http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iowa_lottery_guillotine

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3091697&forum_id=2#29555132)

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0702744/

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3091697&forum_id=2#29558248)

like if the # is 9479274973, 3794729749 faces summary execution in Times Square

modified hunger games, in a way... or like that short story the lottery everyone has to read in junior high English... also the long walk by Stephen King. and the running man! damn there are too many stories about death lotteries/competitions what the fuck is wrong w people

I wonder how many people would enter lol

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3091697&forum_id=2#30277817)

"hey dude i won the $100 million! yeah second prize but i'm not complaining right? maybe the meteor will come tomorrow"

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3091697&forum_id=2#30277886)

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3091697&forum_id=2#32148125)

The Lottery in Babylon

Like all the men of Babylon, I have been proconsul; like all, I have been a slave. I have

known omnipotence, ignominy, imprisonment. Look here-- my right hand has no index

finger. Look here--through this gash in my cape you can see on my stomach a crimson

tattoo--it is the second letter, Beth. On nights when the moon is full, this symbol gives me

power over men with the mark of Gimel, but it subjects me to those with the Aleph, who

on nights when there is no moon owe obedience to those marked with the Gimel. In the

half-light of dawn, in a cellar, standing before a black altar, I have slit the throats of

sacred bulls. Once, for an entire lunar year, I was declared invisible--I would cry out and

no one would heed my call, I would steal bread and not be beheaded. I have known that

thing the Greeks knew not--uncertainty. In a chamber of brass, as I faced the strangler's

silent scarf, hope did not abandon me; in the river of delights, panic has not failed me.

Heraclides Ponticus reports, admiringly, that Pythagoras recalled having been Pyrrhus,

and before that, Euphorbus, and before that, some other mortal; in order to recall similar

vicissitudes, I have no need of death, nor even of imposture.

I owe that almost monstrous variety to an institution--the Lottery-- which is unknown in

other nations, or at work in them imperfectly or secretly. I have not delved into this

institution's history. I know that sages cannot agree. About its mighty purposes I know as

much as a man untutored in astrology might know about the moon. Mine is a dizzying

country in which the Lottery is a major element of reality; until this day, I have thought

as little about it as about the conduct of the indecipherable gods or of my heart. Now, far

from Babylon and its beloved customs, I think with some bewilderment about the

Lottery, and about the blasphemous conjectures that shrouded men whisper in the halflight

of dawn or evening.

My father would tell how once, long ago--centuries? years?--the lottery in Babylon was a

game played by commoners. He would tell (though whether this is true or not, I cannot

say) how barbers would take a man's copper coins and give back rectangles made of bone

or parchment and adorned with symbols. Then, in broad daylight, a drawing would be

held; those smiled upon by fate would, with no further corroboration by chance, win

coins minted of silver. The procedure, as you can see, was rudimentary. Naturally, those

so-called "lotteries" were a failure. They had no moral force whatsoever; they appealed

not to all a man's faculties, but only to his hopefulness. Public indifference soon meant

that the merchants who had founded these venal lotteries began to lose money. Someone

tried something new: including among the list of lucky numbers a few unlucky draws.

This innovation meant that those who bought those numbered rectangles now had a

twofold chance: they might win a sum of money or they might be required to pay a fine--

sometimes a considerable one. As one might expect, that small risk (for every thirty

"good" numbers there was one ill-omened one) piqued the public's interest. Babylonians

flocked to buy tickets. The man who bought none was considered a pusillanimous

wretch, a man with no spirit of adventure. In time, this justified contempt found a second

target: not just the man who didn't play, but also the man who lost and paid the fine. The

Company (as it was now beginning to be known) had to protect the interest of the

winners, who could not be paid their prizes unless the pot contained almost the entire

amount of the fines. A lawsuit was filed against the losers: the judge sentenced them to

pay the original fine, plus court costs, or spend a number of days in jail. In order to thwart

the Company, they all chose jail. From that gauntlet thrown down by a few men sprang

the Company's omnipotence--its ecclesiastical, metaphysical force.

