Four Questions With No Answers

-Every time I see a commercial these days (especially for the big financial firms) there are symbols at the end of it which inform me that the company has a Facebook page, a Twitter account or both. This infuriates my father, because he doesn't understand why people would want to be 'friends' with a business. I think he has a point. Now, I get why you would want to be friends with a sports organization or some other fun company you wanted to work for, but not some random financial firm. Which got me to thinking: What percentage of the people who are friends with a business on Facebook are not employees of that company? I'd put the number at something low, like 5% and I would imagine that even those people work in the same industry as the business they are friends with. I refuse to believe you're going to find random teenage girls who want to see what is going on with Bank of America on a day-to-day basis.

-I recently went to the Coinstar machine and turned in all my loose change, where I discovered that you can either get cash and they take a percentage of every dollar, or you can get a gift certificate with no money taken out. Since I hadn't bought any new music for ages, I went with the iTunes gift card. Upon finding a song I wanted, I was informed that there have been some changes made to the iTunes agreement. Clicking the link I was greeted with a lengthy document. So, here's my question: Is there a smaller transaction with a longer legal contract than what you see when you want to buy music through iTunes? Honestly, it's a .99 cent transaction and the legal document that goes with it is 30 pages. I give you a dollar, you give me the theme song for Sons of Anarchy. We don't need to involve lawyers for this. The Declaration of Independence wasn't this wordy.

-The other night I was eating something and on the package were the rules for a contest I inadvertently entered by purchasing this product. Even though I had already lost, since I had nothing else to do at that moment I began to read the rules. They stated that if you won the contest and didn't want the prize you could instead opt for the cash equivalent of the prizes, which were listed on the packaging. First prize was a new car, valued at roughly $40,000. Second prize was a trip to the set of ESPN's College GameDay and a meeting with crew. Value? About $4,000. Ok, first off, that seems like a large step down from first to second prize. Secondly: Who calculates the value of contest prizes? I only ask because clearly they overestimate how excited anyone would be to go to the College GameDay set. Look, I love that show and I watch it every Saturday before the games. But I would take happily take half that money and stay home.

-One last question: In this day and age of compression tee-shirts and thermal clothes that are skin-tight and therefore easily worn underneath clothing, why are pitchers who get on base during the playoffs still wearing jackets on the basepaths? Really, I can't take you or your sport seriously if you are playing it while wearing a bulky piece of clothing. I mean, can a pitcher really get that cold in the fifteen minutes he might be standing on first base? He should be moving enough (taking leads, potentially running to the next base) that his body won't lock up on him. The fact that they are so worried about it really leads me to doubt their athletic prowess. Also, I hold out hope that if we told the pitchers they could no longer wear jackets on the basepaths, the opposing pitcher, sympathetic to his fellow hurler's plight, would speed things up out of professional courtesy. Then maybe one of these games would end in under 4 fours.