I suppose there are those housebound people for whom a new Ohio start up, Lotto Butler, makes faint sense. The company offers to buy lottery tickets for you, store them, and, should you win, deliver them by courier. It can also handle pools of people who wish to buy blocks of tickets and share in the prize.

Putting aside for a moment the terrible odds lottery players face, I was bemused by the thought that enough people could be deeply motivated to play the game yet unable to buy tickets themselves. This in a state where you can't swing a dead cat without knocking over a lottery ticket machine.

However, Lotto Butler claims to already have 600 people signed up. These customers pay for the tickets at the time of purchase, and receive email copies of the tickets while the originals are stored by Lotto Butler. Since it's illegal to mail lottery tickets in Ohio, winning tickets are delivered by hand to its customers. The company offers monthly plans ranging from $8.99 to $49.99.

According to the Columbus Dispatch, the company has already received a cease-and-desist letter from the Ohio Lottery forbidding it to use the lottery logo from its site.

Apparently, if a lotto player is unable to appreciate the odds against winning, he won't be too concerned about making the deal even worse by increasing his overhead. Chalk this up as another life penalty for those who didn't see any reason to learn math.