This blog is overrated.

Consumerist usually does an excellent job as an unapologetic advocate for consumers’ interests in increasingly tough economic times; for instance, the Gawker Media blog has a whole series on the stealth-inflation-causing “grocery shrink ray” even though it’s more or less an invitation for “lazy fat Americans DESERVE to pay the same amount for smaller packages” moralizing. But this list of “Easy Ways To Save Money At The Supermarket” is something of a disappointment. With tips like “Make a list and stick to it,” “[U]se a basket, not a cart. Empty space cries to be filled” and — seriously — “Eat a meal before shopping,” the implication is that trips to the grocery store are expensive because stupefied, stomach-led shoppers mindlessly load up their carts with impulse buys. Some of the advice is completely inaccurate, like the suggestion that the perimeter of the store is “where the healthier, cheaper items hide.” Healthier, probably, but fresh fruits and vegetables are hardly cheaper than processed food. Let me know when one of these lists is written by someone who actually cooks.

The rugged adventurers at Outside magazine have named their “Best Towns in America,” and topping the predictably outdoorsy choices like Ithaca, New York and Crested Butte, Colorado, is, inexplicably, Washington, D.C. “The magazine said one of the things it was looking for is towns that have turned things around.”

The Times’ food-nannying “Well” blog reports on an utterly perplexing study:

Half the women were sent a letter describing the survey as a study of fruit and vegetable intake. The letter included a brief statement of the benefits of fruits and vegetables, a Five-A-Day sticker and a Five-a-Day refrigerator magnet. The rest of the group received a general letter, without mention of fruits, vegetables, stickers or magnets.

Within 10 days of receiving the letters, the study subjects answered a food frequency questionnaire and were asked to recall how many fruits and vegetables they had eaten in the past 24 hours.

The group that had received the Five-a-Day propaganda reported significantly higher consumption of fruits and vegetables. The conclusion: people lie about how many fruits and vegetables they eat. “Because the two groups were randomly selected, average fruit and vegetable consumption should have been similar.” Really? Wasn’t one of the groups just told repeatedly about how important it is to eat fruits and vegetables? Why wouldn’t that make a difference in their eating patterns? This looks like some pretty incredible cynicism on the part of the nutritional establishment; the de facto admission seems to be that nutrition researchers regard the general public as a bunch of liars — and their own public health campaigns as completely ineffective.

Why doesn’t experimental fiction involve handing out packets of different kinds of fiction to different groups in a double-blind study? You could have a control group that gets some nonfiction too.

Cities usually get a little excited about making it on to the latest best-places ranking, sure, but how often do you see one that’s thrilled to have almost placed on such a list? That would be Baltimore’s reaction to its not-quite-top-10 finish on the new “America’s Best Cities for Design” survey.

Also in best-cities news: why the Texas fixation on so many of these lists? Forbes ranks Houston, Dallas and Austin as the top three cities for recent college grads.

Inside’s Higher Ed’s “Mama PhD” blog, a recent and somewhat dubious addition to the site,
today stirs up vaccination fears and expounds on the dangers of “sodium laurel [sic] sulfate.” The sources: unnamed “news reports” and a friend’s blog, respectively. “I read in another friend’s phenomenal blog (facebook reconnection again) about how she found sodium laurel sulfate in her face scrub and how it is not only a possible carcinogen but lends to the killing of marine life as well.”

Inside Higher Ed, if you’re not familiar with it, is home to many cranky academics who like to bemoan their students’ tendency to cite lazily or not at all.

As an undergrad, I lived on campus all four years, as did just about all of my classmates. So it was a bit of a culture shock to go to grad school at Michigan, where there is an odd social stigma against living in the dorms past freshman year. As a sophomore, you’re supposed to move off-campus as soon as you can, into a most likely dilapidated, slumlord-owned Ann Arbor house with seven of your best friends that you leased 11 months in advance. (Nine months now, since a new law was passed.) And grad dorms? Forget about it, unless you’re a parent or an international student who has to arrange housing in a hurry. I had a number of theories about who might have an interest in perpetuating this attitude. The university, for one; Michigan has just started building their first new dorm since the 70’s. And, of course, the landlords. Even if no one actually moves back to the dorms, just the idea that they’re a viable option could make student tenants better negotiators. When living on campus no longer marks you as a loser, there’s less pressure to sign the first lease that comes along.

So it’s encouraging that students may be starting to realize that living right near their classes in a large community of students with a nonsleazy nonprofit landlord might not be such a bad deal after all.

Technohipster Jakob Lodwick quits the internet over harsh comments from his various detractors. “I may be a millionaire but…this sort of thing still hurts,” he writes. “You may conceptualize the Unites States as a great nation. But it’s also a big tribe, with its own irrational taboos. One of them is: don’t talk proudly about your achievements.”

This may be a good time to mention (proudly!) that, in the latest D&D campaign I’m playing, I’ve named my half-elf warlock “Lodwick.” Okay, there’s no really good time to mention that. But he describes Gawker’s Alex Pareene as an elf, so it’s totally pertinent!

No one refers to individual articles in Harper’s as “magazines”. So why are blog posts increasingly (I have no evidence that it’s increasing, but that makes it a “trend”) considered “blogs”?

Scientists have proved that the hormone oxytocin turns writers into spouters of inane pseudoscience and groundless speculation. Well, not yet, but it’s pretty likely that they will. First it was used to explain the now-debunked “fact” that women talk more than men. Now a science writer at the Times of London is waxing dystopian about a new study showing that the chemical may calm anxiety:

The potential uses of oxytocin could ultimately extend well beyond individual patients and into commercial environments. Restaurants, for instance, could spray a thin mist over customers to put them at ease.

It could be used as a benign form of tear gas, quelling any violent feelings among groups of demonstrators, or even to prevent extramarital affairs.

Lots of “could”s there. The reactions at Metafilter are mostly predictable (OMG SOMA!), whereas you can be fairly sure that if some writer mused that, say, salvia “could” be introduced into the water supply, they’d recognize the suggestion as the media-driven War on Drugs hysteria it is. At least one poster sums it up accurately: “It’s like [journalists] are amateur science-fiction writers.”