Some time after this, the announcements of the numbers drawn began to leave out the

lists of fines and simply print the days of prison assigned to each losing number. That

shorthand, as it were, which went virtually unnoticed at the time, was of utmost

importance: It was the first appearance of nonpecuniary elements in the lottery. And it

met with great success--indeed, the Company was forced by its players to increase the

number of unlucky draws.

As everyone knows, the people of Babylon are great admirers of logic, and even of

symmetry. It was inconsistent that lucky numbers should pay off in round silver coins

while unlucky ones were measured in days and nights of jail. Certain moralists argued

that the possession of coins did not always bring about happiness, and that other forms of

happiness were perhaps more direct.

The lower-caste neighborhoods of the city voiced a different complaint. The members of

the priestly class gambled heavily, and so enjoyed all the vicissitudes of terror and hope;

the poor (with understandable, or inevitable, envy) saw themselves denied access to that

famously delightful, even sensual, wheel. The fair and reasonable desire that all men and

women, rich and poor, be able to take part equally in the Lottery inspired indignant

demonstrations--the memory of which, time has failed to dim. Some stubborn souls could

not (or pretended they could not) understand that this was a novus ordo seclorum, a

necessary stage of history.... A slave stole a crimson ticket; the drawing determined that

that ticket entitled the bearer to have his tongue burned out. The code of law provided the

same sentence for stealing a lottery ticket. Some Babylonians argued that the slave

deserved the burning iron for being a thief, others, more magnanimous, that the

executioner should employ the iron because thus fate had decreed. There were

disturbances, there were regrettable instances of bloodshed, but the masses of Babylon at

last, over the opposition of the well-to-do, imposed their will; they saw their generous

objectives fully achieved. First, the Company was forced to assume all public power.

(The unification was necessary because of the vastness and complexity of the new

operations.) Second, the Lottery was made secret, free of charge, and open to all. The

mercenary sale of lots was abolished; once initiated into the mysteries of Baal, every free

man automatically took part in the sacred drawings, which were held in the labyrinths of

the god every sixty nights and determined each man's destiny until the next drawing. The

consequences were incalculable. A lucky draw might bring about a man's elevation to the

council of the magi or the imprisonment of his enemy (secret, or known by all to be so),

or might allow him to find, in the peaceful dimness of his room, the woman who would

begin to disturb him, or whom he had never hoped to see again; an unlucky draw:

mutilation, dishonor of many kinds, death itself. Sometimes a single event--the murder of

C in a tavern, B's mysterious apotheosis--would be the inspired outcome of thirty or forty

drawings. Combining bets was difficult, but we must recall that the individuals of the

Company were (and still are) all--powerful, and clever. In many cases, the knowledge

that certain happy turns were the simple result of chance would have lessened the force of

those outcomes; to forestall that problem, agents of the Company employed suggestion,

or even magic. The paths they followed, the intrigues they wove, were invariably secret.

To penetrate the innermost hopes and innermost fears of every man, they called upon

astrologers and spies. There were certain stone lions, a sacred latrine called Qaphqa,

some cracks in a dusty aqueduct--these places, it was generally believed, gave access to

the Company, and well- or ill-wishing persons would deposit confidential reports in

them. An alphabetical file held those dossiers of varying veracity.

Incredibly, there was talk of favoritism, of corruption. With its customary discretion, the

Company did not reply directly; instead, it scrawled its brief argument in the rubble of a

mask factory. This apologia is now numbered among the sacred Scriptures. It pointed out,

doctrinally, that the Lottery is an interpolation of chance into the order of the universe,

and observed that to accept errors is to strengthen chance, not contravene it. It also noted

that those lions, that sacred squatting-place, though not disavowed by the Company

(which reserved the right to consult them), functioned with no official guarantee.

This statement quieted the public's concerns. But it also produced other effects perhaps

unforeseen by its author. It profoundly altered both the spirit and the operations of the

Company. I have but little time remaining; we are told that the ship is about to sail--but I

will try to explain.

