Author: eightbeer_shakespeare@outlook.com

This is a blog I started writing about six months ago.  It’s based on a game theory situation that has real world implications.  Despite the simplicity of the game, there are computer programs written to play the game, and tournaments and strategies invented to excel at it.  The blog wasn’t going very smoothly and I feel that the point I was trying to make is bigger than the sum of my explanation and examples.  I have thought about this idea every day, and I have kept trying to edit it and dress it up in my head ever since.  Time has expired, and now I will toss it out, three quarters baked, but at least out of my hair for now.

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Prisoner’s Dilemma is a very simple game.  The idea is that two gangsters (or better yet, petty criminals who won’t have to fear being a snitch) have been arrested and put in separate rooms where they can’t communicate with each other.  The cops are pretty sure they did a big robbery (or any crime, doesn’t matter) but they can’t prove it.  Without a confession or one gangster testifying against his accomplice, the cops can only implicate them with a smaller crime.  The first gangster can either keep quiet and maintain his innocence or tell the police it was all the other guy’s doing.  The other criminal has the same two options.   So if the first criminal says he’s innocent while his accomplish tells the cops criminal #1 did the crime, then criminal #1 goes to jail for 20 years and the second criminal goes free.  If the exact opposite is true, criminal #2 goes to jail for 20 years and the first guy goes home.  If they both finger each other, they will both go to jail for 10 years.  And if they both keep quiet and claim innocence, they both get charged with the lesser crime and go to jail for two years.

The main point of this scenario is that, while cooperation seems like the right idea, no matter what the other guy tells the cops, each criminal gets a shorter sentence by ratting his buddy out.

You rat, your friend keeps quiet: go free

You rat, your friend rats: 10 years

You keep quiet, your friend keeps quiet: 2 years
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You keep quiet, your friend rats: 20 years

Where Prisoner’s Dilemma gets interesting is in its real world applications.  Nuclear war between the Soviet Union and the USA was one example.  Neither side could start a nuclear war because they had to fear their enemy would live and retaliate.  If either side could have guaranteed they would destroy the other, they would have done it, but they both kept missiles in hidden, untraceable places the other couldn’t be sure they’d hit.  So they spent 40 years or so cooperating.

Another example where it is better to cheat, a la PD, is steroid use in sports.  If you take steroids you will either be superior to your honest opponent, or even with a dishonest one.  Not taking steroids will assure you will not be superior, regardless of whether your opponent cheats or not.

In some cases, it’s better to be bad as long as you are in the minority.  Aggressive, impatient drivers will get where they’re going faster than most people, but only as long as only a few people drive that way.  They say if everyone shopped at Walmart, all the local stores in your town would go bankrupt, and service workers would all get minimum wage.  But you go there to save a few bucks and hope that enough other people are willing to shop elsewhere to keep the local economy moving along.

In these examples and many more, cooperating is the most common result, but cheating or choosing the non-cooperative option gets you farther ahead, just like Prisoner’s Dilemma.  Another bonus for the selective cheat is that women prefer liars and cheats to honest people, on a primitive level, because it is seen as a survival trait to be passed on to their offspring.  Being a poor schmuck stuck in traffic is appealing to no one.

 

Well, it’s Saturday night and I find myself alone at home with only the radio and a little herd of Mooseheads (a rustic beer brand from New Brunswick) to keep me company.  It is time again to ramble about nothing much to no one in particular.

In the on-going roller coaster ride that is our empty nest/adult children at home status, it looks like the last one is getting ready to fly away again.  She and her 21 month old toddler are leaving to go occupy a basement suite in Aldergrove, 15 minutes away.  This time I’m not excited to see them go.  Having a wobbly, babbling little guy at my feet has kind of grown on me.  I love all my grandchildren, and they all have totally distinct, interesting personalities, and I think of them and miss them and look forward to spending time with them all.  But the one who lived here, Kingston, whose birth I noted in a blog in September 2017, has become my little day to day buddy.  I hasten to stress that this doesn’t make him my favourite, but it does make him a part of my daily home life.  The last time I got greeted home every day from work by a midget with a big smile was when my son was that age 32 years ago or so.  Oh well, they wont be far away and I will still see them often.

