This Is the Lady You Want Buying Your Lottery Ticket
Winning the lottery is incredibly unlikely. I mean, that’s the whole point. If lots of people were winning, it would be one of the worst ideas of all time, and you’d just end up with the world’s weirdest version of universal basic income. In terms of mathematical specifics, keeping in mind the odds can change over different promotions and number of players, you’ve got about a 1 in 292,000,000 chance of winning. Try to convert that into a percentage chance, and the internet will start spitting out numbers with scientific notation, which is a dismal sign.
In other words, winning once is an incredible, impossible feat. But winning four times? That’s not even something the most dopamine-starved gambler’s brain would bet on.
Yet, one Texas woman has done exactly that. Joan R. Ginther has won the lottery jackpot four times over the course of her life. I think I’m most surprised that her legal name is that widely available, as that seems like the equivalent of putting out a classified ad as a victim in Thieves Quarterly. I would have long changed my name, bought a new nose, new hair, or both, and would be wherever the fuck the Maldives are.
Her winnings total up to almost $21 million, a sum that’s formidable, though less than it really should be in our sick economy. That’s maybe one, two generations of wealth at best, especially after taxes.
I wish there was some fascinating explanation for how she did it, but by the nature of the lottery, there really isn’t. She’s lucky it can’t be explained too, since if it could, she’d probably be in jail. Honestly, even if this is nothing but pure luck as claimed, I’m still surprised she’s not stuck in a Magneto-style plastic jail at some CIA black site with enough electrodes on her to make a test monkey jealous.
I’m going to go ahead and assume she’s one of the few lottery winners who's still financially stable, given that even if she blew through her first three winnings, she’d have a better grasp of personal finance by the time the fourth jackpot rolled in. If not, I’d suggest she set up some sort of throne and charge a fee to lay hands on other lottery hopefuls’ tickets, Pope-style.
