I pulled up to the light at the busy intersection and noticed a throng of people surrounding the entrance of a nearby convenience store.

I made a mental note and turned the corner to pull into a gas station to fuel up the van.

As the gas gushed into the tank, I listened to the click, click, click of the pump as it ate away at my wallet.

It's easy to lament about the cost of just about everything these days, especially since our wages seem mostly frozen, and that's if we are lucky enough to still have jobs.

Capping the tank, I headed for the cashier only to see another lump of individuals crowding the aisles at this store as well.

The disheveled smoker, the working mom, the blue collar guys and occasional college student, all, I realized were in line for that most infernal invention of gambling promoters: the lottery ticket.

I am no different than anyone who has entertained fantasies of instant wealth.

I have been known to pay the "fool tax" on many occasions, but I do it in a sort of fog of unreal expectation.

You buy the Snapple, you buy a cuppa coffee, some breath mints... "oh..yeah..and gimme a couple quick-picks too willya?"

You think you might get lucky, just this once, quit your job, pay off the bills and move to someplace where there's no crime, no noisy airplanes or barking dogs and it only rains at night when you're asleep in your custom-made, four-poster water bed.

But you still have to beat the odds to win.

And those odds are so poor that sometimes even the winners don't win.

Just a few weeks ago the state lottery announced a winner in a 9.7 million dollar jackpot.

It's been over a month now and nobody has come up with that golden ticket.

I think that speaks to the nature of the trouble with this sort of gambling.

That person probably bought a few quick picks and then tossed them in the glovebox or on the dresser and just forgot about them, because every other lotto ticket purchase they've made, for years and years, has not gotten them mostly zilch, zero, bupkis (look it up).

So why bother to check?

Anyone who has good enough eyesight to read the infinitesimally small print on the back on any ticket will find what appears to be a reasonable chance. "Odds of winning a Lotto prize...1 in 10."

Not bad, you think. But what isn't said is that what constitutes "a prize" in the eyes of lottery officials is usually just another free ticket.

Beyond this, the true odds of actually winning "the big one" generally run upwards of 17 million to 1, and in the instance of those Mega-Whopper, multi-state lotteries, the fat chances can get up to 80 million to 1.

At this point, the odds of being struck by lightning are quite a bit better, reportedly at 709,260 to 1.

I believe I heard it as a quote from Bill Nye the Science guy: "The Lotto is for people who are bad at math."

This is humorous, just as the name "fool tax" is funny, but it's hard to deny.

It gets worse: The payout of a typical 1 million dollar win in 20 annual payments, after fica takes it's cut off the top at 28 percent, works out to about 36 thousand, and that's before state and local taxes.

There is concern that much of the advertising for state lotteries is deceptive and misleading.

In fact, state lotteries are exempt from The Federal Trade Commission's truth-in-advertising standards because they are state entities and in terms of advertising, can operate in ways that true commercial businesses cannot.

Many of these ads emphasize luck over hard work, instant reward over traditional investing and could be seen as manipulative in encouraging playing in order to contribute to state programs for education or for other "worthy" public benefit.

If the education included some math classes that could teach us just how bad the odds are in the first place, maybe we'd have something.

For those of us who really don't like math, continuing to play will remain a relatively harmless diversion.

You can always try that new lottery game? Winners get 5 million dollars- 5 bucks a year for a million years.