Category Archives: Lunch

A good friend was in town yesterday and had lunch with us at Ballet. He spoke of recent travels to India, Thailand, Providence, and Ballard. Along with the Pork Special, I was still digesting the madness of Foo Camp from this last weekend.

Todd decided to reward my hard work on some last minute performance improvements with the daily blog entry. At least I didn’t have to pay for lunch. I fully expected that the fates would align in such a way that I would very nonrandomly end my time in Seattle with a massive losing streak.

We tried to have a discussion of the nature of planets and why it was necessary to call for a conference to define what a planet was, but there wasn’t a lot of interest among the earthbound gang. But just for the record, Pluto is a planet, Charon is not, and the Moon will only become a planet once sharks with laser beams blast it out of its orbit.

A review of Snakes On A Plane was a little more interesting although only two of the five of us had actually seen the movie. So much for the target demographic.

My mind is a bit of a jumble after being tossed around in whirlpools, waves, and the San Francisco social scene for the last 16 days. I feel like I’ve been dunked and am just now able to take my first whole breaths. Our lunch conversation at Ballet today seemed to be similarly swirly and lightheaded as everyone was either newly returned from adventures or planning new adventures in the near future. This is one of the signs that this company is working… we’re all gaining momentum in some way or another towards something weird and unknown.

It’s going to take me another day or two to confabulate all of my recent experiences and conversations into something entry-worthy, so for now I’m just going to drop various tasty morsels into this blog entry box and see how they get digested over time.

In the short braindump session, we talked about everything from Eric Hodel rescuing dead cats (do you have a picture, Hodel?), to Todd and Bob ’s scuba diving, to Daniel and his highschool reunion, to my own SF Rock Paper Scissors tournament and river kayaking, to Todd’s Landmark Forum experience, to Bob’s migration to Scotland, and Josh’s yearly escape to Manzanita.

I need a chaser.

Today I write this blog post because Erik paid a three digit lunch bill (including tip). I’m often accused of cheating at Credit Card Roulette but I don’t know how I do it. I bet everybody else are sore losers.

Lunch topics today included the crappy cell phones and cell phone service we have here in the US. One of Erik’s friends had a cell phone with not one, but two cameras! One for photo taking and a second one for video conferencing. In Asia everybody has phones with these kinds of nifty features (and uses them), but here we have to pay extra to get the fancy phones then pay more to use them (if we even can).

Shortly after that we moved into the glorious rent prices of days of old, probably from back when I was in middle school and not even thinking about any of that “real world” stuff. (Not that I do know.)

I have to think of a theme for my Toastmasters meeting next week and one I’ve been considering is the theme of luck. .. a favorite topic of the Robot Co-op, inspired early on in part by the wonderful book Fooled by Randomness (read it). Today, at Bimbo’s Bitchin’ Burrito Kitchen, luck led Bob to pay for our gut bomb of a lunch, and because he claims I cheated (even though I was only looking out for his own self-interest), I get to write the blog post about it.

Josh, a learned student of the classics, brought up the dichotomy of chance and fortune in the context of luck. Chance, the random distribution of good and bad events; Fortune, that fickle lady who determines if you will land on the lucky or unlucky side of the distribution.

Todd, myself, and Bob believe that luck is basically a mislabeled package of personality traits like resourcefulness, boldness, and a positive affect. Feeling lucky often begets being luck… but only when the game is not entirely one of chance. Lucky people seem lucky because they can inspire themselves and others to bring about desirable events… no supernatural blessing required. But, because resourcefulness, boldness, and a positive affect do often lead indirectly to good fortune, the word luck has become an easy label to place on the larger phenomenon. Josh, on the other hand, didn’t appreciate the sloppy bending of the dictionary sense of the word. Which is understandable. I think it’s somehow MySpace’s fault.

In true games of chance, like Roulette, I think we all agreed that feeling lucky has no correlation with how well you’ll do in the game. Sure, you can try employing the Martingale betting strategy or wear a computer that detects flaws in the wheel and takes advantage of them, but as Einstein might have said, “You cannot beat a roulette table unless you steal money from it.” Or, I guess, by quitting when you’re ahead.

In the end, Josh and Bob agreed on some idea of fortune, but I think I was processing a burp at the time and can’t remember what it was exactly.