I hate to burst everybody's bubble, but it's my line of work to know this stuff. Mega Millions draws on Tuesdays and Fridays at 10pm Eastern time, and the jackpot was not won this past Friday--it was won on the fifth (last Tuesday), with an estimated jackpot of $19M. The last $100M+ jackpot was in September 2012 in Riverside, CA. Coins4Fun lives in New York.
. . . . now that I've been a total evil killer of dreams and all, I will tell you what I would do with a jackpot of $100M:
--$200k would be set aside to pay off my mom's student loans, my student loans, and what remains of my sister's student loans. That would be over the amount we would need, but it'd be pretty close.
--$1M each in a trust fund for each of my nieces, and an additional $1M in trust for the future kids of my two best friends, Alicia and Cassie. These girls have stuck by me when everybody else walked away and I love them like sisters. (As long as we're at it, I would stealth-pay Alicia's mortgage. Cassie has a house that has been bequeathed to her, but Alicia and her husband had to start from scratch with her parents pretty much rooting for them to fail. Given the neighborhood they live in, let's call that another $80k-ish.)
--I want a 2012 Hyundai Accent and when I was eight years old I promised my dad a red Ford F-150 when I got rich. My car would be about $12k (it's the most wonderful little compact thing, and for an additional bonus, most Hyundai cars sold in the US are also manufactured in the US!) and nadaprices tells me a fully-loaded F-150 would be about $33k. So, another $45k. My mom has a brand-new car already that she really does not need to be driving, which leads me to . . .
--$70k for my mom to have good, reliable eye surgery. That would cover both the surgery and the aftercare--her boss would complain, I have no doubt, but if I footed the bill for a temp to replace my mom for eight weeks, Jeri would do it.
--$10k and
I AM GOING ON MY TRIP TO EUROPE, AND YOUR ARGUMENTS FALL ON DEAF EARS. Among other things I want to visit easily a dozen places in England alone (Stratford-upon-Avon, I have a friend who lives in Liverpool where there is also a Beatles museum, the original Twinings Tea Shop in the Strand, Stonehenge during Samhain, and I want to take both the Harry Potter and Sherlock Holmes tours), but there is plenty of love left for Notre Dame, the Alhambra, Venice, the Coliseum, and hundreds of other little places I want to go.
--$5M for living expenses while I try to make a go of Hollywood. It's all I've ever really wanted to do.
--$10k for a shopping spree. No way in heck I'd spend it all (with the way my tastes run I'd be a spendthrift to burn through three grand of it), but
just once in my life I want to walk into a store like Nordstrom, go "oooh! This is gorgeous! And--hey--it fits
perfectly!" and walk out with whatever-it-is in a bag, having never looked at the price tag. That's why the huge margin--I don't want to know how much I paid for whatever-it-is. I want one item that's essentially free, something I didn't have to scrimp and save and cry and pine for. Just one. When I get home, like a week later when the shine has worn off just enough that I'm okay with looking at the price tag, I will look, and probably gasp and need a strong cup of tea, and then $500 of whatever happens to be left will go in a slush fund whose entire purpose is CRH (what is this "buying coins" thing of which you people speak?). The rest would go back to the remainder.
And the remainder would go . . .
. . . . to a trust fund set up to be self-sustaining and also to accept donations, that would hand out a minimum of $1M per year to needy libraries and children's literacy groups. It would be called The Clarisse Fund, in memory of the girl in
Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury who says "I don't care about the answers. I want to know what the questions are." That $1M would aid in setting up computer classes and resources, indexing local resources (e.g., the stuff that back in the bad old days we called "microfilm"), setting up a dedicated youth resource center and purchasing books--whatever the particular petitioning library needed most. And in each of those libraries, I would require a copy of that book. At least one. You can apply as long as you have, or are willing to use ten bucks of our money to buy, a copy of
Fahrenheit 451, and feature it in a reading program. Because I don't care if kids know the answers--I want them to know what the questions are. They can find the answers themselves, if they can develop the know-how to ask the questions.
That's it.
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Posted 02/10/2013 10:22 pm
and I got a 75 cent candy bar from vending machine today, put in a dollar and got back 
1913 
