Do not purchase lottery tickets for investment purposes

I'll skip all the warnings you know about playing the lottery (that the last time the lottery was as popular in Western culture was just before the French proletariat cut the heads off the aristocracy; that winners of the lottery tend to be less happy than they were before they won; that the odds of winning the lottery are worse than those of being hit by lightning 14 times, et al. and etc and etc).

A little advertisement is printed on every Powerball ticket, as if to reinforce to the person wasting her money on a fruitless dream that Yes, although your numbers won't match up, not even one of them, to the winning numbers, at least you are still in the game. The ad on my latest ticket is:

Winning Powerball could be like
winning 8 gold medals without
the hours & hours of physical
exertion and wearing a swim cap.

I am speechless. It must be a joke. A deeply self-referential, ironic statement, like the best British comedy. But can it be possible that the powers behind Powerball have a sense of humor? A black, ironic, self-destructive sense of humor? I cannot believe that.

Yet, how could this message possibly be serious? Has our culture so eroded that we are to celebrate laziness (in the absence of celebrating hard physical exertion)? That I am unsure about the intentions of the statement is fearsome in itself. Certainly I do not believe that the average American will get the humor (but maybe I'm too hard on my fellow Americans).

It's not going to prevent me from buying the next ticket, potentially worth $118 million. I know I won't win, but the fantasy, for the cost of $1, is too much fun to ignore. You might ask why I can't have the fantasy for free, but it doesn't work that way, at least not my fantasies. (And yes, I'm aware that means I hold out hope for the possibility of winning, even while knowing that I won't. The ad campaign works: It could happen.)