Chance is a kind of religion where you're damned for plain hard luck...

I lost an ebay auction last night. The item on the block was a Gibson guitar signed by The Edge, offered to raise money for Music Rising, a charity aimed at restoring musical instruments to those who lost theirs during last year's hurricanes.

The bidding was at $5,600. With three seconds to spare, I entered a bid of $6,556, a nice symmetrical number. But symmetry doesn't matter when it comes to ebay. Another bidder had set his/her maximum bid at an amount higher than mine and they won the auction with a bid entered on 9/28. Final price: $6,656. That's ok. It was a long shot and that's a lot of money for a guitar even if it is for a great cause and even if it is signed by The Edge.

I told my wife earlier in the day that she should start thinking of ways to talk me out of bidding, but she was pretty supportive, choosing to think of it as an investment. Investments need to be sold eventually, and she was concerned that I would never want to sell this one, so she was glad that I didn't have time to revise my bid upward. I do wonder though -- what was "bssweed's" maximum bid? Was I close? I take some comfort that I extracted an additional $1,056 for the chartiy. That's good for everybody (except, perhaps, bssweed.)

Oh well. As my friend Russell often says, "Good times!"