A look at whether we are starting to consume less. Also, an argument for more consumption of leisure.

Ever wonder how food is prepared for commercials? McDonald’s shows us. I have to confess that I haven’t watched this video. It sounds interesting, but I like McDonald’s food, love the way it looks in ads, and don’t want the illusion spoiled.

Once written off for near-dead, the great plains is apparently enjoying a revival. With the exception of mineral exploration, there’s not much to expect from a lot of these places, but Fargo and Sioux Falls have become quite the booming little cities and Oklahoma City has really come into its own.

The Last Psychiatrist on sex and comediennes (among other things).

All of my anecdata says that working your way through school is a bad idea. It’s becoming harder and harder to do.

A woman in Mississippi was arrested after trying to reunite a dog with its owner, who believe that she stole it. We have a lot of tagless-but-collared dogs around here. I have little fear this would happen to me if I intervened (I have, once, with a dog that had a tag), but this is a bad situation to put people in. People should help loose animals, or decline to, because they want to or don’t want to. They shouldn’t have liability fears.

Three cheers for Robert Samuelson. It takes a fair amount of courage for a columnist – who isn’t known for being a libertarian or a conservative crank – to make the case against college for all. In two parts!

Portland is concerned about food deserts. So concerned that it couldn’t find enough of them and so redefined them.

Why we root for the underdog. I think a couple explanations are missing. First, when an underdog is doing well, it means that it’s a good game because it’s so much easier for the favored team to stage a comeback. When I watched Boise State beating up on Oklahoma, I never felt comfortable with the lead. Had Oklahoma been ahead by as much, I probably would have stopped watching. Also, there is a bit of counterculturalism. We assume that other people are rooting for the better team, and so rooting for the underdog makes us special (even if 81% of people are doing to the same).

I’ve been given the whole “technology is encroaching on our sanity” arguments an unusual (for me) hearing lately, so I read this article on the subject when I might not have otherwise. Do I agree with it? It’s just a really, really hard river for me to cross. The sheer amount of things I can do on my new smartphone has made me wonder, at least a little bit. Not just about the smartphone. To the author’s credit, he avoids the self-contradicting trap of saying “Technology is ruining us, you should be reading instead.” Instead, he’s saying that we should look out of a window or something. This is significant to me, because there’s little more annoying to me on a personal level than those who argue about technology isolating us but also talking about reading books on a train.