Friday
February 15, 2002
Sharing The Wealth
David has decided that when he wins the two hundred million dollar California State Lottery, tomorrow night, he's going to split it with the denizens of his beloved Super Fun Time message boards.
"Yes, Dear Reader," he grandly announced on his board yesterday, "we're going to BUY A SUPERFUNTIME LOTTERY TICKET. If we win, we divide up the greenbacks,
and ALL OF YOU can have yourselves cryogenically preserved!" Today he posted the numbers from the ticket he'd purchased specifically for SFT.
So far the SFT people are not exactly knocking each other over, running to take him up on his offer. Maybe they think he's yanking their chain. Maybe they're afraid to get their hopes up. Maybe they're troubled by his plan to use his lottery winnings to have his head cryogenically frozen and reattached to a cloned, twenty-one-year-old version of his body. ["... Since I'll be about sixty-five years old, I'll ALSO be able to collect social security, which will really piss people off! I'll be twenty-one, retired, collecting Social Security ... AND richer than Croesus!"]
We figure they'll come around, though, when those million-dollar checks start landing in their mailboxes.
In the meanwhile, this has prompted the obligatory [but always amusing] discussion, here in the SecraTerri/Ю僱êrvØ¡ household, all about How We Would Spend The Money. What if the other lottery ticket -- the non-Super-Fun-Time ticket we purchased just for us -- turns out to be the big moneymaker? What would we do with our sudden fortune? We agree on the obvious stuff, of course: dumping most of it back into investments ... continuing our program of aggressive debt relief ... sending our assorted progeny to college [whether they like it or not, dammit] ... assisting our favorite charities [and perhaps a few not-so-favorite charities, just for karmic balance]. We would replace the ailing Subaru. We would buy that crumbling Victorian, over on Central Avenue, and paint it Day-Glo Tangerine. We would do nice stuff for our parents.
We would finally pay our Blockbuster fines.
But we both have a list of other, less-obvious things we could do with two hundred million dollars. While his list includes stuff like Siberian Tiger fur pajamas, gold leaf toilet paper, blowing up all available copies of "Fireball Forward," and building a life-sized replica of Mount Rushmore entirely out of Charmin ["Mount Flushmore"] ... *my* list is a little more practical and down-to-earth, I believe.
See if you don't agree:
- I've always wanted to travel ... so I think that when we win the two hundred million bucks tomorrow, David and I will immediately embark on a cross-country tour of the United States. Our goal: to sample Honey BBQ Wings at every single KFC restaurant in the country. As soon as we've finished loading up on sodium, grease, sugar and deep-fried chicken pimples at one restaurant, we'll hop onto our custom-built tandem bicycle and ride to the next location ... until we've made our way from The West Coast all the way over to That Other Coast. [Losing and gaining the same ten pounds a hundred times, along the way.]
- I would make talking in a movie theater a felony.
- I would hire a fulltime *FootNotes* editorial assistant whose only job function is to make sure I've properly reconfigured my "Next" and my "Previous" links whenever I post a new entry. I might also ask her to tidy up the archives, verify the links in my notify messages, and fetch me some coffee occasionally.
- I would have The Main Marketing Guy transferred to our Bodie, CA office.
- I would build a world-class drug and alcohol rehab facility, combining state-of-the-art medical technology, recovery education services, round-the-clock supervision and a staff of crackerjack physicians, therapists, nutritionists, fitness experts and after-care counselors ... including Robert Downey, Jr. And then the only patient I would admit would be Daughter #2.
- I would work tirelessly to find a cure for middle-aged acne.
- I would build an exact replica of my childhood home ... right down to the white picket fence, the chenille daisy-print bedspread on my bed, the two wormy apple trees in the backyard and the fourteen dollars in embezzled Girl Scout cookie money I buried in Grandpa's garden.
- I would market my idea for caffeinated envelope flaps.
- I would have all of my favorite movies filmed over again ... with alternate endings. This time around, Alice wouldn't step off that cliff, Lara & Yuri would live happily ever after, and Dorothy would decide to stay in Oz [which looks like one HELL of a more *colorful* place to live than that stoopid chicken farm, forcryingoutloud].
- I would invite all of the 1972-73 Sunset Junior High School Pep Club Officers to a "luau" on my private South Seas island ... and then I would force them to divide up into tribes, eat live pupating mealybugs, walk around in their bathing suits all day on national television, and eventually vote each other off the island, one by one. The *winner* receives a million dollars' worth of black bobby sox.
And last but not least ...
- ... *FootNotes: The Movie* would finally become a reality, with Ron Howard directing [as long as he keeps his baseball cap on, OK?], soundtrack provided by Steven Rappaport ... and the part of Young Secra played by The Olsen Twins.
See what I mean? My stuff is infinitely more do-able ... AND I'd probably still have a couple thousand million to share with my Notify List people.
Have a great weekend, everybody!