The Toronto Raptors are on the brink of winning the NBA championship, and oh lord how I have tried to be excited by it.  I am not.  I have taken to watching the last five minutes or so of each game to absorb all the crucial, tense moments of the battle.  Invariably I find myself switching channels to watch a Simpsons episode from 2008 or Wheel of Fortune.  Sure, I go back and forth in case something of competitive interest occurs, but it rarely does.  I guess I’m just not a connoisseur of the sport.  And this is me watching the final moments of an NBA Finals game.  Think back to some mid winter Tuesday with two mediocre teams squaring off, and it’s early on and the score is 8-6, on its way to 100-96, and oh my god I doubt you have enough money in your pocket right now to make me watch.  If that game was happening across the street and admission was free, I’d probably shut my curtains.

The Stanley Cup Finals are on now, too, and while I obsess about hockey in general, it is a match up of one team I have zero interest in versus a team I actively dislike.  So far the team I don’t give a rip about, St Louis, has a 3-2 series lead and could end it tomorrow.  The last game did provide some comedy, as the Blues scored the winning goal after getting away with a blatant un-called trip, and the Boston Bruin’s president Cam Neely had a childish tantrum which the cameras caught and replayed many times.  The game was delayed for several minutes while the ice crew used snow shovels to clear the garbage off the ice, thrown by the seething mob.  The Boston fans, despite seeing their home teams win championships in every major sport repeatedly over the last decade or so, still manage to be angry with violent tendencies.  As the Bostonians file into the arena they are scanned for weapons with a metal detector, but they get around that by bringing in glass marbles to throw if they get provoked.  In baseball, the fans have been known to throw batteries at the opposing outfielders.  People wearing jerseys or hats from the visiting team are often physically assaulted, and being subjected to verbal assault is guaranteed.  Even their former anthem singer Rene Rancourt used to finish his patriotic song with a violent gesture of pulling out the still beating heart of his sporting enemy with an intense, teeth-clenched grimace.  YouTube it!   Yet, if someone tugs a little at the sweater of one of their heroes, the whole crowd goes into a frenzy of injustice.  Tears flow, chants start, marbles fly.  I just want it to end in St Louis’ favour – the sooner the better.
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Well the Mooseheads are beckoning, so I’ll quit ranting now.  Summer is starting any minute now, so things are looking up.  Hockey and basketball are winter distractions and it’s time for them to go away for a while.  Time to go outside and eat meat cooked on a fire.  Time to strip down and read a book in the shade.  Time to watch day slip into starry night with a beer in hand.

I haven’t written anything in a while, as I hope at least someone noticed.  I have been reading a lot though, and a lot of what I’ve read makes me nuts.

We like to think here in Canada that we are doing better as a society than our noisy neighbours to the south, but sometimes I wonder.  In their election in 2016, social media was full of memes and posts nudging voters to be angry and move toward the political right, ie vote for Trump.  The conjecture is that many of these posts were made by the Russians and that it was interference from a foreign country.  We have an election coming up in the fall, and I have seen dozens of posts on Facebook about how badly Canada is doing, how repressive the current government is, how our Prime Minister is a chicken/spoiled brat/wiener who has ruined the country etc.  Most of the time I scroll by, in the interest of preserving my sanity, but every so often I research the subject and find that it is nearly always false.

Every time I correct the facts, I get verbally assaulted for defending Trudeau and all his sins.  Fact is, I never defend him, and if someone suggests this or that about him as an opinion, I let it go.  Opinions are fine, but telling lies to sway others’ opinions is not.  I suppose if I saw a post that told some huge half truths about Andrew Scheer I would stop and correct them, too, but I never see such a thing.  The fact is that every single meme and post that is breathlessly angry and full of exaggerations comes from the right side of centre, aiming at the political left.   It is the same modus operandi and political slant that the Americans dealt with three years ago.  Do these posts originate in Russia too?  I saw warnings early on that they might interfere here, but I haven’t seen anyone connect this wave of bullshit to them yet.  Key word: yet.

A few examples of the crap I have wrestled with the pigs over:

-The Liberal government has lost its moral authority to govern based on the SNC-Lavalin scandal and the five, count ’em, five, times they have been investigated for ethics violations.  I had to remind the torch wielding mob that their hero Stephen Harper abused his power 70 times, which got me called some choice names until I actually posted all 70 for their enjoyment.

