This wins the award for the best sign (among many hilarious mock-signs) at Jon Stewart's political Rally for Sanity last weekend in Washington D.C.:

How Seinfeldian: it identifies an issue everyone thinks about but rarely analyzes. Why do Mexican restaurants not provide more than three or four tortillas with a fajitas order? Order fajitas and you inevitably run out of tortillas before the meat and veggies are eaten.

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Last week I met with a friend who subscribes to this blog via Kindle. He pulled up to our meeting place, got out and stood in front of his car, and waved me over. He popped open the trunk. I looked. He had just come from picking up groceries. Plop in the middle was a full rotisserie chicken. I asked, "You read my post?" He smiled and nodded. I had a quiet moment, and reflected. To think my blogging has had that kind of impact — to know that more supermarket rotisserie chickens have made their way into the homes of hard working men and women, to know that said men and women will be enjoying not only warm chicken right away but also cold chicken leftovers for days to come…goosebumps, goosebumps. (Thanks to Jackie Danicki for turning me on to the wonders of inexpensive supermarket rotisserie chicken.)

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Here's my post on bread baskets, menus, and waiter eitquette. I talk about fish oil and supplements here. Here's my ode to the rice cooker. Paul Graham thinks the number of restaurants in a city that require men to wear a jacket and tie is an indicator of that city's potential as a tech center. Here are Michael Pollan's nine rules of thumb for good nutrition.

Last year the always worthwhile Adam Gopnik wrote a great piece about cookbooks. Delightful reading for anyone unusually interested in cooking. For the rest of us, there was one big overarching practical nugget:

…hyper-seasoning, and, in particular, high salting, is a big part of what makes pro cooks’ food taste like pro cooks’ food….

Mark Peel, in his Campanile cookbook, comes near to giving the game away: “We chefs all lie about our mashed potatoes,” he admits. “We don’t tell you we’ve used 1½ pounds of cream and butter with 1¾ pounds of potatoes. You don’t need to know.” (Joël Robuchon, the king of his generation of French cooks, first became famous for a purée that had an even higher proportion of butter beaten into starch.)…

After reading hundreds of cookbooks, you may have the feeling that every recipe, every cookbook, is an attempt to get you to attain this ideal sugarsalt-saturated-fat state without having to see it head on, just as every love poem is an attempt to maneuver a girl or a boy into bed by talking as fast, and as eloquently, as possible about something else.

I've learned a bit about cooking over the past several months. Below, I add two points of advice to Gopnik's:

1. Add salt.

2. Buy rotisserie chickens from the supermarket.

3. Buy a rice cooker.

I am an entrepreneurial, adventurous person hungry for new experiences. I enjoy experimenting. I am above-average in my appetite for risk. Why have I not done a single drug in my life? Why no weed, cocaine, LSD, cigarettes, mushrooms, etc?

I am not sure. I know a few other people who are in a similar position and they are also genuinely perplexed.

Some possible reasons:

1. Not doing drugs when young actually was the risk-taking behavior. Most people around me were smoking at least marijuana. There was a lot of social pressure to do drugs. By choosing not to, I risked social alienation while also signaling independence and free spiritedness.

2. Early on I became known as the guy who "doesn't smoke" and therefore a no-drugs attitude became part of my identity. Once an identity forms, it's hard to act in ways that contradict it.

3. My first exposure to drugs was in high school and the people who did a lot of drugs, including marijuana, tended to be the stupidest in terms of raw horsepower and work ethic. I associated weed with those people, and I did not want to be those people.

4. I am unusually health-conscious and I perhaps unfairly lump all drugs together when assuming they harm physical and/or mental health.

5. I am deferential to the law (though I often challenge the authority structure in other situations). I have never been arrested or in jail. While I drank alcohol when under-age, alcohol would soon become legal at age 21 so it seemed less-bad than smoking marijuana, which is always illegal no matter the age.

6. At this stage in life I do not know where I would buy drugs, how much to buy, how it works, how to verify purity, and so on. There is a non-trival logistical barrier.

7. The benefit of drug use is unclear and since I cannot calculate it, I would rather spend my money on other things.

8. I fear addictions. This explains, by the way, why I do not drink coffee.

9. I like to be in control of most situations and I fear relinquishing that control if high on a drug.

Note that I am pro-marijuana legalization from a policy perspective. I could be convinced that we should legalize or decriminalize other drugs. I do not think less of adult professionals who smoke pot from time-to-time though I inexplicably find pot-smoking a turn-off when pondering the sexual attractiveness of women.

