All or Nothing: $590,000,000 Powerball!!!

June 6, 2013

$590,000,000 Powerball!!!

My, oh My.

I'm not even going to comment on this.

Thanks,

Preston

_________________

This from the Miami Herald
By BRENT KALLESTAD
Associated Press

TALLAHASSEE, Fla. -- When Gloria C. MacKenzie went to a Florida supermarket near Tampa last month to buy a Powerball ticket, another person in line did something nice for the 84-year-old widow.

"While in line at Publix, another lottery player was kind enough to let me go ahead of them in line to purchase the winning Quick Pick ticket," she said in a statement Wednesday.

The nice gesture turned out to be a life-changing one for MacKenzie and her family. She came forward Wednesday to claim the biggest undivided lottery jackpot in history, $590 million.

A retiree from Maine and a mother of four who lives in a modest, tin-roof house in Zephyrhills, Fla., where the lone winning ticket in the May 18 drawing was sold, MacKenzie took her prize in a lump sum of just over $370 million. After federal taxes, she is getting about $278 million, lottery officials said.

Wearing large sunglasses and dressed in a pink sweater and white pants, she clasped her son's arm after visiting the lottery offices as they made their way to a silver Ford Focus and left quickly. She did not speak to a crowd of reporters outside the building. She was accompanied at the lottery offices by two unidentified attorneys.

MacKenzie bought the winning ticket at a Publix supermarket in the town of about 13,300, which is 30 miles northeast of Tampa. It is best known for the bottled spring water that bears its name - and now, for one of the biggest lottery winners of all time.

The $590 million was the second-largest lottery jackpot in history, behind a $656 million Mega Millions prize in March 2012, but that sum was split, with three winning tickets.

MacKenzie let the lottery computers generate the numbers at random. She said she had previously bought four other tickets for the drawing.

"We are grateful with this blessing of winning the Florida Lottery Powerball jackpot," she said in a statement read by lottery officials. "We hope that everyone would give us the opportunity to maintain our privacy for our family's benefit."

The winner had 60 days to claim the prize. Lottery spokesman David Bishop said MacKenzie, her lawyers and her financial adviser spent about two hours going through the necessary paperwork.

"They had clearly been preparing for this. They took all this time to get everything in order," Bishop said.

Minutes after the announcement, a dozen reporters in Zephyrhills were camped outside MacKenzie's gray duplex, which backs up to a dirt alley and is across from a cow pasture.

Neighbors were surprised by her good fortune.

"She didn't say anything about it. She's so quiet and secluded. She's usually in the house," said James Hill. "I'm very happy for her. It couldn't have happened to a nicer person. She was always pleasant and smiling."

Another neighbor, Don Cecil, joked, "I hope she gets a better place to live."

MacKenzie's neighbors offered few details about her life. They said she mostly kept to herself, but they'd seen her take short walks along the street and exchanged pleasantries with her.

Her house, situated among mostly mobile homes and pre-fabricated houses, has a chain-link fence with a sheet-metal roof and an old TV antenna.

MacKenzie retired to Zephyrhills more than a decade ago from rural Maine with her husband, Ralph, who died in 2005.

Back in her hometown of East Millinocket, Maine, relatives and friends were surprised to hear of her good fortune.

Robert MacKenzie, Ralph's brother, said the couple met just after World War II after Ralph got out of the Navy. He went to work in the town's paper mill, laboring as a technician for almost four decades.

He said the couple raised four children in East Millinocket, a town of less than 2,000 people in northern Maine. A daughter and son still live in East Millinocket, another son lives in Florida and another daughter lives out of state, possibly in Massachusetts, he said.

Robert MacKenzie said he didn't know his sister-in-law had won until a reporter called him.

"Holy mackerel," he said when told of her winnings. He added: "It hasn't soaked in, but I'm happy for her. That would be great because she's a widow and she can have a nice home now."

