I haven’t written in a while. Call it a collision among lack of time, lack of motivation and lack of things to say.

But, that tragic alignment can’t last. In that spirit, I offer a handful of things I’ve learned lately.

Incentives spin the world on its axis. Last weekend, a coworker lent me Freakonomics, the intense examination of the everyday by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner. The former is an economist, the latter a journalist. In the book, they present ideas about why people do things and how those actions can have subtle consequences. Many of those ideas ring like common sense in retrospect.

Which brings me to the next item.

Even if you didn’t do it, with an abundance of financial incentives and a dearth of legal disincentives, you’ll gladly try to tell the world you did. I find it encouraging that, even in this surreal world, one can still cross a line of good taste.

Hard boiled eggs, relative to fried ones, are good for you. With that in mind, it makes perfect sense (to the American* mindset, at least) to wrap them in sausage, bread them and deep fat fry them. I thought I had seen the length and breadth of bar grub with the deep fried pickle. I was wrong.

“Get-by guys” are an ugly but necessary component of accomplishment. A “get-by guy” exists to punch a clock and rarely offers a progressive or head-up idea. Think of the little man Hem in Spencer Johnson’s Who Moved My Cheese. (Ugh. Did I just cite a feel-good business self-help book?) Comfortable. Tenured. I like to use get-by guys as rhetorical punching bags (mainly because I fear, at times, that I slip into get-by mode). But, like day needs night, excellence relies on mediocrity for contrast.

* I learned later that this strange delicacy is actually a British dish called Scotch eggs. My first instinct was to attribute the dish to the same American culture that brought the world the deep-fat fried Twinkie and Snickers bar. I was wrong.