Are You Careful What You Wish For?
July 25, 2008
If you’ve wished for a healthy, fast-food breakfast at home, quick breads might be for you. Because they are leavened without yeast, you don’t have to wait around for them to rise. Because you can add fruit, nuts, whole grains and other good stuff to the many available recipes, quick breads are much healthier than commercially baked breads. According to a recipe I found on line, I could have fresh blueberry pecan muffins in less than thirty minutes. Yes, they are quick to fix; but there doesn’t seem to be a quick fix for laziness.
Laziness isn’t a word you’d associate with the 2008 Olympic swimming trials in Omaha, Nebraska; but controversy is. The controversy started at the 2000 Olympics when Australia’s Ian Thorpe won three gold medals and two silver medals wearing a full-body swimsuit. Now Speedo, having tested sixty fabrics in order to lower skin friction drag, has developed its full-body swimsuit - the LZR Racer. Thirty-eight world records have been broken by competitors wearing the LZR Racer since it was released in February. Non-wearers, who can’t keep up with swimsuit technology, are upset. One competitor is so upset he became involved with a different kind of suit - an anti-trust suit.
For people who have been wishing for an inexpensive, non-gas-guzzling car, there’s the Zap Xebra. It’s a converted motorcycle rickshaw that was developed in the U.S. and modified in China. This $12,000, all-electric vehicle goes 40 mph, gets 25 miles per charge and costs only $10-$12 per month to drive. That’s the good news. The bad news is this four-seated vehicle has a weight capacity of 303 lbs. That’s about 75 lbs. per passenger. If the Xebra is what you have wished for, maybe you should wish for light-hearted passengers too.
The Nielson Company estimates how many people - lighthearted or not - are watching television and advertisers pay for airtime based on those estimates. That’s the way it’s been since the 1940’s. Now, however, viewers have a choice of more than three hundred channels. Now there must be a better way. There is - the cable box. The cable box knows what every cable viewer is watching. When you combine that information with the information the supermarket computer knows when we use our club card, you get what advertisers want to know - payoff on return of investment. While Nielson is monitoring twelve thousand people, Big Brother will be monitoring us.
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