Madrigal Dinner
So a friend of mine, the one who started Melee, asked me one year if I would be interested in participating in a fund raiser for a domestic violence center. This sounded like such a sophisticated and mature thing for me to do so I said yes. He told me they were doing a Madrigal dinner, basically a recreation of a medieval dinner. He need people to play the royalty and tapped me on the shoulder. I was to play the Castellan of the castle, basically the chief financial officer. I dressed up in some medieval garb, was assigned a lady to escort, and sat at the head table with the king and queen and the Chancellor and his lady. We would march in behind tumblers and jugglers, act royal, and make some occasionally pronouncements about the next stage of the dinner. My good friend Tim would be part of it as well so while neither of us had done anything like this before, we vowed to have a good time at it. Read more »
Posted: August 15th, 2008 under Improvement.
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Yesterday was Hope’s first day of school in first grade. I took the day off from work and we made a big day of it. We took her to school, had lunch with her, and picked her up afterwards. She had a lot of fun and is excited about the new year. It reminded me of what first days of school were like. Every year you had to face this large unknown all by yourself. What would your teacher be like, who would be in your classes, would you have friends to sit next to at lunch? I can remember feeling the stress and nervousness of so many unknowns. I thought about how we rarely experience that in adulthood, the closest thing being starting a new job. It is almost too bad as we lose the ability to adapt over time. 
As I’ve mentioned before, I love to play games. I have a fairly extensive board game collection and at least once a month, I get together with some friends and play. Around the world there are conventions held with the sole purpose of playing games. People fly in from all over and enjoy one, two, sometimes even four or five days of doing nothing but playing games. It should come as no surprise that I have attended my fair share of these events and they are always a lot of fun. One of the draws for these conventions is the chance to play games that you have never played before and also to play with people you’ve never played against. It is playing against these new people that really make the convention interesting. 
One of the more interesting aspects of Economics that I learned in my masters program was the obvious point that people generally make economic decisions that benefit them the most based on the constraints faced. This concept was the main focus of the best selling Freakonomics book a few years back. In it, the authors examined various behavior and using statistics tried to determine why two seemingly disparate pieces of information were actually related. It seems fairly common sense; after all you would expect people to take actions they perceive are in their best interest. Still, why are we surprised when it happens? 
You ever have someone around you that says “I hate to tell you this but…” and then they go off on some negative comment about you or something you do? Do they really “hate to tell you this?” I think they can’t wait to tell you “this” and by prefacing it with “I hate to tell you…” they absolve themselves from hurt feelings and are free to tell you exactly how you feel. Of course that is not how the recipient receives it so the whole point is rather moot.