This is a graph of the Dow Jones Industrial Average on Friday October 10, 2008. There were a lot of very nice peaks, but there were also very, very many more valleys. I love the valleys within the valleys. I’m just a meek PR major, what do I know about economics and/or the stock market. Ladies and Gentlemen I know that when the markets are down, you do not sell. I don’t know who started this wonderful trend of panicking when someone yells, “the sky is falling!” It has the same resounding effect as, and I’m stealing this directly from Dr. Chris White, yelling “FIRE!” in a crowded theatre. Everyone jumps up drops their belongings and runs away crying.

This sheep-like mentality is killing me. I don’t usually watch the markets, but after the whopping 700+ point drop last week, I haven’t been able to stop watching. There are a lot of people that have lost a lot of money in the recent market flops, but I am having trouble sympathizing with some individuals that are selling out, because they think it’s the smarter thing to do. This is what happens when you allow people who don’t know even the basics of supply and demand to invest in the markets. People sell when the prices start falling because they seem to not understand that Warren Buffet is going to come in behind them and buy their newly dropped stock, and the prices will rise again. If no one wants it, then the prices are low. Thusly is everyone sells their shares, the prices drop. It’s a very simple concept. Honestly if I wasn’t living the life of an undergrad, I’d be investing. There are quite a few nice deals out there currently among the floundering prices, Ford Motors is down to $2.00 a share of Christ’s sake.

Maybe I’m too young and naïve to understand what’s going wrong. I feel reassured by the people I’ve discussed this with that I’m not an idiot, but the sellers are. I hope life works out for everyone.

We went to the San Diego Zoo on Friday. This place is awesome! We took a lot of pictures, but due to complications we had to buy a disposable camera, and we haven’t developed the photos yet. As soon as I get those done they will be up! We got to see the Pandas, Polar Bears, Galapagos Tortoises, Komodo Dragons, Okapi, Sun Bears, this list could seriously go on for a long time. We had a blast at the zoo! We even got to go on a bus tour which was fun, and take the sky trolley across the zoo twice! That was intense, I’m usually not into heights, but that day I decided to just go for it! We left the zoo about ten minutes after they were asking everyone to leave. In the toy shop they had a stuffed hedgehog that I contemplated buying for Layla, but didn’t. After the zoo we went to Wal-Mart. I can never seem to escape that place, even when in a different state. We bought snack foods and stuff like that. We met a very kind person that let us in on some local secrets, about different areas that was kind of them. While at Wal-Mart we attempted to remedy our camera situation. After purchasing one disposable camera for $13.00, we needed something else. We bought a Digital Photograpy for Dummies camera for $30.00. This is the most crap-tastic camera ever. I’ll post some of the photos we took with it, and you will see. However it did get us through an afternoon of picture taking, and the pictures are decent enough.

At this point we had been taking cabs everywhere we needed to go, but that was getting ridiculous. It cost us almost $40.00 to get to Wal-Mart from the zoo. Cab pricing is messed up in my opinion. I don’t know who chose these seemingly arbitrary numbers, but I think they’re bad numbers. For those of you who don’t know, cabs charge $2.40 as soon as you enter the vehicle, then they charge another $0.20 for every 1/13 of a mile. 1/13? Really? Why? On Saturday we learned about the trolleys and the rest of San Diego’s amazing public transit system.

On Saturday we spent the morning being lazy and watching the tele. We did finally get up though and head over to the Seaport Village. We were told it was a place filled with shops and such, but it was kind of disappointing. There weren’t many shops, but there were some great food joints. There was an artwalk going on that day, where all of these artists had their work out on display and for sale. We bought two painting from a very kind Taiwanese man named Gary Poon. His painting are watercolor on silk, and they’re magnificent. I will post photos of those soon too! We also spent some time at the Fashion Valley Mall on Saturday. We mostly did window shopping, but we also each bought new clothes because we needed something more formal to wear. We then went to see the new Pacino/DeNiro movie Righteous Kill it was a pretty awesome flick. Nice and twisty and such. If you haven’t seen it yet, go do it now.

