taser. The effects of the taser were supposed to be short lived, with no long-term adverse effect on the assailant, allowing her adequate time to retreat to safety... WAY TOO COOL!

Long story short, I bought the device and brought it home. I loaded two triple-A batteries in the darn thing and pushed the button. Nothing! I was disappointed. I learned, however, that if I pushed the button AND pressed it against a metal surface at the same time; I'd get the blue arch of electricity darting back and forth between the prongs. Awesome!!! (Unfortunately, I have yet to explain to Toni what that burn spot is on the face of her microwave).

Okay, so I was home alone with this new toy, thinking to myself that it couldn't be all that bad with only two little triple-A batteries... Right?

There I sat in my recliner, my cat Gracie looking on intently (trusting little soul) while I was reading the directions and thinking that I really needed to try this thing out on a flesh & blood moving target. I must admit I thought about zapping Gracie (for a fraction of a second) but thought better of it. She is such a sweet cat. But, if I was going to give this thing to my wife to protect herself against a mugger, I did want some assurance that it would work as advertised. Am I wrong?

So, there I sat in a pair of shorts and a tank top with my reading glasses perched delicately on the bridge of my nose, directions in one hand, and taser in the other. The directions said that a one-second burst would shock and disorient your assailant; a two-second burst was supposed to cause muscle spasms and a major loss of bodily control; a three-second burst would purportedly make your assailant flop on the ground like a fish out of water. Any burst longer than three seconds would be wasting the batteries.

All the while I'm looking at this little device measuring about 5" long, less than 3/4 inch in circumference, (pretty cute really and loaded with two itsy, bitsy triple-A batteries) thinking to myself, "No possible waaay!"

What happened next is almost beyond description, but I'll do my best.....I'm sitting there alone, Gracie looking on with her head cocked to one side as if to say, "Don't do it Master." Reasoning that a one-second burst from such a tiny little ole thing couldn't hurt all that bad....I decided to give myself a one-second burst just for the heck of it. I touched the prongs to my naked thigh, pushed the button, and ... HOLY MOTHER ..WEAPONS OF MASS DESTRUCTION...@!@$$!%!@*!!!

I'm pretty sure Jessie Ventura ran in through the side door, picked me up in the recliner, then body slammed us both on the carpet, over and over and over again. I vaguely recall waking up on my side in the fetal position, with tears in my eyes, body soaking wet, both nipples on fire, testicles nowhere to be found, my left arm tucked under my body in the oddest position, and tingling in my legs. The cat was standing over me making meowing sounds I had never heard before, licking my face, undoubtedly thinking to herself, "Do it again, do it again!"

Note: If you ever feel compelled to "mug" yourself with a taser, one note of caution: there is no such thing as a one-second burst when you zap yourself. You will not let go of that thing until it is dislodged from your hand by a violent thrashing about on the floor. A three-second burst would be considered conservative.

SON-OF-A-..... That hurt like h...l!!!

A minute or so later (I can't be sure, since time was a relative thing at that point), I collected my wits (what little I had left), sat up and surveyed the landscape. My bent reading glasses were on the mantel of the fireplace. How did they up get there??? My triceps, right thigh and both nipples were still twitching. My face felt like it had been shot up with Novocain, and my bottom lip weighed 88 lbs. I'm still looking for my testicles? I'm offering a significant reward for their safe return.


edit:

want to know all about taserman story? read this post:
the fabulous destiny of the taserman story