It's too late in the month to be making New Year's resolutions. If I had bothered to make any this year, I would already have broken them by now. Admit it: any resolutions you made on Dec. 31st are already in the recycle bin, waiting to see if you have more willpower next year than you had last year.
No, I usually don't bother making New Year's resolutions. But I do, usually, come New Year's Eve, have a short list of things I'd like to see that great world of geniuses and propellor-heads out there provide us with in the coming year. I don't think that's unreasonable. If you consider the long list of things we have now that we didn't have when I was a kid, from personal computers to cell phones to cars that can actually tell you which way to go, there's practically nothing that could be invented anymore that would surprise anyone. There are things that I suspect will always remain pipe-dreams, such as time-travel, (except forward, which is theoretically possible in Einstein's universe--all you have to do is go fast enough) there are fewer and fewer things in our world that remain elusive for long.
With that in mind, here's my list of things that I'd like to see Bill Gates, GM, Lockheed, Major League Baseball or whoever out there come up with to improve my quality of life in the coming year:
10. An ice-making machine for my freezer that guarantees the ice cubes won't stick together and have to be hacked at with a sharp object.
9. A TV remote control that not only has a mute button for silencing commercials, but a feature which will allow me to leave the room and be informed when the commercials are over.
8. Technology which ensures that, any time I have to travel somewhere on an airplane, the entire flight will be 100 percent free of turbulence.
7. A gizmo that quickly and easily removes the 100 pounds of plastic and adhesive crap that compact discs come wrapped in, and disposes of it.
6. Some alternative to those idiotic stickers they put on pieces of fruit in the grocery store.
5. Powdered scotch whiskey. Just add water and voila! Cocktail time.
4. A piece of filtering software I can download into my computer which will prevent pictures of Jennifer Aniston, Britney Spears or J-Lo from ever appearing on my video monitor again.
3. I've given up hope that baseball will ever get rid of the designated hitter rule. Too many washed-up ballplayers are able to squeeze a few more lucrative seasons out of their careers with it. But how about some way to restore the World Series to early October? November baseball is absurd.
2. A gizmo (I'm envisioning something similar to a stun-gun) which I can point at every idiot I see driving by me, steering his Humvee or his Ford Gargantua SUV with one hand while blabbering into a cell phone with the other, and send 10,000 volts of electricity through the hand holding the phone, forcing said idiot to shut up and drive.
1. A painless, quick, foolproof and cheap way of removing double chins from 50 year-old guys.
You thought that last one was going to be "world peace," didn't you? No, I'm afraid war is like the DH--we're always going to be stuck with it. I decided to set my wishes within the realm of the possible: you'll notice that I also did not include receiving a breathless e-mail from Reese Witherspoon, telling me that she'd stumbled across my blog, thought I was an astonishing genius and just couldn't get on with her life until we'd had lunch together.
Speaking of lunch, I have a lunch date in an hour with the guy who runs the gym where I work out. He's going to look at my plate and tell me that I eat all the wrong foods.
That's more in keeping with my level of expectations. 2006, bring 'em on.
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