One of the MacKenzies' daughters, Melinda "Mindy" MacKenzie, a high school teacher, still lives in the family home in East Millinocket in a quiet middle-class neighborhood of white clapboard houses.

Ralph MacKenzie enjoyed snowmobiling, hunting and fishing, said Andrew Hopkins, a retired high school teacher and assistant principal who taught some of the MacKenzie children.

"They were good people. That's about all I can tell you," said Hopkins, who lives across the street.

Read more here: http://www.miamiherald.com/2013/06/05/3434747/590-million-powerball-jackpot.html#storylink=cpy

No comments:

Here's the plan . . .

Please email me at prestonthewriterallen@gmail.com with your gambling questions and your publishing world questions. I will use this site to post your questions and answer as many of them as I can.

Scroll down to the bottom of the page to see a list of Reading Group Questions for Discussion and a list of video interviews of writing heavyweights Joyce Carol Oates, Stephen King, J.K. Rowling, J California Cooper and others.

Also, feel free to purchase any of the books on this site to support the best writing talent in the country.

Thanks,

Preston

My other blog, which has a wider range of topics, can be reached at http://www.prestonlallen.blogspot.com/.

Professor James Haskins

For those of us who had him as a teacher at the University of Florida in the mid 80s--you know why he is here on my page. What a teacher. What an experience.

I remember walking to his office for one of those jam sessions (I made some mistake or another in one of the essays that I had submitted to him), and I spied on his wall a poster for the Francis Ford Coppola movie the Cotton Club. I noticed for the first time that the words "based on the James Haskins book" were embossed on the poster.

I blurted out, "Oh, Professor Haskins, you're THAT James Haskins!"

He rolled his eyes at me and spit out, "So what are you telling me, Allen? That a black man can't write a book?"

I stuttered my apology as I would stutter many apologies to him that semester, and he launched into me for a half hour berating--reminding me loudly and sarcastically that in my introductory essay to his class I had indicated that my career ambition was to be a novelist. How then could it surprise me that he was THAT James Haskins?

I had no answer for him, as so often happened that semester. I was quite humbled.

He was a difficult man, to say the least, but over time I came to enjoy his class, though he often put me on the spot in front of the others. I was the only African American in the class besides himself.

He was my CHILDREN's LIT professor, and I must say I learned a great deal from him, though not about children's lit.

At some point in the middle of that semester, I began to give serious consideration to becoming a college professor when I grew up.

I thank James Haskins for that.

Rest in Peace.

All or Nothing Reviews

New York Times--". . . a cartographer of autodegradation . . . Like Dostoyevsky, Allen colorfully evokes the gambling milieu — the chained (mis)fortunes of the players, their vanities and grotesqueries, their quasi-philosophical ruminations on chance. Like Burroughs, he is a dispassionate chronicler of the addict’s daily ritual, neither glorifying nor vilifying the matter at hand."

Foreword Magazine--"Not shame, not assault, not even murder is enough reason to stop. Allen’s second novel, All or Nothing, is funny, relentless, haunting, and highly readable. P’s inner dialogues illuminate the grubby tragedy of addiction, and his actions speak for the train wreck that is gambling."

Library Journal--"Told without preaching or moralizing, the facts of P's life express volumes on the destructive power of gambling. This is strongly recommended and deserves a wide audience; an excellent choice for book discussion groups."—Lisa Rohrbaugh, East Palestine Memorial P.L., OH

LEXIS-NEXIS--"By day, P drives a school bus in Miami. But his vocation? He's a gambler who craves every opportunity to steal a few hours to play the numbers, the lottery, at the Indian casinos. Allen has a narrative voice as compelling as feeding the slots is to P." Betsy Willeford is a Miami-based freelance book reviewer. November 4, 2007

Publisher’s Weekly--"Allen’s dark and insightful novel depicts narrator P’s sobering descent into his gambling addiction . . . The well-written novel takes the reader on a chaotic ride as P chases, finds and loses fast, easy money. Allen (Churchboys and Other Sinners) reveals how addiction annihilates its victims and shows that winning isn’t always so different from losing."