-A meme of an angry guy who writes on his tax return that millions of illegal immigrants, poor people in far away places and various criminals and drug addicts are his deductible dependents.  I crunched the numbers and found out that his numbers were hugely inflated.  Also we give less to foreign aid than we did when Harper was PM, and in fact we give the least per capita of any developed country.  Then I mentioned that Angry Meme Guy’s biggest dependents were, by far, seniors and veterans which he should be proud to support.
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-A super right wing Christian newsletter says Canada is forbidding Christians from demonstrating, and it showed a picture of that commie Trudeau.  I didn’t really set out to defend the guy, but what the site was referring to is a new piece of legislature in Ontario that prevents people with hate agendas to gather and spout nonsense. (Funny the Christians think that applies to them, isn’t it?) Doug Ford’s government came up with that Bill, but he’s conservative like they are, so they don’t want to cast him in a bad light.  Why not just post a picture of Trudeau so the person scrolling by gets another negative image of him?

-The price of gas is super high now because of the Carbon Tax, so we need to get a new government to save us from this family-killing tax.  Fact is, since 2012 the Carbon Tax has gone up 2.2 cents per litre.  I drive 112 km a day to work and back, so I figure it is bringing poverty my way at about a dollar a week.  I sure hope I can hold on!  Besides Canada is only producing 1.6% of the world’s carbon pollution, so why do we bother?  Well, that makes us the third worst polluters in the world – our carbon emissions are more than twice the per capita rate of China – so there’s that to think about.

If all these memes and posts were true, changing governments would be a great idea.  My fear is that there will be a lot of people who will vote based on this crap, and won’t bother to question anything.  Maybe we as a society are complacent about our information, assuming if it’s published it must be true.  We should either teach critical thinking or have some resource or watchdog to keep ‘facts’ factual.

I’m a little disenchanted with the government too, to be honest.  If someone comes along with something other than mudslinging and baloney, I am willing to listen.  But if your campaign strategy is character assassinations of your rivals, then no thanks.  Every candidate running must have ideas of what they’ll do when they get elected, why not spend a few advertising dollars on telling us what they are?  Rampant negativity is what got everyone sick of Harper in the end.  He wasn’t doing a terrible job, but his campaign was nothing but attack ads, which I read afterward had everyone tuning him out.

Just take this stuff with a grain of salt and don’t be afraid to do some research if the facts seem a little over the top.  Think of it as a boil water advisory for your mind.  I’d almost welcome a chance to be fair and defend Andrew Scheer and Jagmeet Singh, but so far I haven’t encountered any angry hordes calling for their heads.

I wrote a story about being mentally blank a while ago, mostly as it pertained to the interview I took to get my current job.  Looking back, it was the beginning of something larger and scarier.  For the next six weeks or so after that interview, I continued to get less and less focused.  I was leaving things laying around, forgetting conversations I had just had, stuff like that.  I once tried to get out of the car but couldn’t because my seat belt was still done up.  If I put my keys in my pocket, I would basically do the Macarena where I had to stick my hand in every pocket twice to find them.  Just before Christmas it got to its worse point.  One morning I got to work and left the interior light on in my car and wandered off into the office.  Of course, I needed a jump start after my shift.  Then the next day I did almost exactly the same thing with my work truck and needed a jump, too.  Then I threw away my work ID badge and fob by accident.  I was frustrated, embarrassed and anxious.  What was going on?  Was I starting to suffer from Alzheimer’s?  Few things in this world scare the crap out of me like dementia.

I was pleased to see that one of the early signs of Alzheimer’s was falling down frequently, which I didn’t have.  I had some of the other symptoms, but not all of them.  I researched side effects of the medicine I take for diabetes and found that the only one that listed “confusion, memory problems and trouble concentrating” was glyburide.  Glyburide is an old drug, developed in the mid 1960’s, that stimulates insulin production.   Coincidentally, not long before this I took a test to see how much insulin my body was producing, and it turns out it was producing a normal amount.  My diabetes, according to the test, was due to insulin resistance.  The question was, did I produce enough insulin to give up taking the drug?

