Morning Juice: Lottery Makes Games Even Tougher, Dave Barry Recaps Boring Year, Apple-Free Holocaust Costs Man Book Deal

^{Play the lottery, and you too could be a dickwad.}

What the Florida Lottery Needs: Tougher Odds

Officials with the Florida Lottery are on a statewide tour to promote the fact that Florida is joining the multistate Powerball game. In fact, the folks who bring you your favorite scratch-off tickets will be at Sawgrass Mills Mall tomorrow night and will give away a  Nintendo Wii and a big-screen TV. Now if there's one thing I've learned from a lifetime of scratch-off games, it's that anybody can win. Just the other day, I was at the Gas-n-Go rubbing some Florida Lottery Holiday Cash scratch-off games with the side of a dime when the guy behind me, who had bought some Florida Lottery Super 7s games, was totally hit on the head with the butt of a robber's gun! And that robber? He got like $27 from the Gas-n-Go drawer, so you never know what the Florida Lottery will bring. If I knew how to make one of those copyright symbols, I would've added it to the end of that sentence, because the Florida Lottery should totally be using that slogan.

After the jump, will you get lucky reading a Dave Barry column and find a joke?

Dave Barry Recaps Apparently Boring Year

Jim Carrey, giving up his In Living Color-era humor acting, has made a second career as a serious actor who makes really pretty terrible movies. Similarly, former humor writer Dave Barry has reinvented himself as a daily newspaper writer who writes really pretty terrible year-end wrap-up stories. Barry even gave up his standard lines about how something would make a good band name or that he's not making something up so that he could bring us a recap of the year we've all lived. If things don't work out with the straight writing for Barry, I'd suggest he team up with the Florida Lottery to produce a Dave Barry scratch-off, where each card gives you a chance to personally make newspapers obsolete!

Apple-Free Holocaust Costs Man Book Deal

Turns out the guy behind the "greatest love story ever told" -- about his future wife throwing him apples over the fence of a Nazi concentration camp -- was totally making it up. Herman Rosenblat's book publisher recently withdrew a deal he had after it came out that there weren't really apples in wartime Germany during the winter. The news has prompted me to withdraw my book proposal about tossing apples through the Miami Herald's windows to Dave Barry. It's not that the story is untrue, it's just that Dave Barry beat me to it with a chapter in his new book, How My Band Name Joke Is Funnier Than 'That's What She Said'.

In this reenactment below, Jim Carrey plays Dave Barry, who, having given up not-funny year-end reviews, reinvents himself as a not-funny karate sensei.



-- Eric Barton