Double-lottery Winner Counting His Millions

Third time lucky? You have to like his chances.

A Missouri man has won a million dollars in the lottery twice — three times, actually, since his second win was $2 million.

Ernest Pullen, a 57-year-old retired telecom employee and military man from Bonne Terre, Mo., won big in two different lottery events in his home state. In June, he won just a $1 million prize as part of a "100 Million Dollar Blockbuster" promotion run on the Scratchers lottery system. In September, he won another Scratchers event, "Mega MONOPOLY," to the tune of $2 million. (Now that's a lot of hotels on Boardwalk!)

It's not surprising that Missouri Lottery officials can conclusively state that this occurrence is the first of its kind. A lottery official put the odds at winning merely $1 million at 1 in 2.28 million. Winning $2 million after winning $1 million? Infinity is not enough.

But what about the money? Surely the state government gets part of that $3 million in tax. Well, yes. In fact, the payout was reduced further because Pullen chose to receive his winnings as lump sums, rather than as annuities. The $1 million payment was chopped to $700,00 right away, and the $2 million prize was a mere $1.3 million. And that's taxed income, remember.

Still, a man's house is his castle, and Pullen plans to spend some of his winnings on fixing up his castle. He probably has enough to install a top-notch security system.

Now We're Ready for the Aliens

Some things make me sleep better at night. This just might be one of those things: As far as aliens are concerned, we (Planet Earth) may yet have a leader.

The cliche of alien beings landing on Earth and uttering words to the effect of "Take us to your leader" is a cliche for a reason: It's entirely possible. Yes, it is entirely plausible, possible, predictable, and lots of other words ending in -able or -ible that intelligent members of a non-Earth species who arrive on our home world and can somehow approximate language that we humans can understand will assume that we have a leader and, more to the point, ask to be ushered into the presence of that leader.

If that happens, we need to be ready. And now, it seems, we are.

The United Nations (did you know this?) has an Office for Outer Space Affairs. It even has a catchy acronym — UNOOSA. UNOOSA has a leader, Mazlan Othman of Malaysia. She's an astrophysicist, a fact that will no doubt come in handy during the first discussions with alien beings who land on Earth and want to do something other than liquefy our defense systems.

Look at her picture: Othman is a kindly sort. At 58, she's been around the block a time or two in terms of astronomical research. She knows the chances of meeting a representative of an alien species (and she knows the chances are slim). However, she also knows that with the advent of the Hubble Space Telescope, the James Webb Telescope, the International Space Station, and all manner of other hunks of scientifically enhanced metal orbiting Earth, humans' chances of detecting intelligent life anywhere other than most places on Earth are growing by leaps and bounds.

This is undoubtedly not news to the U.N. scientific advisory committees, which will hear Othman's case very soon. If they agree that she and her office are the ones who should be put forward for a First Contact tete-a-tete, then (barring a no vote by the General Assembly), that is exactly what will happen.

Nightmares of alien overlords ruling the world? What nightmares of alien overlords ruling the world? We have a leader (or at least we will soon).

Love Killed the Social Media Star

Proving once again that too much of a good thing can be bad, workers at a library in Australia are reporting a horticultural case of death by Facebook.

Seems the Queensland state library hooked up a plant to a watering device, added in some electrical designs, threw in a bit of social media, and there they were.

Meet Eater, as the plant has come to be known, issued a call for fans and Wall posts on Facebook. Anytime someone went to the page and wrote something on the Meet Eater's Wall, the plant got a squirt of water.

Better yet (or worse yet, depending on how much you know the rest of the story), each time a person Liked the plant, the water rations went up.

Well, the plant proved pretty popular and so many Likes made so much more water trickle into the plant's container and before you could say "Man the lifeboats," the plant was waterlogged. Library officials report that the plant has "died" twice.

Turns out you can get a lot of water if you get 5,000 Likes. Surely these people were thinking they were doing the right thing, giving water to what was surely a plant that needed some attention, other than the kind brought on by the apparatus invading the plant's container in the name of a social media experiment.

But the writing should have been on the Wall when the number of Likes started to skyrocket. Still, the people looking after the poor plant say it's all part of their experiment.

Also part of their experiment is the opportunity to get up close and personal with the plant. See, the plant is the real thing, not just some virtual center of attention. If you happen to be in the neighborhood of the Queensland state library (and you'd be in Australia, of course), you can stop in and give the plant some real-world TLC. Organizers of the project have set up certain sound effects to reflect activity, including a sort of crooning sound that results from contact between the plant and green thumbs and a full-on crying suite triggered by the plant's being abandoned for more than a certain amount of time.

Somewhere, Akihiro Yokoi is smiling.