Over Christmas I decided to take a little holiday from glyburide.  Over the ten or so days off I watched in horror as my blood sugar went from 7 or 8 mmol/l, which is high but not crazy, to the 15-16 range, then up to 25-26 , then finally so high my monitor only read HI without giving a number.  Normal blood sugar should be between 4 and 6.  After a week or so I was forced to start taking my brain food again, but my mind was a lot clearer from being off it a while.
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And then… a few weeks later I lost my ID badge and fob again.  This time it might just have been a one time thing, as it was an isolated incident, so far.  Next month I see my doctor again, and this time she might prescribe me insulin like she’s been threatening, and it may mean I can do away with glyburide for good.

And then, god willing, I can get back to writing stuff and getting through the day without doing anything stupid.

Well it’s time to tally up the BC 50/50 winnings from the little villages that do the winning.  I had a question for the Lottery Corporation, and I only got an answer from them yesterday morning, which is why this took a week to get started on.  In the last six months of 2018, the village with the big winnings was Pemberton, winning almost $23,000 more than Burns Lake in the same period.  In fact, the gap is actually even wider, but I started out by only counting wins made at the Pemberton Petro Can gas station.  It doesn’t change much, though, as almost all of the town’s winning tickets were bought there, with a couple wins from the Frontier Pharmacy not included.  For the whole year, Burns Lake was still the champ, but it was close.  First, the facts:

July:  Burns Lake won 8 draws, $25,109.50, Pemberton 6 wins, $17,306

August:  Burns Lake 3 wins, $11,380.50, Pemberton 4 wins, $13,732

September: Burns Lake only 2 wins, $4,210.50, Pemberton 7 wins for $19,770.50

October: Burns Lake 3 wins, $5667, Pemberton 6 wins, $23,272.50

November: BL 9 wins, $44,985.50, Pemberton 8 wins, $43,496

December: both towns must have been on holidays after all the money they won in November, as each town only won one draw, BL for $6219 and Pemberton for $2732.50.

Total for the six months: Burns Lake 26 wins for $97,572, Pemberton 32 wins for $120,309.50.

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Here is the info that the BC Lottery Corp sent me in response to my question about how much the average 50/50 win is and how it has increased since its inception.  No matter what I do, I can’t seem to make it any clearer.  It looks great until it gets inserted into this story.

 

If your best spectacles aren’t handy, it says the average win has doubled in the last four years.

The BC 50/50 started a couple days before Halloween 2012.  It replaced the Sportsfunder 50/50 that used to draw every half an hour, and at off peak times often had prizes of $10 or less.  I won it a couple times, $33 once and I think $11 another time, when I had to fish my ticket out of the trash at the pub.  The BC 50/50 only had four draws a day, so the prize was much higher, even at the beginning it was usually over $800, even in the slowest times.  Oh, except for the first time I won it when it was nearly at its lowest ever point, $671.50.

The first year or so, the little town that was winning like crazy was Fort St James, population 1700.  They won like Burns Lake for a while, then they petered out.  Even at the start it was dominated by small towns and obscure gas stations.  Maybe someone moved from Fort St James to Burns Lake around 2015?  Of the larger cities only Kamloops and Victoria seem to win their share.  If Vancouver, Surrey or Burnaby supported this lottery the way Burns Lake and Pemberton do, the prizes would be huge.

 

Fall has got to be my least favourite season.  The pretty colours?  The dropping temperatures?  Those are all signs of nature dropping dead before our eyes.  Sure, it is a cycle, and sooner or mostly later it bounces back and blooms and produces tasty food again.  But still, I find it mildly depressing to witness.  Add to that the fact I work outside and have an hour drive wrapped around my day at work like a commuter sandwich.  These days I leave in the dark and come home in the dark.  Golf is a distant memory, as is sitting on the patio with a beer.  Some days I get a good soaking at work and have to stand under the hot shower for a while to thaw out my bones.

It’s a lousy backdrop, but it’s almost ready to give way to winter, and life continues to be mostly happy and interesting despite what’s happening outside.  Hockey is in full swing, and already my favourite teams are in power nose dives heading for the bottom of the standings and oblivion, yet it still holds my interest for some reason.  I get to see a lot of some of my kids and their kids which is nearly always a good thing.  Christmas will be here in five weeks or so, and my birthday follows along 16 days after that.  By the time the last of the wrapping paper is being hauled away in the recycling, the days will already be getting longer.

