Eating sushi makes you more attractive...

...statistically speaking.

According to an article about how Democrats are pinning their hopes on sushi, sushi eaters are more attractive.

They don't show a graph in the article, but I'm assuming they are comparing the amount of sushi restaurants in a city and the attractiveness of the people who live there.

Here's the list of the top 25 cities by human attractiveness: LINK
(only Philly is worse than D.C.)

The original article, which I found on the Freakonomics blog, actually talks about how the ratio of steak to sushi places can be correlated to the blueness or redness of a city.

ACOM tends to be conservative, but he loves sushi. So, clearly it doesn't always work.

The article also highlights a few other fun facts:

• fattest vs. fittest cities - steak doesn't necessarily make you fatter
  
• the most wired cities - no real connection between internet access and the food you eat
  
• steak-eating, Republican-voting cities are getting bigger faster than their sushi-loving, blue state brethren

And the Horrible Pie Chart Truth Will Set You Free

Alternate title: Save Money, Lose Weight, Play More Video Games

After playing with Mint for a few weeks, and fixing some of the (few) mis-labeled transactions, 2 things became abundantly clear:

1. Owning and improving a home in the DC area is expensive as balls.


2. I am spending enough money on fast food and coffee to lease a Kia.

The home improvement isn't that troubling, assuming anyone ever buys or sells a house again. Ever.

But the fast food spending is killing me (quite literally) in several ways. First, there are many better ways to utilize $310/month than Panda Express and Starbucks. Second (and I haven't done the legwork on this) I suspect there are healthier dining options extant.

Enter the magic of the internets. Starting Columbus day (no time to grocery shop before then) I will harness the self-improvement (and waist-line reducing) power of Joe's Goals, ING Direct, and self-loathing to banish fastfood and Starbucks from my (weekday) life. This should help me save money (for to pay off credit cards and buy a 40GB Playstation 3) and bring sexy back.

I typically spend ~$5 on breakfast/coffee and $10 on fastfood lunch and dinner. My thinking is that I can replace $125/week of fastfood with ~$50 of groceries, saving $75/week. Tracking my (hopefully) good behavior on Joe's Goals, I plan on dumping the first $35/saved each week into a no-fun ING account that will go towards credit cards. The other (possible) $40 will go to fun.

I'll check back in a month and let you know how it's going. If you don't hear from me, I'm probably at Pentagon City mall gorging myself on Kung Pao and Orange Chicken.