Jason Sandford
Jason Sandford is a reporter, writer, blogger and photographer interested in all things Asheville.
For morning, noon and night, WLOSers followed the opening of the North Carolina Education Lottery. Let the bankruptcies dreams begin. Everywhere they went, they found a rube to scratch a ticket live while the on-air talent rambled on and on.
First up, Susan Mundane, tracking some guy first thing in the morning. Was he going to buy a ticket or not? He said he was, and Susan was live. Then he put it off. So WLOSers had to cut away. Back again, he finally scratched a ticket. It was a loser.
At noon, Victoria Dunkelhead was all over the lottery again. By the way, did you notice that Jay Seltzerwater let slip that he’s been taking meteorology lessons in school? He is totally angling to take over for Bob Caldwell, who plans to retire in a couple of months after four decades in the television business. That’s one helluva run.
Anyway, from 5 to 6:30, *Larry “Gloryhole” Blunt” was live in West Ashvegas watching people play. You could tell that it hurt Larry’s soul to do anything to promote gamblinig. You could just tell he was dying to preach to us about the evils and wrong-headedness of the numbers.
The best example came when he pulled out a wad of cash he said folks back at the station had given him to buy tickets. He turned to the counter, but oops – all the $5 tickets were gone, so he couldn’t bring any back. Right, Larry. The folks back at the station were screaming – “Just buy the one dollar tickets, Glory Hole!!!” Not good acting, Larry. You need more lessons from Diva Darcel.
Jon “Punnyman” Le gave us the story on how bad the odds are of winning. Again, he found some rube to do some scratching while Le attempted a few lame puns and did his little story about how your odds of getting hit by a bus are better than winning the lottery.
Finally, at 11 Holly Headache was out (where is Cherub Charu?) at a store telling us that the first day of the lottery wasn’t over yet. She followed some girl who was determined to be first in line to buy tickets. She didn’t win much.
In fact, nobody did, as far as we could tell. No news of any big winners in Ashvegas.
10-minute verdict in Rutherford County
A murder trial in Rutherford County came to a dramatic end Thursday when the case went to the jury and it came back with a verdict in 10 minutes. Yes. Ten minutes. That might be a new record.
Anyway, the convicted killer then lunged at the district attorney’s table and the cops swarmed him. He kept fighting, all the way back to the jailhouse, and WLOSers had the video. Good stuff! Sentenciing starts today, but we’re sure the dude will be hog tied and chained up.
Hey Ash, here’s my report. Frank came home yesterday with three tickets. One $5, one $2. and one $1 ticket. On the $5 ticket, I matched three numbers each paying $5 for a total of $15. We busted on the $2 blackjack ticket and won $2 on the $2 ticket. So on an $8. investment, we won $17, a profit of $9. The moral of the story is that it obviously pays to play and since we more than doubled our money we’re considering putting our life savings into scratch-offs. I’ll let you know how that goes.