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I wonder sometimes if my cat is happy.  She doesn’t associate with other cats.  At home she is chased around by a mini Frankenstein toddler who terrorizes her.  She hardly goes outside in the cold, dark or rain.  She doesn’t hunt or do crossword puzzles.  Mostly she sleeps and eats kibble and watches people from a safe distance with a scowl.  She likes me, however, and it is a definite mixed blessing.  Everywhere I go in the house, the cat is a few feet away, waiting for me to sit down so she can curl up on me.  Sometimes she heads off to sleep, other times she tears at me with her claws and purrs.  It is too much neediness for me.  I am patient with her, but I really wish she’d expand her horizons and claw someone else once in a while.  My day is long enough without having some love starved cat cling to me like the last chopper out of Saigon.  At Christmas we are lodging another cat for a couple weeks, and our cat will be distraught.  The other cat and our cat don’t get along, and the other cat bullies our cat.  It’s too bad they aren’t pals, but maybe she will be too distracted to follow me around for a few blissful days.

This summer I got a lesson in why weddings are so expensive and nerve wracking.  For weeks we trimmed, landscaped, hung lights and planned, shopped, built and fretted.  Then, when that was done, we undid what we had and re-landscaped, re-hung the lights and fretted some more.  For the most part it was my wife and I and the bride and groom to be – my son James and his fiancee Lindsey, but a couple times we had gatherings of friends and family to help.  The first such gathering was a disaster by any definition.  It poured rain when it hadn’t rained in weeks.  Then the next day, virtually everyone who had come over got sick with the flu.  No one actually did any yelling at us, but I feel there was a simmering anger out there from some people who, in some cases, missed several days of work.

We were watching the forecast nervously, as it changed back and forth in the week or so leading up to the big day, calling for sun then rain and sometimes one website would forecast one and another would contradict it.  Finally, with a few days to go, the sites all started to agree: it was going to rain, or at least be showery.  So we ordered up a 20′ x 40′ tent and redid the lighting yet again.  The end result was pretty impressive, I think.  We zap strapped rope lights in a big X over head inside the tent, which looked cool and threw lots of light.  We had the yard framed in curtains of lights in all the surrounding trees too.  For the ceremony, we built an 8′ x 8′ stage hung with a lacy curtain and footed with pleated gold fabric.  At the back of the stage were more lights which we turned on at dark.

It rained during the ceremony, which they say is a good omen: knots that are tied wet are tighter and harder to undo.  I felt bad for the maid of honour.  No doubt she spent a lot of time and possibly money to look as good as she did, then in the big moment all she could do was stand helplessly to the side of the stage and get rained on.  Someone did run over and hand her an umbrella, but she had absorbed a lot of rain by then.  My son got pretty choked up reading his vows.  I will never give him a hard time about it, because I couldn’t even go to the mike and say a speech for them.  Merely the thought of it choked me up.  I had to make do by writing a speech, which the other kids helped edit, and I stood far away and watched it read.  What a chicken!  Lucky I didn’t put out an eye with my feathers.  Years ago, at my niece’s wedding, I was talked into speaking and what I said was so short and choppy my sister called it a haiku.

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The rest of the event went beautifully.  We ate, there were some touching speeches (the woman who lives directly behind us told us she was listening through the trees to the speeches and they got her crying), and then the drinking and socializing got going.  Everyone was on their best behaviour, and there were a few mismatches of personalities that could have clashed but didn’t.  It was a nice beginning to their lives together.

The next day we had to clean up a lot of stuff, most of it soggy and wet.  It was reminiscent of the aftermath of Woodstock, but thankfully on a much smaller scale.  But the keg was still half full, and there were lots of leftovers to eat, so things were still pretty good.

Well my big summer of major distractions is coming to an end.  It was a beautiful summer, lots of hot days and sunshine for many weeks on end, but it didn’t really turn out the way I expected on a couple of fronts.

First, our house didn’t sell.  We had the paperwork all signed and we were busy ignoring our household maintenance jobs because the house was going to get bulldozed anyway – why waste the time and money to paint?  The City of Abbotsford was in the process of making new rules for increasing density in old neighbourhoods like ours – while we were shopping for mansions and laughing off our chores – rules that would ban townhouses which is what our house was going to be replaced with.  The bright spot in this failure is that the new rules permit smaller lots, and now our lot can be subdivided into three properties instead of two.  At half a million per lot, we still could laugh away our work and shop for gaudy homes, but that is not happening any time soon.