On Sunday we did more early morning lounging, because that always feels nice. We then went out on the trolley and spent some time at another shopping center. This place however gave me my first In-N-Out Burger experience. The burge was delicious. I even enjoyed their secret sauce or whatever they may call it. The burgers look so small, yet so filling. Not to mention the place is cheap. I ate a burger and fries for less than $5.00, beat that McDonalds. While shopping on this day we purchased a Nintendo DS for ourselves. We’ve been debating this for almost a year now, and decided that it was silly to keep waiting. We then spotted a Radio Shack. I was very disgruntled by the cheapo digital camera we had purchased, so we went in to find a battery charge for girlfriend’s regular camera. Luckily we found one, and it worked great!

Sunday evening was interesting. It started with some nice DS playtime, then moved on to us getting ready for dinner. We had decided on Friday that we were going to go on a dinner cruise out on San Diego Bay. It looked like a lot of fun, and we had a two-for-one coupon! As girlfriend was gettign ready, she decided to paint her toenails. This was going fine and dandy until we realized the crack in the fingernail polish bottle, which occured because of the pressure changes in the plane, was not sealed. There was now a healthy cover of fingernail polish on a box she was using and our rooms carpet. This escalated us both to panic mode! We tried scrubbing it out of the floor with what we had, but eventually gave up, then we got it stuck in the bath tub and sink. This part is awesome! Girlfriend had gotten it on her hand, and while standing up accidentally close her fist. Now her entire palm was a gorgeous pearlescent red, and we had no way to get off except some baby-wipe-like fingernail polish remover wipes. We scrubbed for hal fan hour to get it mostly off, then we had to rush off to our very expensive dinner! As she was putting on her shoes girlfriend realized only one foot had toenail polish on it. That was exciting, and we had no time and no means to remove it, so we went with it anyway.

We made it to the boat with plenty(!) of time to spare. We boarded at 6:30 and all was well. We had out picture taken, we were sat at our reserved window seat, and then everything went to Hell. We were seated next to a very obnoxious couple. They weren’t dating, but they knew each other some how. We could never figure it out. They were loud and very rude to the wait staff. They were on a yacht, for a dinner cruise, and instead of sipping some more refined drink or wine or anything at all, they decided to go fro Jaeger-bombs and shots of Patron. Our steward eventually came to us and whispered that he had an open table across the boat from them. We leapt at this opportunity. After we left them our night was very, very nice! It was a fantastic 3-course meal, and a bottle of champagne for us to share, except I can’t really stand the taste of champagne. WE have lots of pictures from the boat too that I will soon share.

Today is Monday. The conference officially starts today, and we’re busy with that. I don’t know what all I’m going to do today, but we’ll see!

This whole hurricane thing has become unnecessarily inconvenient for me in less than 12 hours. First, and this isn’t a bad thing, it was just surprising, my father informs me that my mother and brothers would be arriving at my house bright an early this morning. This was apparently meant to be the first stop in their grand trek north. That’s not anything to worry about, except whenever they called to tell me this we were having a minor “party-time” at the house. There were only 4 people there including us, but it was a buzz-kill. So we went to bed. Surely enough my mom and brothers arrived at my house around 7:15 this morning. I’m not sure exactly where they’re going after Huntsville other than north.

As you can see that isn’t that big of a deal. Problems arose whenever we learned that parts of Harris County were being forced to evacuate! This normally means nothing to me, but I’m supposed to fly out of Houston tomorrow. We considered changing our flight to Dallas or Austin, but apparently there’s connecting flights in Houston for all of them. After a 20 minute wait on hold with Continental’s bad, bad, bad Muzak we changed our flight to earlier in the morning. We’re also going to stay near the airport over night. Hopefully this works out! I should be in San Diego tomorrow morning, several hours earlier than originally intended. I still plan to get to the San Diego Zoo this weekend before the conference activities begin. We shall see.

