Half a cookie

Walking around the bakery at my local H-E-B, I noticed these delicious-looking oatmeal raisin walnut cookies:

I love oatmeal raisin cookies, and at 150 calories per serving, these didn't seem too fattening. Should I buy them?

Then I took a closer look at the serving size:

Seriously? Who only eats half a cookie at a time?

Weak, H-E-B. Very weak.

Houston 31, Arizona 28

Ethan Sanchez kicked a field goal as time expired and the Cougars notched a homecoming win over the Arizona Wildcats to become bowl-eligible.

The Good: Houston's ground game. The Cougars gained 232 rushing yards, 100 of which were courtesy of RB Dean Connors and another 98 of which came from QB Conner Weigman. The UH offensive line's ability to open running lanes against Arizona's defense was good enough for them to be named the Big XII's Offensive Line of the Week. Who had that on their bingo card this season?!

The Better: In addition to his 98 yards rushing, Conner Weigman passed for 163 yards and 3 touchdowns. Amare Thomas, who led the Cougars in receiving yards, caught two of those scoring passes. Weigman also had no interceptions and was not sacked once.

The Best: Houston's game-winning drive. After the Wildcats had scored 14 unanswered points in the fourth quarter to tie the game, the Cougars put together a calm and methodical 13-play, 4:48, 52-yard drive to get well into Sanchez's field goal range. A textbook way to win a football game!

The Bad: As good as Houston's defense has been this season, they gave up 381 total yards to the Wildcats, 269 of which came through the air. Arizona QB Noah Fifita was amazingly accurate, completing 24 of 26 passing attempts with no INTs. To the UH defense's credit, he was also sacked four times.

The Ugly: The 11 am kickoff.  The heat and humidity were brutal (Houston hasn't had much in the way of autumn weather so far), and I'm not sure half of the announced attendance of 28,535 ever actually made it into the stadium. Additionally, 11 am kickoffs ruin homecoming festivities.

What It Means: This was a good game between two evenly-matched teams, and the fact that Houston was able to pull ahead at the end means that they will finish the season with no worse than a .500 record and go to a bowl for the first time since the 2022 season. The Coogs need to win just one more game to secure a winning season.

Next up for the Cougars is a trip to Tempe, Arizona to face Arizona State.

Behold, the Southeasternwest Conference!

As seen on social media:

You could even add former SWC school Rice and former SEC school Tulane to get to an even 24 teams. Doing so would have the added effect of raising the conference's academic profile...

On coffee

The Atlantic's Ellen Cushing explains why, in spite of its ever-increasing cost and the availability of any number of caffeine-delivering alternatives, coffee is "the drink that Americans won't give up without a fight:"

Coffee is fixed in our culture, our economy, our rituals, and our brain chemistry. It is the country’s most consumed beverage aside from water, and its psychoactive ingredient, caffeine, is by far the most popular drug on Earth. On any given day, an American is likelier to drink coffee than they are to exercise, pray, or read for pleasure. The U.S. has more Starbucks locations than public libraries. Coffee gave us the Enlightenment, and insurance, and the most puissant bop of summer 2024. It is so crucial to the machinery of capitalism that many employers give it away, like pens or any other essential office supply. It is the only consumable I can think of that people regularly joke about dying without (which is funny because, again, it provides nothing our bodies actually need to live). It is the thing in a big carafe at every meeting, and on the menu at nearly every restaurant, and built into our language as a widely understood shorthand for “having a conversation with another person.”

Due to a variety of factors - chief among them, the Trump administration's tariffs on coffee-producing countries such as Brazil and Vietnam - American coffee drinkers are paying about 40 percent more for their cup of joe than they were a year ago. Congress recently introduced a bill to exempt coffee from Trump's tariffs, but it remains to be seen if it will go anywhere, even if and when the current government shutdown ends. 

It is also a fascinating symbol of the interdependence, and the limitations, of an internationalized food system and the free-trading global order. “Coffee is a good way to think about how the world works,” the author and food historian Augustine Sedgewick told me when I called him to chat about it. Aside from on a few comparatively tiny farms in Hawaii, California, and Puerto Rico, coffee doesn’t grow in the United States: We cannot make the drink that we cannot live without. And though we expect coffee to be cheaply and abundantly available, its production is tremendously costly and difficult, even before tariffs.

Coffee is a strange crop because it only grows in particular altitudes and soils, and is rather complicated to procure and prepare. Its harvesting, cleaning and roasting requires a great deal of manual labor - and that all happens before the barista grinds the beans and makes your latte. Honestly, it seems weird that we drink it at all. 

Yet we can't seem to live without it, and we intimately feel the pain when we have to pay more for it.

The Coogs at midseason 2025

I got kinda busy over the last few weeks and haven't had a chance to write about Cougar football. Here's a quick rundown of their last three games:

Houston 27, Oregon State 24 (OT): It's not how you start, it's how you finish. Houston played unprepared and uninspired football for most of this game, and at one point trailed the winless Beavers by two touchdowns. However, in the final six minutes of regulation the Cougars scored 14 points and blocked what would have been a game-winning field goal attempt by Oregon State for force overtime. Then, in the extra period, UH stuffed the Beavers on fourth down and kicked a field goal of their own to escape Corvallis with a win they really didn't deserve. 

To be fair, this game had "trap" written all over it: that the Coogs were able to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat reflects well on their character. "I mean, nothing brings a team closer than a game like this,” Tight end Tanner Koziol said after the game. “Now we've looked at each other in the face of a loss, and we brought it out to a win." Of course, the Cougars were also beneficiaries of Oregon State's uncanny ability to find ways to lose; a few weeks after this game, their head coach was fired. 

