I stayed up into the wee hours last night planting potatoes. And tilling soil. And clearing branches, and cultivating strawberries, and pampering my sheep. I'm completely absorbed in my latest rental from the invaluable GameFly service, the Nintendo DS version of the venerable handheld farming sim Harvest Moon.

What I'm spending all of my precious free time on is, paradoxically, a full-blown toil simulator. You can't die in Harvest Moon, but you can pass out from exhaustion, and I have been working my poor little knapsack-wearing avatar like a slavedriver. Cesar Chavez would not approve. The other "day" a little kewpie doll blonde stopped by the farm to invite me to the duck festival, and I was all like, get out of here, I have to plow.

Harvest Moon might be a little bit of an extreme example, but I imagine most folks with even a little bit of video game experience have been through the same thing, whether micromanaging the existences of their Sims or poring over columns of attribute numbers in Madden franchise mode. In the PC game Civilization, which I have been playing obsessively a couple times a week without interruption since roughly 1992, I have probably dedicated a few real-time months of my existence to directing little settler units around in circles building tiny railroads and irrigation channels.

Everybody's working for the weekend... so we can go home and do virtual work on our XBoxes and PlayStations. Truly this is the best of all possible worlds.

Elsewhere: I'm pretty jaded after years and years writing about music, so it's seldom indeed I write a complete rave about a live performance. So you should pay attention to what I had to say about Manu Chao's show at Red Rocks for Billboard:

Chao's chief strength is his ability to cherry-pick the best elements from musical traditions all over the world, and in terms of stage presence, he's definitely adopted a demonstrative, Latin American-influenced fixation on leaving no audience members attached to their seats. At least two of the musicians in Chao's five-piece backing band were employed predominantly for their skills at fist-pumping and otherwise inciting the near-capacity crowd to frenzy. The seemingly inexhaustible 45-year-old frontman did not stand still from his opening "Qué paso?" through multiple encores....