USA Wins Lottery

When the USA stepped into a corner market in San Jose, California, it just wanted a late-afternoon snack. It ended up getting a lot more than that.

"I hadn't eaten any gummy bears in a while, so I grabbed some and then saw that the lottery was past fifteen trillion bucks, so I decided to give it a shot."

That shot paid off, as the former hegemon was the sole winner of the $15,101,982,332,288 jackpot announced last night. Needless to say, the country has big plans for the winnings. "I've got some bills that I should probably pay down, but I also want to do some traveling. North Korea's been looking at me funny, and I might wanna throw some money at that."

While debt elimination and military projection of power may seem like the responsible thing to do, the USA has more whimsical ideas, too.

"Maybe I'll get, like a dozen iPads so I can put them on my wall and have some sort of virtual window onto an alien landscape. Or go to Mars. Wait and see, right?"

The winning numbers were (4, 8, 15, 16, 24, 42) were selected through a lucky confluence of cultural literacy (the USA is "a big Lost fan") and incompetence (the USA "totally got one of the numbers from the show wrong").

The windfall is a change of fortunes for a nation that has recently seen the BP oil spill, an early elimination from the World Cup, and Justin Bieber.