Hurricanes Suck. Why hasn’t modern science created something worthwhile to help kill them? I mean if meteorologist know how they work, should they know how to kill them? I mean we know how zombies work, and with that information we have designed a method to kill them. Disable the brain, but never use fire arrows. Apparently zombies can burn for days and continue to eat brains.

This is why I haven’t been around much lately. I’ve been trying to think of something worthwhile wo blog about, but I’ve been failing at most attempts. The fall semester began, and that has essentially, and reasonably speaking, been occupying most of my time. It also means that I’ve been reading a lot, but text books, articles, case studies, and court cases, instead of my beloved books. I’m still making my way through Freakonomics, which is amazing by the way, but I’m almost done. I am not sure what I am going to pick up next. Hopefully I find something worthwhile. I’m still sad that I didn’t read as many books this summer as I did last. I’ll make it up!
Next week I will be in San Diego, CA. I can’t wait. I’ve never been to California before, and I’ve never flown that far before. I’ve actually only ever flown once, and that was just from Houston to Austin. I’ll be posting next week about my adventures in San Diego with pictures! That will be crazy, since I never do that.

I am also considering revamping chetg.com with a new design. I’m not inspired yet, but hopefully in the very near future i’ll have something new that both you and I love. We shall see I suppose.

–Chet G.

I once attended a session with Brady. I was a young college freshman. I wanted to get in on the political game. It was an election year for congress and governor, I was armed with my vote registration card and I was ready to roll heads in Austin. So of course I had to attend this pivotal meeting to hear Brady’s stance on the issues. I quickly learned that I would not be voting for Kevin Brady’s right-wing point-of-view. I haven’t really paid much attention to him since he was elected, as pathetic as that may be. Today though, since he was coming at me loud and clear at 6:30 this morning I listened again, he was giving his opinion on Senator John McCain’s Vice-Presidential Candidate Sarah Palin. He said that he feels that she was a good choice because she has the most executive experience out of everyone else in the race. This is laughable for me because her executive experience consists of acting as mayor in a township in Alaska and serving two years as Governor of Alaska. While these are legitimate executive positions, I don’t think they’re comparable to vice-presidency. I hear that she’s performed great reforms in Alaska. I want to know is that really much of a task? Alaska has a population of 683,424. Houston has a population of 2,208,180. It appears to me that it would be more difficult to cause reform in the city of Houston than in the entire state of Alaska. However I’m not a Political Science analyst, so maybe I’m wrong. I still think Brady’s logic fails.

While in my Principles of Marketing class we were discussing the value of one service versus another. Today we were specifically comparing the value of flying Southwest from Houston to Dallas, or driving from Houston to Dallas. Apparently, in the early days of Southwest, they wanted to compete openly with driving. That is how this discussion arose. Logic says that if the benefits of flying outweigh the lesser cost of driving (completely dependent on your vehicle’s fuel economy, and the state of crude oil futures.) then the value is higher. However one woman in class stated that Southwest flies out of Houston’s Hobby Airport which is on the south side of town. She said that since she lives on the north side of Houston she’d rather just drive to Dallas than have to drive all the way to Hobby. Immediately my brain exploded in an interrobang! I could not for the life of me figure out why this woman preferred to drive 190 miles to Dallas rather than the 60 miles to Hobby Airport. This caused my brain to swell, and I considered pointing out her fallacy in class, but decided to stumble instead.

That’s all I got for today.

This new show, Secret Life of the American Teenager, starring Molly Ringwald, has broken all of those rules in less than a season. Here’s a list of everything talked about in this show thus far:

1. Teenage Pregnancy
2. Faith & Religion
3. Adoption Pains
4. Abortion
5. Adultery
6. Gay Marriage
7. Teenage Masturbation
8. Alzheimer’s Disease
9. Teenage Marriage
10. Lying
11. Jealously

and any other biblical no-no you can think of. Many of these occured in a single episode! Reverand Camden thought he had it bad when Mary trashed her school! Intense, yo. If you’re bored and curious, you can check out the show on ABC Family’s Web site, or any other T.V. show provider out there that I’m not really supposed to visit.

Chet

This image belongs to: Rumplo.com.