What a nice thought to begin the week.

Spied on the Boulder's main street: A store selling ... hammocks. Yup, they have a month-to-month lease while the landlord looks for a long-term tenant, preferablhy a restaurant. Meantime, the rent is cheap and the hammocks sell, albeit slowly.

There's a big opportunity to assemble temporary space and lease it out to short-term tenants, likie clothing consignment stories, Halloween and Christmas junk, etc.

Hertz is not cheap: On the Internet, the bill came to $586.83 for 8 days. The actual bill came out to $778.40 -- 33% higher because of Hertz' creative additional charges, including "concession fee recovery"," facility use fee," "energy surcharge, "road safety prog fee" and tax. And this was after declining all their various insurance add-ons. The bottom line: To rent Hertz's car cost us $1.85 a mile. Renting outside the airport is clearly cheaper.

The best photojournalism on the Internet is from the Boston Globe. It's gripping stuff -- a village of heroin addicts in Aghanistan, Cuba 31 years after Che, Indian Hindus celebrate Holi, daily life in Karachi, the Sichuan earthquake one year later. See them at Boston.com.

Everything is marketing - Part 1: Spied at a Denver restaurant called WaterCourse Foods. They're called plugs. This was a waiter there. He had plugs in both ears. He told me the cook had ones that were twice as large.

items on the menus included veganaise (a vegetarian version of mayonnaise, milkshakes made with Chicago soy dairy temptation and seitan (pron SAY-tahn) which is "a low fat, high protein, chewy, firm textured meat substitute." Sounds positively delicious.

This is a breakfast vegetarian taco.

It was large. How large? My son -- the one with the worm -- didn't even finish his.

There is a serious shortage of vegetarian restaurants in the U.S. You can see WatterCourse's menu. Click here.

Everything is marketing - Part 2: My favorite recent book, Born To Run, rants about the evila of running in traditional running shoes (like the kind Nike makes). The book argues (very persuasively) that running bare foot will lead to fewer injuries, faster speed and great distances. Barefoot can be painful. Hence the industry's latest product... Vibram's FiveFingers.

They have a Vibram sole which is sort of contoured to your feet. Running in these things allegedly is like running bare foot. And only $80 for the pleasure of feeling you're wearing nothing.

We found them at a Boulder shoe store. Ted, my son-in-law, tried on a pair. Our women thought they were the ugliest shoes they'd ever seen.

From left, Susan (my wife), Claire (my daughter) and Anne (my son Michael's girlfriend).

Despite their ugliness, the shoes are flying off the shelves. Vibram, which makes them, is a private Italian company. (We checked.)

Movie reviews. Check out RottenTomatoes.com.

2009 U.S. Open Tennis Schedule: It starts today. TV coverage of the US Open will be virtually around the clock -- presently on ESPN2 and the Tennis Channel, and then later on CBS. The full schedule is on USOpen.org. Here's today:

Burning Man is on this week. It's the most famous and most popular annual festival out west. Spied on a shop window in Boulder:

For more on Burning Man, click here.

This column is about my personal search for the perfect investment. I don't give investment advice. For that you have to be registered with regulatory authorities, which I am not. I am a reporter and an investor. I make my daily column -- Monday through Friday -- freely available for three reasons: Writing is good for sorting things out in my brain. Second, the column is research for a book I'm writing called "In Search of the Perfect Investment." Third, I encourage my readers to send me their ideas, concerns and experiences. That way we can all learn together. My email address is . You can't click on my email address. You have to re-type it . This protects me from software scanning the Internet for email addresses to spam. I have no role in choosing the Google ads on this site. Thus I cannot endorse, though some look interesting. If you click on a link, Google may send me money. Please note I'm not suggesting you do. That money, if there is any, may help pay Michael's business school tuition. Read more about Google AdSense, click here and here.