Finding Freedom

On Monday, one of the personal assistants to one of the big bosses was going around asking for money for an exercise contest that we are apparently having here at the office.

The contest is simple: the person who loses the most percentage of weight in a month wins, and by wins, I not only mean that that person will likely have a longer and more enjoyable life, that person also wins the money that had been collected.

Little do the folks know that they have combined not only my love winning money but also my love of potentially weighing less than a Humvee.

The pot is nearly five hundred bucks. Easy money.

According to a recent post over at the Freakonomics Blog, Pete Rose, the famous baseball player and manager who was banned for life from the game in 1989 for betting on baseball games, signed some baseballs with the inscription “I’m sorry I bet on baseball” for some of his friends who were memorobelia collectors.

Somehow, some of these balls got into the hands of other collectors, who opted to auction them off on ebay.

When Pete Rose heard about this, he started selling new balls with the same inscription over at his own website, thus devaluing the price of the original signed balls.

I think that this story is very interesting. My question is, was Pete Rose angry that somebody stood to profit over something that he had intended as gifts for his friends, or did he himself see an opportunity to make a few bucks, and he ran with it?

I saw this news headline over on yahoo, and I needed some place to share it because I thought it was hilarious. You are looking at that place.

Man Bites Panda After Panda Bites Man.

As you can imagine, this happened after a man who had had a little too much alocohol thought that he would recreate a photo op. Oddly, that panda didn’t want to recreate it, and opted to bite the man instead. With no other real weapons at his disposal, the man opted to bite him back, only to discover that the bear’s fur was too thick to bite through.

If that doesn’t bring a smile to your day, I don’t know what will. I know it brought one to mine.

Disney has made over a million bucks in the last week from selling digital copies of some of its movies on itunes. Because of how well this went, the company is expecting to make over fifty million big ones by the end of the year.

What did they find out about the process? They found that the results of selling movies online made a negligible difference in their dvd sales.

I always knew that Disney was a source of innovative entertainment, but what didn’t really strike me until I read this article is the fact that they really are an innovative company. Companies have to be willing to adapt in order to continually achieve profits, and Disney has found and developed a new trend in entertainment moneymaking.

Good for them.

I am at home today, taking a sick day because, well, I just didn’t feel like my body was working like it was supposed to when I woke up.

When I think about it, besides the obvious immediate gratification of not having to work when you don’t feel like it and getting paid, in my mind, at least, it seems that the company cares for me enough to take care of me when I’m not feeling well. This, in turn, increases my morale and makes me very glad and thankful to have the job that I have, even if I don’t particularly enjoy it.

Because I’m thankful for my job, I’m more likely to do it well than if I were not thankful for my job, which, I imagine, is kind of why they have these policies.

It’s kind of interesting to reflect on how things that don’t specifically make sense in conjunction with one another (not working and getting paid) make sense when you think about them in a broader context.

According to this article at CNN.com, the average gas price for a gallon of the precious, precious liquid in America is $2.50. However, where I live, gas is, on average, about $2.85.

Therefore, somewhere in America, gas must logically be $2.15 per gallon.

My question? Where is this gas, and why don’t I live there?

Anyone? Anyone? Bueller?

I just wanted to jot off a quick post letting you all know that I’ll be gone for a long weekend due to the fact that one of my very best friends is getting married. I’m really happy for him because his fiance seems like she’s just about perfect for him.

I hope you all have wonderful weekends; I know that I will.

The Arizona Diamondbacks are disappointed with how much money they’re making.

Do they,

A) Do nothing and hope things get better on their own,
B) Spend money on trying to get some better players,
C) Spend more money on scouting out the best college players, or
D) Change the team’s colors.

If you guessed D, you’d be right.

I have to say that I agree with the analysis in the article above, especially the lines, “Attention Diamondbacks: Fans will buy your merchandise and go to your games if your team does well. I don’t care if your team colors were baby pink and eggshell, if you made it to the World Series, you would have plenty of rabid fans eager to spend money on everything from Diamonbacks hats to Diamondbacks breast pumps.”

This is an issue that holds particular interest for me because I went through a situation that I think is very similar.

For my B.A., I went to a very small, accredited Christian college. The year after I graduated, the school, like the Diamondbacks, was finding it difficult to make ends meet. So, the administration decided that the best course of action to get new students was not to implement long lasting changes so that the course structure was better or seek out professors that may have been a little bit better at what they did, but instead, to change the school’s name.

And it makes perfect sense, when you think about it. Implementing lasting change is difficult; who wants to do that? Besides, when you’re going to college, you don’t want a name that you can recognize; you want something flashy, like, “A Legitimate College” or “President So and So’s Party Fun Time University.”

I just don’t get it. I don’t get why people will go for a gimmick when the obvious answer is staring them right in the face. Perhaps one day, the answer will come to me.

My call-back on Saturday went really well, and I have really high hopes for it. The auditionees seemed really impressed with me, and I don’t know that I could have done very much better.

Unfortunately for me, rehearsal for the show won’t start for another month, and so the theatre has a large amount of time to figure out who they’re going to cast.

As it is common practice for theatres not to call those who didn’t get parts to let them know that they didn’t get parts (because, really, who would want that job?) and as they did not tell us when they would be letting us know, that leaves a lot of room for self doubt between now and next month.

If this were myspace, I would put that my mood was apprehensive. But it’s not, so I will awkwardly include it as a new paragraph in this post.

I saw a similar post over at Financial Freedumb, and I thought that I would post my own story over here.

I woke up mid morning. Still being in college and not having class until eleven, I was afforded such luxuries.

After taking my shower, I went back to my room to get dressed. I turned on KPBS to listen to while I was going over some homework for my class. I overheard words and phrases like “planes” and “safety issues.” Figuring that this was just another round table discussion about something that didn’t really impact me, I clicked the off button as I grabbed my stuff and headed off for class.

As I was walking, a friend came up to me and said, “So, what do you think of all the craziness?”

Not knowing what she was talking about, I said, “What do you mean?”

She replied, “Our country is being attacked right now. What do you think about that?”

I laughed out loud. I said, “What? Are you serious? That’s the most ridiculous thing that I’ve ever heard.”

She asserted that she was telling the truth, but before we had the opportunity to talk further, we realized class was about to start, so we each went our separate ways.

When I got to my class, the teacher looked grave. Once class started, he told what he knew about what was going on, which, to be fair, was not much. We didn’t know at the time whether planes would keep flying into buildings, or if other terrorist acts would occur.

Shoot, we didn’t even know that it was terrorists that had done the attacking.

Being in San Diego, we were all mildly concerned about our health due to our proximity to the large military community in surrounding area. Would they be attacked next?

The teacher decided that we should continue with class. I’ve got to say, not a lot was learned about that subject that day. After class, I rushed back to a common area on campus that had a tv, and I watched the replays of the planes hitting the WTC. Over and over and over the news showed the same surreal scene, which was almost necessary in that even when I had seen it several times, I still had a hard time believing that it had happened.

I still do.