Gambling, Cleaning, and What I Really Think About The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

by Chris McGinty

I’m going to write a short blog today and focus on previous posts in 2025. I sometimes get thoughts from reading and rereading our old posts. It makes for an easy point by point blog post, and I’m trying to get my contributions scheduled about three weeks in advance, so I can start to focus on writing quality posts.

Lottery tip – Nathan started the year with the New Year’s resolution, “Lose all of my money testing gambling advice.” Ok, I’m sure that’s not what he meant, but you can read his post here and decide for yourself. I have a tip about playing the lottery. Don’t play the lottery. But if you’re going to, I have a tip. Choose numbers that are 32 or higher if you’re not playing quick pick where your numbers are chosen randomly. A lot of people choose numbers based on the birthdays of themselves and their loved ones. Choosing higher numbers won’t make it more likely for you to win. It’s still 1 in 25 million to win six numbers in the Texas Lotto. You have no chance. But in the statistics defying chance that you do win, you’re less likely to have to share the pot with people who chose numbers based on birthdays.

Housecleaning – On the first day of the year, I wrote about housecleaning. I was watching a video on YouTube a couple of days ago and he was talking about how throughout the day he’ll do a one-minute cleanup. He’s a minimalist, so that can kind of go a long way. It’s still not a bad thought. You would be surprised how much you can do with a minute if you’re fully focused on straightening up. I did one such maneuver earlier, but it was just grabbing a broom and sweeping behind a piece of furniture. When I was done I thought to myself, I don’t ever spend an extra minute making sure I got every speck of dirt into the dustpan. The floors will never be prefect, so near perfect will do. I used this technique (and all the others I wrote about in the blog post) when I was a shift manager at Pizza Hut, and we got complimented on how clean our store was. You know why? Because they weren’t worried about a footprint in the middle of the floor from the night before when someone walked on the wet floor. They weren’t worried that there was a little cheese that fell on the floor by the makeline. They were used to seeing that kind of thing. They looked under the shelves and saw that we actually mopped under there every night. I focused more on the detail work.

Hitchhiker’s Guide – Nathan wrote about the “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” movie from 2005. The title was very click bait sounding, but it was actually valid. I don’t know why the fans didn’t like it either. I’ve seen it twice and laughed heartily each time. I might need to watch it again now that I’m familiar with Martin Freeman. Speaking of Martin Freeman, I think “Mostly Harmless” is like the “The World’s End” of The Hitchhiker’s series for me. I’m not even sure that it’s the best book in the series (like I’m not sure “The World’s End” is the best movie in the series) but I seem to like it way more than most people, and it’s maybe my personal favourite. Back to the Hitchhiker’s movie though, there was really just no way to make the destruction of Earth funny. That’s a pretty dark scene.

I might do some more posts like this in the future. It’ll give me a chance to comment on Nathan’s writing and catch missed points in my own posts. It’s a nice simple format too.