DebtKid is running a contest: confess your dumbest lifetime purchase and you get a plenary indulgence of 25 shots at his dumbest purchase, a Nintendo DS Lite. Well, heck, who could let a thing like that pass?

Over a lifetime extending back to the Cretaceous period, I’ve made a lot of dumb purchases, so I had to think about this.

        How many ugly, ill-fitting clothes have I bought?

        Let me count the rags....

        Maybe the time I decorated the kitchen with all that Hallowe’en orange paint?

        The puppy that ate the eucalyptus tree?

        How about that dreadful Polaroid camera?

But now I’ve got it: a raffle ticket. No mere ordinary two-buck raffle ticket, mind you: a HUNDRED-DOLLAR raffle ticket! And did I stop at one? Heck no! I bought three of the things. I justified this by pretending it was a donation to the large urban hospital that runs the fund-raising shindig (the very hospital where, a couple of years later, I could not get so much as one minute of medical care when I presented myself at the ER with acute appendicitis). Top prizes are worth between $500,000 and $1 million. Because only those who are stupefied by their own wealth enter this event, odds of winning are relatively high.

Higher than winning the lottery, but probably not as high as winning a numbers game.

Naturally, I won nothing. A friend who puts on more high-society airs than Hyacinth Bucket was also suckered in; she won a cheap portable radio.

Jeez. Greed will out!

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