What is the Lottery Party? The LP is a webzine of one. It is an online magazine of citizen journalism and cultural commentary and stegosaurs. Heavy on the coffee and cigarettes, it lives and breathes with its hands waxing philosophical endlessly up the skirts of Absurdism. What is Absurdism? The point of Absurdism is that there is no point to anything, unless meaning is created after the fact in hindsight.

If all men are indeed created equal, then no collective has need of elections. Every adult citizen should be handed a lottery ticket, with the winning numbers allowing the winning ticket holder to hold whatever office in whatever body politic. But this shall never happen, because no person is equal to all persons. Our culture is nothing but layers of hidden bias. We are expected to play the cards dealt to us, but the deck is stacked, by individualistic apathy and individualistic greed alike.

Empathy is not readily welcomed in the popular domain of the Collective Unconscious and its xenophobic lynch mob mentality. Life is too fleeting for being told what to buy, what to think, what to feel, as salt of the Earth folks prefer sniffing out the diamonds in the rough down the roads less traveled, instead of suffering the orchestrated pablum of our times. It’s not a matter of discerning highbrow or lowbrow tastes, rather it’s a matter of fact that our culture is mindless garbage, our ideals are mindless garbage. The finest music is never on the radio, the finest films never garner television commercials. The finest ideas are never spoken aloud often enough.

As journalists we abide by this exclusively, shunning the maelstrom in trade for those persons who deserve their spot in the limelight for possessing imagination and initiative and integrity. More Mom and Pop, less Uncle Tom. The tortoise beats the hare. Buster Keaton gets the girl and saves the day. The aim of the Lottery Party is to embrace that dream, even at times when there is nothing else on the planet worth embracing. Not even stegosaurs.

the staff.

Richard Caldwell, sometimes known as nilskidoo, has freelanced since the Fall of 2000, abusing commas as a columnist, reporter, interviewer, Consulting Editor and Managing Editor, ghostwriter and script doctor and scapegoat, as well as reviewer of books, comics, and films; all for a sad lot of indie print periodicals and an embarrassing number of webzines no longer extant. A news junkie in general and a political junkie in particular, he is a proud non-theist.

Nuno Teixeira, sometimes known as XEI, is an accomplished writer and Canadian. The official Damage Control for the LP and a maestro of design and production, he lends tech support and really funny non sequiturs as warranted. He also runs XEI books, a vanity press with aims to offer a highly creative catalog of anthologies, comic strips and chain letters. How he was blackmailed into participation is surely some testament to our journalistic integrity.