However unlikely it may seem, no one, until that time, had attempted to produce a

general theory of gaming. Babylonians are not a speculative people; they obey the

dictates of chance, surrender their lives, their hopes, their nameless terror to it, but it

never occurs to them to delve into its labyrinthine laws or the revolving spheres that

manifest its workings. Nonetheless, the semiofficial statement that I mentioned inspired

numerous debates of a legal and mathematical nature. From one of them, there emerged

the following conjecture: If the Lottery is an intensification of chance, a periodic infusion

of chaos into the cosmos, then is it not appropriate that chance intervene in every aspect

of the drawing, not just one? Is it not ludicrous that chance should dictate a person's death

while the circumstances of that death--whether private or public, whether drawn out for

an hour or a century--should not be subject to chance? Those perfectly reasonable

objections finally prompted sweeping reform; the complexities of the new system

(complicated further by its having been in practice for centuries) are understood by only a

handful of specialists, though I will attempt to summarize them, even if only

symbolically.

Let us imagine a first drawing, which condemns a man to death. In pursuance of that

decree, another drawing is held; out of that second drawing come, say, nine possible

executors. Of those nine, four might initiate a third drawing to determine the name of the

executioner, two might replace the unlucky draw with a lucky one (the discovery of a

treasure, say), another might decide that the death should be exacerbated (death with

dishonor, that is, or with the refinement of torture), others might simply refuse to carry

out the sentenceÖ. That is the scheme of the Lottery, put symbolically. In reality, the

number of drawings is infinite. No decision is final; all branch into others. The ignorant

assume that infinite drawings require infinite time; actually, all that is required is that

time be infinitely subdivisible, as in the famous parable of the Race with the Tortoise.

That infinitude coincides remarkably well with the sinuous numbers of Chance and with

the Heavenly Archetype of the Lottery beloved of Platonists. Some distorted echo of our

custom seems to have reached the Tiber: In his Life of Antoninus Heliogabalus, Aelius

Lampridius tells us that the emperor wrote out on seashells the fate that he intended for

his guests at dinner--some would receive ten pounds of gold; others, ten houseflies, ten

dormice, ten bears. It is fair to recall that Heliogabalus was raised in Asia Minor, among

the priests of his eponymous god.

There are also impersonal drawings, whose purpose is unclear. One drawing decrees that

a sapphire from Taprobana be thrown into the waters of the Euphrates; another, that a

bird be released from the top of a certain tower; another, that every hundred years a grain

of sand be added to (or taken from) the countless grains of sand on a certain beach.

Sometimes, the consequences are terrible.

Under the Company's beneficent influence, our customs are now steeped in chance. The

purchaser of a dozen amphorae of Damascene wine will not be surprised if one contains a

talisman, or a viper; the scribe who writes out a contract never fails to include some error;

I myself, in this hurried statement, have misrepresented some splendor, some atrocity

perhaps, too, some mysterious monotony.... Our historians, the most perspicacious on the

planet, have invented a method for correcting chance; it is well known that the outcomes

of this method are (in general) trust-worthy--although, of course, they are never divulged

without a measure of deception. Besides, there is nothing so tainted with fiction as the

history of the Company.... A paleographic document, unearthed at a certain temple, may

come from yesterday's drawing or from a drawing that took place centuries ago. No book

is published without some discrepancy between each of the edition's copies. Scribes take

a secret oath to omit, interpolate, alter. Indirect falsehood is also practiced.

The Company, with godlike modesty, shuns all publicity. Its agents, of course, are secret;

the orders it constantly (perhaps continually) imparts are no different from those spread

wholesale by impostors. Besides--who will boast of being a mere impostor? The drunken

man who blurts out an absurd command, the sleeping man who suddenly awakes and

turns and chokes to death the woman sleeping at his side--are they not, perhaps,

implementing one of the Company's secret decisions? That silent functioning, like God's,

inspires all manner of conjectures. One scurrilously suggests that the Company ceased to

exist hundreds of years ago, and that the sacred disorder of our lives is purely hereditary,

traditional; another believes that the Company is eternal, and teaches that it shall endure

until the last night, when the last god shall annihilate the earth. Yet another declares that

the Company is omnipotent, but affects only small things: the cry of a bird, the shades of

rust and dust, the half dreams that come at dawn. Another, whispered by masked

heresiarchs, says that the Company has never existed, and never will. Another, no less

despicable, argues that it makes no difference whether one affirms or denies the reality of

the shadowy corporation, because Babylon is nothing but an infinite game of chance.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3091697&forum_id=2#32148127)