Houston 11, #11 Texas Tech 35: All good things must come to an end, and such it was for Houston's four-game winning streak to start the season at the hands of a physically superior Texas Tech squad. Houston just couldn't get anything going on offense, as they turned the ball over three times and were held to only 12 first downs the entire game. QB Conner Weigman was replaced by Zeion Chriss late in the first half, after suffering a head injury. It's a credit to the Cougar defense that this score wasn't worse than it was. The Red Raiders were held to field goal attempts on seven of their drives (and two of those FG kicks were missed). 

The announced attendance of 42,806 was the fourth-largest crowd in TDECU Stadium history. Unfortunately, a lot of those attendees were Texas Tech fans.

Houston 39, Oklahoma State 17: The Cowboys are in a bit of a freefall, having fired longtime coach Mike Gundy a few weeks ago. They simply weren't much of a match for the Coogs, who rolled up 487 total yards of offense. Conner Weigman threw for two touchdowns and ran for another, and Dean Connor's one-handed touchdown catch may end up being Houston's top highlight of 2025. The Houston defense made things difficult for Oklahoma State's converted wide receiver QB, Sam Jackson V, who completed 7 of 16 passes for 84 yards with an interception and was sacked twice.

What It Means: At the halfway point of the season, the Cougars are 5-1, which already exceeds their win total from all of last year, and are just one win away from bowl eligibility. The offense has made definite improvement compared to last year, and the defense has remained solid in spite of fears it would take a step backwards this season. The program is definitely on a positive trajectory, and Ryan credits this improvement to the Coogs' success in the transfer portal.

However, this is not to say the Cougars are a great team by any means. With the exception of FCS Stephen F. Austin, none of the teams the Cougars have beaten currently have a winning record. They were completely outclassed by Texas Tech, and their sluggish starts in games like Rice and Oregon State are cause for concern. That's why, in spite of their record, the Coogs aren't even receiving votes in the AP top 25 poll. The remaining schedule is formidable and ESPN's FPI only clearly favors Houston in one remaining game (West Virginia). A winning season isn't assured.

The Cougars host the Arizona Wildcats at TDECU Stadium this weekend.

Has Iceland's tourist bubble burst?

A couple of weeks ago, an Iceland-based budget carrier suddenly ceased operations, stranding thousands of travelers:

In an unfortunate turn of events, low-cost Icelandic airline PLAY ceased operations without warning on Monday, September 29, 2025, leaving nearly 1,750 passengers stranded across Europe and North America. The airline, known for its budget-friendly transatlantic routes, issued a brief but jarring message on their website:

“Dear passenger, Fly PLAY hf. has ceased operations, and all flights have been cancelled. We kindly advise you to check flights with other airlines. Some carriers may offer special ‘rescue fares’ considering the circumstances.”

For travelers caught mid-itinerary, the announcement was both confusing and infuriating. With no prior warning, flights bound for cities like Baltimore, Barcelona, Lisbon, Paris, London, and Copenhagen were canceled, and inbound planes to Reykjavik never took off. Many travelers were left scrambling for last-minute alternatives at their own expense.

This isn't the first time an ultra-low-cost carrier based out of Iceland has folded without warning: WOW Air collapsed in 2019. Both WOW and PLAY were centered around a similar business model: connecting budget travelers in Europe and North America through Icelandic capital of Reykjavik, effectively making that city's airport a transatlantic hub. However, as both the demise of WOW and PLAY indicate, this business model is fraught with risk.

PLAY’s shutdown is a reminder of the fragility of ultra-low-cost carriers, especially in smaller markets like Iceland where operational margins are razor-thin. For travelers, it’s also a cautionary tale about the risks of booking with new or financially unstable airlines.

The Telegraph claims that PLAY's demise is proof that Iceland's tourist bubble has burst:

While Iceland’s tourism numbers boomed in the 2010s, things have slowed significantly in recent years. The country’s tourism bureau says international visitors have dropped 6 per cent in the last year. And it wasn’t like they were thriving before then: visitor numbers in 2023 were still lower than they were before the pandemic.

As for what’s causing the slump, analysts point to a drop-off in demand from Iceland’s two largest tourism markets, namely visitors from Britain and the United States. The two English-speaking countries usually account for almost half of all international visitors to Iceland – but it looks like travellers are increasingly getting cold feet.

The data doesn’t shine any light on what might be causing that reticence. But it seems sensible to assume that the ongoing cost-of-living squeeze – particularly on this side of the pond – may have played a part. After all, Iceland is frequently named as one of the world’s most expensive destinations, with a pint of beer often costing well over £10 in Reykjavík.

The Telegraph's claim drew the ire of Icelandic media, which claims that "data from the Icelandic Tourist Board shows that the number of visitors rose by 2.2% in 2024 compared with 2023, with further growth forecast this year." Left uncontested is the observation that fewer visitors are visiting Iceland than before the pandemic, or the likelihood that the sudden collapse of PLAY will have at least some negative effect on tourism to (and through) the country. 

From a purely anecdotal standpoint, I'm no longer being flooded with advertisements for Iceland like I was back in 2018, when the volcanic island was at the peak of its tourist popularity. It's also worth noting that some airlines that were flying to Iceland during that boom, such as American Airlines, are no longer doing so.

For those who still want to travel to Iceland, Icelandair remains operational and serves multiple North American and European destinations from Keflavik Airport. It also offers stopover packages for travelers who want to spend a few days exploring on their way between continents. As for me, my attitude regarding using Iceland as a stopover to Europe remains the same as it was in 2018: until there are direct flights between Houston and Reykjavik, there's no point in me doing so.