Into All That

This story on MSNBC blipped my weirdness radar from three sites away: a 16-year-old girl was struck by lightning, survived, and then won the lottery the next day. I mean, wow. What are the odds? I don’t know about lightning, but I did do a little legwork tracking down the odds of being hit by a meteor not terribly long ago, and figure meteor, lighting, what’s the diff?

And then… what gives? Twenty dollars? Twenty? I mean, I’m glad yound Miss Helsel is okay and all, but, come on. Extrapolating from these statistics I found on Them Internets (i.e., inarguable facts) some two thousand people are struck by lightning every year. Which isn’t a lot, given the current world population approaching 6 billion, but still too many for a list a recent lightning victims to be much of a draw in USA Today. And the number of people that win twenty-dollar bills every day? That’s another of those numbers I can’t really hold in my head. in Must’ve been a slow news day at MSNBC.

Yep. I can relate.