Kirkus Review--"We gamble to gamble. We play to play. We don't play to win." Right there, P, desperado narrator of this crash-'n'-burn novella, sums up the madness. A black man in Miami, P has graduated from youthful nonchalance (a '79 Buick Electra 225) to married-with-a-kid pseudo-stability, driving a school bus in the shadow of the Biltmore. He lives large enough to afford two wide-screen TVs, but the wife wants more. Or so he rationalizes, as he hits the open-all-night Indian casinos, "controlling" his jones with a daily ATM maximum of $1,000. Low enough to rob the family piggy bank for slot-machine fodder, he sinks yet further, praying that his allergic 11-year-old eat forbidden strawberries—which will send him into a coma, from which he'll emerge with the winning formula for Cash 3 (the kid's supposedly psychic when he's sick). All street smarts and inside skinny, the book gives readers a contact high that zooms to full rush when P scores $160,000 on one lucky machine ("God is the God of Ping-ping," he exults, as the coins flood out). The loot's enough to make the small-timer turn pro, as he heads, flush, to Vegas to cash in. But in Sin City, karmic payback awaits. Swanky hookers, underworld "professors" deeply schooled in sure-fire systems to beat the house, manic trips to the CashMyCheck store for funds to fuel the ferocious need—Allen's brilliant at conveying the hothouse atmosphere of hell-bent gaming. Fun time in the Inferno.

Reading Group Questions for Discussion

ALL OR NOTHING
Reading Group Questions for Discussion

1. Based on her upbringing, her typical reaction to P’s gambling throughout All or Nothing, and her decision to nurse him back to health after the shooting, how would you describe P’s wife Hon?

2. Discuss the use of setting in the novel, particularly how Las Vegas gambling compares to gambling in Miami.

3. What aspects of P’s personality and his upbringing, including his relationship with his father, might have contributed to his becoming the kind of gambler that he is?

4. Using his wife (Hon), C.L., S’s wife, Missy and his fat girl as particular examples, discuss what role romantic love plays in P’s life.

5. How are P’s attempts to properly parent his children undermined, or otherwise impacted, by his gambling?

6. In what ways does E.V.’s gradual decline, which P is a witness to, affect his feelings about his own addiction?

7. What is meant by the quote, “The only addiction stronger than gambling is charity,” and how is it supported (or contradicted) by the actions of P? The professor? Missy?

8. P complains to C.L. about outsiders that “they don’t understand us.” What is it that outsiders do not understand about gamblers? How do outsiders view gamblers?

9. What explains Missy’s decision to come to the aid of P’s son?

10. To what extent are the gamblers in All or Nothing superstitious? Religious? Scientific?

11. Explain the professor’s theory of “roundness” and its connections to P’s epiphany after he shoots his son.

12. How do the quotes and the parenthesized headers at the beginnings of some of the chapters assist in the development of the plot? How do they assist in the development of P’s character?

13. How do gamblers feel about money? Where do they get it from? What is its purpose?

14. At the GA meeting, P calls himself "the sickest one here." What is the sickest thing, in your opinion, that P does in the book? What is the sickest thing any of the gamblers do in the book?

15. Why does C.L. partner with someone other than P to cheat the casino?

16. What important truth was P trying to teach our friend D about the nature of addiction after their fist fight at the GA meeting?

17. At the funeral C.L. tries to sum up P's life by exclaiming with tears in her eyes that P had a great life, he had fun. How does this sum up P's life? Gambling addiction?

18. Based on what you have learned about gamblers in All or Nothing, is it likely that P’s son will eventually gamble again? Will Missy?

All or Nothing

At the Pen Festival 2010

June 6, 2013

$590,000,000 Powerball!!!

No comments:

People Counter: 2503 Visitors Since December 30, 2007