“The number you have reached has been changed. The new number is …” How many times have you heard that message? It turns out that the voice you (and approximately 22 million other people per day) heard belonged to Jane Barbe. She died yesterday at age 74. Ms. Barbe had been recording messages for phone companies around the country for more than 40 years. Pretty amazing.

I wonder if Ms. Barbe ever met AOL’s “You’ve got mail” guy, maybe at some kind of convention of people who make recorded messages heard by gazillions of people every day.

Link via My So-Called Blog

TJ at Twisty asked herself this question and identified the five living and five deceased celebrities she chose.

One of the five deceased celebrities she chose was “grandma.” She conceded that “grandma” was probably only a celebrity to her, but that she “would love to watch her smoke, slug back a brew and listen to her sassy, colorful commentary about the afterlife.” I would love to have a beer with her too, although I always called her “mom.”

TJ made my heart smile.

Several people, all of whom used to be friends, are parties to a New Jersey lawsuit over the ownership of a $25 million lottery ticket. It seems that the fellow who regularly collected a couple bucks each week from a group of co-workers (these days he is called “defendant”) is being sued by his co-workers who claim that he passed off the winning ticket to a former neighbor (he also is known as “defendant”) and shared the winnings with him.

Not surprisingly, the facts are hotly disputed, and no one’s story seems perfect. However, for what it’s worth, the Lottery’s Deputy Director believes the former neighbor who says he has no relationship with the office pool guy, and he doesn’t know anything about any office lottery pool. A Superior Court judge will have to sort it all out.

The moral of the story is that if you take people’s money for a lottery pool, after you buy the tickets, run – don’t walk – to a photocopy machine, make copies and see that everyone in the pool gets copy of the tickets you bought for the pool. This is particularly true if you also buy your own tickets. Cover your ass, because when $25 million is involved, lawyers are easy to find.

It’s not bad enough that New Jersey has what the DOT considers to be lousy roads, and that it leads the nation in car thefts, now we learn via DynamoBuzz, another Jersey Blogger, that we pay the highest auto insurance premiums in the nation. I have a feeling that these three things go together.

Would somebody please call Tony Soprano to get this straightened out. Oh, I forgot. He’s vacationing with the governor.