A satirist has amassed a large following after John Halpern from Okracoke Island, NC won over $1.3 million in the state lottery by cracking the numerical code hidden in an article written by Dominic Benjamin entitled “Octomoms Claim Numbers Don’t Lie.” Within the article were words that did not quite fit within the context of the story, and when Halpern, noticing this, assigned random numbers to the words, he came up with six numbers that he decided to play in the lottery.
Once word of Halpern’s winnings became public, Benjamin’s online blog site crashed due to the high volume of hits from folks trying to read and decipher his other articles. Benjamin has issued a statement saying that the site will be back online hopefully the first week of February and folks should “count” the days until his next article.