The next failure was the test I was supposed to write.  The test is overseen by a body that certifies Water Operators, and they have decided, in their holy wisdom, that I don’t qualify to be a Water Operator.  In so doing, I have wasted  hours and hours studying that could have been used doing something interesting or productive.  The dominoes that fall in this chain reaction are that I don’t get hired full time at the City of Surrey, as the test is a prerequisite to being hired.  In turn they have to hire someone else, who in all probability will be some 22 year old who won’t know a water meter from an avocado but will have seniority over me and will one day be my boss.  It also means I continue getting older and nearer my retirement without a pension, which is the main perk of this job.  The people who denied me my test also withheld some of my money when they refunded me after they denied my application, as if the other problems weren’t enough joy.  Yes, this has me rather upset from several angles.  Surrey has appealed their decision, so it might not be over yet.  Still, my partner at work is retiring in five days, so I still might be beaten in the race to become the next person hired in my department.

You will get complete satisfaction from the medicine. http://appalachianmagazine.com/2017/01/06/2017-solar-eclipse-will-darken-kentucky-tenn-georgia-carolinas/ purchase generic levitra cheapest tadalafil 20mg Potent herbs in this herbal pill offers effective cure for involuntary ejaculation of semen. Some other important vitamin supplements include vitamin D and cleansing circulatory help. order cheap viagra 4. The drug purchase generic cialis appalachianmagazine.com ensures smooth, strong and hard erections during lovemaking. Preparations for the wedding are going well, I suppose.  Our house has never looked better inside or out.  Our yard is strung with overhead lights and surrounded by curtains of lights in every tree.  I built an eight foot square stage for the ceremony itself, draped with lace and gold fabric.  I will probably write about the wedding when the time comes (next week!) and maybe I will provide a few pictures.

This summer was also frustrating watching the news from the Big Circus down south.  Trump infuriates me daily.  He is a pig of a human, with no decency, compassion or diplomacy.  He has lied so many times about so many things that he often lies about other lies he has told and contradicts himself frequently.  But my main frustration with him is his portrayal of Canada as being something other than a loyal ally.  He has put tariffs on steel and aluminum for national security reasons.  Really?  We declared war on Japan before they did after Pearl Harbor.  He says the US can’t allow Chapter 19 in the NAFTA deal, which allows Canada to challenge them if they break the deal, because it interferes with their sovereignty.  However, they can insist that we do away with our supply management system without seeing it as interfering with our sovereignty.  They have already indicated that they intend to rig the new NAFTA deal in their favour, without any compromises.  Is that bargaining in good faith?  Absolutely not!  It’s like trading hockey cards with the schoolyard bully and hoping to get a fair shake.  He says Canada has been ripping off the US for decades because the old deal was so unfair to them.  Really?  Actually, in 1994, the first year the original free trade deal went into effect, Canada’s gross domestic product went down.  Then, because we loved the deal so much, we voted out the Progressive Conservative party that negotiated it, dropping them from 169 seats and a majority government to 2 (!) seats, and virtually destroyed the party which had been in Canada since Sir John A McDonald.  These are sure signs we’re not ripping you off.  That first deal was so bad for Canada that I offered to bet anyone that, in time, Brian Mulroney would be shown to be an American agent, as no one faithfully negotiating on our behalf would have come back with such a dud.  No one would take the bet. The original deal said the US had access to our water “in all naturally occurring forms,” a clause I sincerely hope we do away with this time.   Since that deal, they haven’t come to take our water, but it came close.  The story I heard is one year (2002?) there was a drought in the US Midwest and the farms were drying up.  The US Army Corps of Engineers came north with the intention of making a pipeline from Great Slave Lake to the American heartland, and there was nothing we could’ve done about it.  Luckily, it got raining again and the whole thing blew over, so to speak.

Anyways, that was my pent up rant from two months or so of not writing anything.  Trump is facing his day of reckoning soon, so I shouldn’t let him get me crazy.  All the other stuff is temporary too.  Onward to fall and the wedding!

