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Roughly What You Deserve
Back when I was gambling professionally, it seemed like everyone had an opinion on which casino was rigged. I never really thought that, but I also didn’t really think that I was winning as much as I was supposed to. To test this, I recorded every single session I played for over a year. Guess…
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Average People
When I write about “average people” or “average Americans”, I often get flack about it. Some people call me elitist. Occasionally I get called something worse. Then there are the comments about how if everyone did something that I suggest, it wouldn’t work anymore, or that the average person isn’t exactly the same as me,…
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Interesting Art Things
I must be in an art sort of mood. I went to the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston before Christmas, and then went to the Met and Museum of Modern Art in New York after New Years. Today I even skimmed a book on drawing, but gave up after discovering the first exercise in…
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My Daily Meals
A few people asked what I eat every day. I think that what I eat is of minor interest, but maybe the reasoning behind it might be more valuable. First the what. My friend Dick Talens suggested that I do intermittent fasting, which means that I eat during only an eight hour period each day.…
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Stimulation and How I Learned to Love Dishwashing
When I bought a house ten years ago, I also bought place settings for six and silverware for twelve. Then I developed a minor fascination with bone China and bought settings for eight. I probably had four dozen glasses. About once a month or so, all of these dishes would be piled up in and…
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Goodbye 2012
I’m sitting by a crackling fire at my aunt and uncle’s house in New Jersey and we’re just a couple hours into the new year, which means that it’s a perfect time to review the year and look forward. If I were to title my year, I’d call it the year I got serious. Something…
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Being Your Own Boss
Standards are an interesting thing. They don’t dictate exact performance, but they do sketch out a ballpark. If you expect yourself to read a book a week, you may not actually do that, but you’ll probably read a book most weeks. If a boss tells you to have something done one month from now, you’ll…
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Three Speeds of Self Improvement
Yesterday I got a good question from a reader. His email was too long to paste in full, but the gist of the question was that he was trying to do a lot of self improvement stuff at once, and his attention seemed to be too spread to really made a big impact in any…
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On Bullshit
If you’ve been reading for a while, you may have noticed that I almost never swear. I tend to think that there’s a more accurate way than swearing to express anything, but today I couldn’t think of a more fitting word. What is bullshit? Well, it’s watching TV. It’s browsing the internet mindlessly. It’s partying.…
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Consistency is the Hard Part
The one thing I consistently fail to account for when planning trips, especially shorter ones, is the disruption it will cause to my routine. For over a hundred days in a row, I wrote a blog post every day, did a Chinese lesson, worked on SETT, and a few other things for which I hold…
