It's a small matter in the overall scheme of things.   Seems large at the moment, but it's small.  Infinitisimol, except in the lives of specific human beings, all influenced by personal decisions, personal choices, personal responsibilities.

Some guy, somewhere, was traveling around last summer making his living playing the lottery.  I met him in an accident of fate, talked a while, him telling me what he does and how he does it, me listening, but not believing him.  But it was a seed.  Eventually I discovered he was telling me the truth, began digging around in scraps of paper and fragments of memory, trying to reconstruct his words.

I was still experimenting, holding my own, but not progressing as much as I'd have liked.  I posted the story on the Strange Experience thread under the Mystical Forum.  Along comes another guy, makes a series of cryptic remarks that seemed pointless at the time, and 24 hours later I'm looking at something on the screen of a computer my brain has some difficulties accepting.  A direct result of the remarks made by the guy about the Strange Experiences thread.

Meanwhile, this guy, wossname, Bigloooser (BL),  posts a claim on another thread in another forum.  He describes what he's able to do to all the minions of this site.  The response?  About what you'd figure.  A lot like my own response when I met the guy over a cup of coffee last year.  Disbelief.  But the manner of expressing that disbelief ranged from mildly discourteous scoffs, to sneers, to outright hostility. 

BL goes on to tell these people, these lottery hopefuls, how if they'll just lift their thinking out of the box, they can do what he does.  It's cryptic, but it contains everything they need to know.  He also says outright that it's a personal crusade of his to bankrupt the lotteries, which I'm confident he can do.  But all they have to do, though he doesn't come out and say it, is open up their minds and allow themselves to disbelieve what they think they know, then do some thinking and listening to what he says.

So, the interesting thing about all this turns out not to be that a man has figured out how to bust the lotteries, those random, unbustable numbers.  The interesting thing is that these LotteryPost users are unwilling to think it out by themselves.  They're determined that he should hand it to them as an answer, not as a question they can answer for themselves.  They've seen his system work, but they'd rather not use it than give up their belief that what they 'know' is actually true.  They'd rather go on playing with wheels and making knowing statements back and forth to one another than give up one inch of their smug realities to stop and carefully consider what BL has handed them.

What he's handed them is an entirely  different way of looking at reality.  A way that erodes the foundations of everything they think they know, everything they believe.  Better, a person might say, to stand lost, solidly on a firmament I can feel when I stomp it, than walk into the quicksand of giving up what I 'know'.

The tide in the affairs of men, the bard said, if taken at the tide can lead on to grand events.  But he also described in few words what happens when we miss the wave. 

The wave is going to pass as soon as BL turns it loose on the world.  That's how long there is to sit and think about it.

Jack