After I got interviewed about the Burns Lake 50/50 business in April, the town went through a little dry spell in May.  I was worried that maybe the attention had upset the balance of things and that their great run of winning was coming to an end.

Ha!

As much as they won in 2017, they won even more so far this year.  Between January and June ’17, Burns Lake won the BC 50/50 30 times for a total of $86,697.  In the same period this year, they have won 47 times for a total of $136,560 – nearly $50,000 more.  In the last 12 months, over a quarter million has been won there. And another town of around the same size, Pemberton, has started winning at almost the same pace.  In fact, in two of the first six months of this year, the Pemberton Petro Can station won more than Burns Lake.

First, let’s break down the haul.

January they won 8 times for $21,395

February they won 11 times for $33,576

March was quiet with only 4 wins for $16,903
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April, when the attention came their way, they won 9 times for $23,919.50

May was atypically quiet, and was when I was thinking the bubble had burst, but they still won 5 times for $11,644

June was business as usual with 10 wins for $29,122.50.

The town has won about $755 per day so far this year, including days they didn’t win.  To win that much, they would have had to spend probably $1200 a day or more (it’s hard to know how much because spending more on a ticket increases your chances), which is astronomical for a town of only 2,000 people.

Meanwhile in Pemberton, the local Petro Canada station is selling winners galore now, too.  In both April and May that location won more than the town of Burns Lake.  The Petro Can sells nearly all the winning tickets in Pemberton, as there were only a few odd wins at the drug store to break up the monopoly.  The total for the first six months for them is $102,165.50.  While that is $34,000 short of Burns Lake, it is more than Burns Lake won last year in the same period.

Will any more small towns start spending wildly on the BC 50/50?  Powell River wins more than their share, too, but not crazily more – yet.  Strangely, Pemberton winning consistently didn’t eat into Burns Lake’s profits.  You’d expect with someone else racking up wins, they would be splitting their loot.  The answer to that, partially, seems to be that more is being spent overall, and the average prize has gone up considerably in the last couple years. When I first looked in on this, the average win was around $1600, now it is $2900.  Still these two towns must be buying tickets at a frenzied pace when compared to the rest of the province.  They combine for about 0.1% of the population and have won 10.6% of the draws, suggesting they are spending around 106 times more per capita than the average town.  And while the BC Lottery Corp doesn’t usually print 50/50 winners names from Burns Lake, they did  name and photograph a group who won large on the 649 lottery.

I don’t see me writing much in the next few months, as I am suddenly surrounded by big ugly distractions.  First, a developer came by and offered us way too much for our old house.  This has resulted in us suddenly having to think about getting a new house and moving and all the disruptive fun that goes along with it.  Also my son and his girlfriend are going to get married in about 10 weeks – in our back yard.  So along with the madness of being dislodged, we now have a yard to beautify and decorate and food and cake and seating arrangements etc. to obsess over.  Then, because nature abhors a vacuum, my supervisor at work has decided he wants me to take the Water Distribution Level 1 course, which wouldn’t be that big a deal except he wants me to challenge the exam in about 8 weeks and I am woefully unready.  He gave me a 600 page book, with more yawns and head bobs Erection problems are more common especially in this age and day when viagra without prescription uk stress, anxiety, worry or financial issues or relationship troubles have tightly gripped our lives. Also when purchase cialis from india you have decided that you would buy medicines from authorized web chemists that have physical presence. Smoking can release harmful substances that can affect men’s health, particularly in get cialis online this pharmacy shop their sexual capabilities. Sex therapySometimes there isn’t any physical reason for Erectile viagra sans prescription canada dysfunction. per chapter than any other book in the English language, that I am to commit to memory by late August.  I took a practice exam on line to see how I was coming along and I only got 45%.  The carrot on this pole is that if I pass, I will get a full time job, so it is worth my while to pay attention.

So I am now about to gear up for a summer of juggling various stressful activities, and on a good day I can barely whistle and piss at the same time.  So I don’t see this leaving me much time to write in my blog, or play chess or golf or probably many other things I would prefer to fritter away my time with.  Oh well, none of this will be fatal. This crazy summer will pass, and there will be days ahead again when I find myself sitting around picking lint out of my navel and contemplating things, and that will be fine with me.