Here is a long reflective piece on the experience of smoking cactus, via Nathan Labenz, and it is pieces like this which pique my curiosity.

I am already a pretty happy person with plenty of friends (I don't need them for social life) and while the temptation for new experiences exists it's not strong enough to get me to move the status quo. My main question about drugs, then, revolves around personal utility. Could they improve my relaxation habits when not on the drug? Could they help me focus or concentrate when not on the drug? I am saying "not on the drug" because I have heard that the experience on the drug opens new dimensions that stay with you. Could they improve my ability to introspect? Would being high on cactus for one day, for example, inspire me to think big thoughts while on the high that I could remember and think about post-high?

These are honest questions, and I suspect Vince Williams, among others, will have answers in the comments section.

Nassim Taleb, of Fooled by Randomness and Black Swan fame, has a new-ish essay up on his site called Why I Do All This Walking, or How Systems Become Fragile. He ponders health and fitness strategy by thinking about our ancestors. Our ancestors walked aimlessly a lot and occasionally had to sprint if we were being chased or doing the chasing. Plenty of idleness, he says, some high intensity. He questions the modern obsession with regular exercise and discusses his own effort at sporadic weight lifting sessions followed by several weeks of being totally sedentary. At the end he links it back to his larger ideas around systems theory.

The footer says “do not quote” the piece, so I won’t excerpt here, except by providing a link to the free PDF. Thanks Seth Roberts for the pointer.

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At the bottom of Taleb’s homepage he posts his email address and invites readers to contact him. With some qualifications:

Concise messages are much preferable (say a maximum < 40 words) as I will not be able to read long letters. Please do not 1) send me your papers or other “interesting material” to read, 2) ask finance questions (not my specialty, 3) make me to rewrite sections of my books (I write books, not emails), 4) ask for a list of “other interesting books to read”, 5) ask me to provide career or educational advice, 6) send me passages from Tolstoy or the Ecclesiast on luck and randomness, 7) send me the list of typos in my drafts. Note that I almost always reply (but ONLY to short messages), time permitting (but once) –even to nasty emails. Finally, note that, thanks to my new keyboard, I sometimes reply in Arabic, particularly to academics. [Also please please refrain from offering to “improve” my web site].

He opens his piece on walking by noting that thanks to the “exposure” of his books he came onto theories about fitness by two authors. I imagine this happend by a reader writing in and sharing “interesting material” of the sort he says he does not want. I have never emailed Taleb, but I don’t take his qualifications seriously. It is, in fact, a very naked way to signal busyness and importance.

When you're on-the-go, finding a gym can be hard and going for a run outside is always fraught with the risk of getting lost.

So I now pack two good exercise tools in my suitcase that allow me to do a workout anywhere, anytime:

1. Jump rope – A jump rope is light, compact, and use-able anywhere. Because you stay in one place, you can simply take one step outside your hotel building and get after it.

2. Ripcords – I discovered these when their CEO, a blog reader, emailed and offered to send me a box. They're awesome. You can do many types of exercises with resistance bands.

Another blog reader, Adam Gilbert who's CEO of MyBodyTutor.com, emailed me a workout plan that requires nothing but a floor:

1. Jumping jacks – Do 4 sets of 50

2. Body Weight Squats – Do 3 sets of 20 (shoulder width)
(http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zqj1qjIA6E0 – Great video to watch for form)

3. Wall Sit – 2 sets of 1:30 each
(http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tDjKeOCgisw – Good video to watch for form)

4. Calf Raises  – 4 sets of 25 each

5. Push ups (shoulder width) – 3 sets of 20 each (Go slow and steady.)

6. Push ups (close grip) – 3 sets of 20 each (Go slow and steady. Again, own the exercise!)

7. Lying Torso Raise – 3 Sets of 15 each

Directions: Lie face down on the floor and place your hands loosely behind your head. Slowly raise your upper body until your chest is a few inches off the floor. You should feel your lower back muscles contracting as you rise up. Hold the top position for two-seconds then slowly return to the starting position and repeat.

8. Crunch – 3 sets of 15 each
(http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TKg_cdwq9l4 – Good video on how to do them. Most importantly crunch your chin up towards the ceiling. Look up! And hold!)

9. Bicycles – 3 sets of 30 each (Every time you touch a knee it counts as one)
(http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vPKXFarXbys – Very good video with great form!)

10. Plank (Hold for 2 minutes or as long as you can. 2 minutes is the goal though.)
(Perfect form – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Ar2iRusnnc)