Lileks: If I only had some BRAAAIINS

The State Lottery has to come up with new games to keep the public from getting bored. I mean, you can only lose at Burstin' Balloons 40 times before you yearn to lose at Perky Pandas. Next up: games based on the cable show "The Walking Dead," a gore-galore squishy-viscera soap opera about a desperate band of survivors who are smart enough to overcome enormous odds but too stupid to drive north from Georgia to Minnesota, where the winter would have eliminated the zombies in short order.

Even if zombies make it through a Polar Vortex without getting freezer burn, just throw some steaks on the lake in late March and watch them go through the ice. Idiots.

Why are zombies popular? Some say it's a way of processing modern anxieties, imagining a horrible future whose nature is so unlike our world's true perils, allowing us to feel better about our usual raft of worries — war, pestilence, a meteor impact, the discovery of a heretofore unknown Kardashian, etc.

This is nonsense. The popularity of zombies arises entirely from the fact that it lets people imagine hitting people in the head with bats and axes. Anyone who has worked in retail understands.

Anyway. Various public events are scheduled to promote the new games, including a "brain-eating contest" at the Mall of America. (The website says: "Do you have the guts? Well, do you?" Errr: brains are not guts.) There will be "Zombies on Ice" at the Xcel, and presumably they will be face down, having fallen the moment they skated out. Perhaps the Zamboni will run over them for additional family fun.

Around town a few days ago, early-bird promotional zombies stood on light-rail platforms, bloody and unsteady, encouraging lottery awareness. Great idea. You can only imagine what a recent immigrant to America might have thought, standing on the platform next to a grue-streaked fellow with a mangled puss moaning softly to himself, swaying slightly. Perhaps someone would explain: It's a stunt for the lottery! And the new arrival thinks, in the old country they had pictures of happy people holding up lots of money. Here it's a guy with Ebola.

It wasn't as if they put out zombies without explanation. There was a slogan. Scratch them before they scratch you! So let's imagine how this works with actual zombies. The undead creature shambles toward you, arms outstretched, a rotting, mindless nightmare that wants to eat you. Your options:

2. Hit it in the head with an ax. You do have an ax, right? There are zombies out there, and you left the house without an ax? Didn't the news anchor say there was a 55 percent chance of scattered undead? And you didn't take your ax? You could stop at the convenience store, but they always jack up the price of axes when the forecast calls for zombies.

3. Inform the zombie that you have already scratched a lottery card, which you believe protects you from zombie bites, and moan, "but the slogan formulation led me to believe I would be spared!" as you are set upon by a crowd of muttering corpses.

I'd go with the ax option every time — if the zombie uprising scenario was remotely realistic, which it isn't. Things that are dead cannot walk around. Oh, but there was a strange mutated bacteria that made them do it! Or a comet. Or bacteria that came from a comet. If bacteria could make dead meat come to life and move, every college apartment fridge would try to walk across the kitchen.

If something did manage to walk around while dead, it would rot and fall over and the raccoons would take it into the sewers, and that just seems an odd choice for a lottery game and PR campaign. I mean, if there's a real nationwide zombie outbreak that infects just about everyone, what are your chances? What are the odds? Not good.

Maybe the lottery's trying to tell you something.

Seriously, I'm asking. I can't think of anything. I know this is the place where the columnist trots out some hardy-har exaggerated examples for Comic Effect. Let's all play Zygi-Zag — match three conflicting statements on Adrian Peterson and win! — but the lottery just makes my brain ache.

It's not physically addictive, or people would save the silver shavings and snort them. It may be psychologically addictive, because there's a momentary rush of pleasurable chemicals in your head when you start, anticipating something good — followed by the same old disappointment. But that also explains why people read newspaper comics, and no one ever thinks "Man, I have to cut down on my Garfield."

You want to play; fine. Zombies don't have free will. Lottery players do. But there's that moment when you consider the things government can do to enhance the general welfare, and somehow "send out blood-smeared actors to promote lousy odds" isn't in the top 10. BRAAAINS! Zombies are supposed to say. But if you had any, you wouldn't play the —

What? GopherPickExtra5 is sending out actors who look like Beethoven, and they stand on the train tracks unable to hear the oncoming light-rail car because Ludwig was deaf, and it's meant to publicize a special lottery to benefit the Orchestra?

OK, give me one. OK, two. Twice the chances of winning!