Hidden Talents

I know nothing about college basketball and find the whole thing too sprawling to follow, and thus I dutifully avoided the annual March Madness pool at my old firm. My new firm, however, runs a NFL picks pool and I just couldn't help myself. And now I have two hundred and fifty reasons to be glad I joined in the fun.

I'm aware it's not nearly as hard as working with point spreads, but I managed to guess 180 out of 256 games right, for a clip of 70.3%, on my way to the title. That's a couple of percentage points better than Gerry Dulac of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, who gets paid to pick the games. Oh, wait. So do I.

In my experience, found money lives on the longest when it's put to something specific and singular. Early in my legal career I worked on a particularly contentious estate dispute. When the matter was concluded, the grateful client wanted to give me a gratuity. After the supervisory lawyers concluded it would be ethically permissible for me to accept the gift, I tried to find something that we would otherwise not have bought then. We had moved into our first house about eighteen months prior, and it made perfect sense to spend the money on a new comforter, sheets and matching curtains. I'd often look at those curtains or that comforter and think of that case and that kindness.

And so now I will contemplate my NFL prognostication prowess each time I gaze upon this, this, this, this and this.