There’S A Lotto Choices

Sat., Oct. 21, 2000

By Paul Turner srpaulturner@gmail.com

It has come to The Slice’s attention that some of you haven’t given careful consideration to what you will do with the money after winning the lottery tonight.

That’s bad.

If you’re going to suddenly find yourself $30 million richer, you ought to have a plan.

And we mean something more imaginative than “Pay off the credit cards and get the garage door fixed.”

So here are a few ideas, just to get you started.

1. Buy a Spokane radio station and adopt a “My friends and I sitting around shooting the bull” format.

2. Establish a charitable foundation and invite supplicants to grovel before you.

3. Purchase one-way plane tickets for those heard saying they are too cool for Spokane.

4. Open a tavern where smoking is not permitted. Hire belligerent bouncers itching to enforce this rule.

5. Help SpokAnimal move to a more visible location.

6. Buy any small business where an employee is rude. Schedule an immediate performance review.

7. Establish a fund to help newborns saddled with dumb names.

8. Spend freely at Spokane-area stores that don’t sell cheap junk.

9. Produce chilling, keep-your-pants-on documentary film on the lives of teenage mothers in Spokane.

10. Write some hefty checks to groups fighting to preserve the separation of church and state.

11. Endow a professorship at Eastern Washington University for the study of crackpotism in the West.

12. Hire a consultant to explore ways to get parents who buy junk food to focus on their children’s ignored nutritional needs.

13. Underwrite a weekly hour of 1940s big band music on KPBX.

14. Hire lobbyist to push your political agenda while you deny having a political agenda.

15. Subsidize local pet-fixing.

16. Finance construction of a building to be named after someone whose flattering opinion of you made you want to be a better person.

17. Start alternative weekly. Require that singles submitting personal ads resemble fetching models shown on adjacent pages.

18. Write big check to S-R’s Christmas Fund the day after Thanksgiving so Bev Vorpahl doesn’t have to sweat reaching the goal.

19. Have one of your flunkies stand at a corner next to a stoplight and hand out $20 bills to random drivers seen not talking on cellphones.

20. Establish an award where each year some unsung person in the Spokane area is given $50,000 for making a positive difference in the lives of local children.

* Today’s Slice question: Ever actually seen a male driver run off the road/smash into something while ogling a female pedestrian?

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