Technology Meets Dentistry

Overheard at a department store:

"I want to get a bluetooth."

Winter Essentials

Forget snow-shovels. When it comes to getting rid of frozen precipitation, my weapon of choice is the ice scraper.

Now don't get me wrong: I'm not talking about those pathetic little moulded plastic de-icers that you keep in the glove compartment of your car. Oh, no. I'm talking about a precision engineered tool with a three-foot steel core shaft and a flat, sharpened steel blade that will cut through any car-compressed or simply neglect-compacted ice sheets that are foolish enough to build up on your drive.

An ice scraper may not be as crudely efficient as my John Deere wishlist-topper, the snow blower, but there's nothing as satisfying as slicing through a bank of thick ice using nothing more environmentally damaging than Reese's-fuelled manpower.

Common or garden-centre snow blower

Given the challenges of lots of snow and a lack of both fences and pavements (and therefore kerbs), another must-have winter product is the driveway marker. These brightly-coloured four-foot poles are stuck into the ground when the first flurries fall to prevent cars inadvertently driving across your garden, which is, after all, at the same height as the adjacent road, especially when thick snow blurs the boundaries between the two.

Because there are ditches along both sides of many roads and these are quickly obscured by the twin forces of snow and snow ploughs, driveway markers have the added advantage that they ensure you approach your garage along your drive rather than having to abandon your Hummer/SUV/4x4 (delete where appropriate) in the aforementioned ditch.

Greeters

Greeters are quintessentially American; the epitome of the service-oriented culture. Their job consists entirely of standing at the entrance to a store and welcoming shoppers as if ushering guests into their own home. The warmth may be as genuine as a prostitute's kiss, but they must have a perceptible effect on sales otherwise shops wouldn't pay people to work as greeters.

Oddly enough for such a common sight in everywhere from Costco and K-Mart to Ikea, the word "greeter" is neither listed in the Merriam Webster Dictionary (the Bible of American English) nor does it have a Wikipedia entry.

Benign and humdrum as the job may appear, it is not always without danger. Last November, a greeter was killed during a stampede on the first day of the post-Thanksgiving "Black Friday" sale, when bargain-hunters who couldn't wait for a Walmart store to open broke down the front door, crushing the greeter in the process.

On a lighter note, there has been speculation that the people-handling skills and qualifications required of the greeter make it the perfect profession for at least one recently unemployed pre-retiree:

Library

Our public library is exactly how I imagined the ideal library would be.

In France they would call it a "médiatheque", but the term doesn't begin to do our library justice.

Far from being a stuffy, poorly-lit place of hushed voices aimed primarily at adults, our anything but humble municipal library is light and airy, has no fewer than three play areas for children of different ages, coloured pipes snake along walls for playing whispering gallery, there are dressing-up costumes and dozens of cuddly toys, about a dozen computers with preloaded educational games and child-size mice. And noise is permitted (if not necessarily encouraged).

Then there must be about 20 terminals dotted around the library simply for the purpose of surfing the Internet or word processing, many of them with scanners, not to mention a dedicated computer room containing another 30 or so PCs, five group study rooms (each offering a table and seating for two or three people and several tutorial rooms for one-on-one work, free wi-fi access and electricity sockets throughout the library, magazines, newspapers and - my particular favourite - armchairs right in front of blazing fireplaces for extra-cosy reading.

On the purely lending side, you aren't restricted to books either, though there are certainly plenty of them, especially in the vast children's section. There are CDs, CD-ROMS and language courses for children and adults, lots of audiobooks, a vast and extremely up-to-date collection of DVDs and even MP3 audiobook players for borrowing - all free of charge.

One time I was there, I overheard a conversation between one of the librarians and an elderly man who had seen a reference to a biblical passage in a film he'd borrowed. The librarian not only scanned the entire DVD to find it, but wrote down the position (to the second) and printed out a screenshot of the relevant frame showing the passage in question.

If you can't quite finish your borrowed film or book within the permitted 2 or 4 weeks respectively, you don't actually need to come into the library to extend it, because everything can be reviewed and renewed online. You can even check what's in stock, order temporarily unavailable books and reserve study or tutorial rooms from the comfort of your home computer.

Add seven-day opening, often until 9pm, and you have a wonderful gift to the local community, and not surprisingly one that earned a nationwide top-ten ranking.

Spray Cheese

After six long months trawling the malls and supermarkets of America, my quest is at an end: I have finally tracked down spray cheese; a culinary abomination that sends chills down the spines of Frenchmen and was long considered so grotesque that it was thought mythical across the Old World.

Yes indeed, I am the proud owner of an aerosol can of Easy Cheese, a suspiciously bright orange sludge that looks like it was made by NASA for consumption in space and tastes like those slices of processed "toast" cheese that always manage to stick to the top of your mouth.

Now all I need to do is find a use for it.

Signs

Fed up with all the screaming, the endless soiled nappies and sleepless nights?
We'll replace your child for another more user-friendly one!
(Only known drawback: it may resemble a marsupial and have flat feet, eight fingers and six toes)

Rule of Thumb

You know it's pretty cold outside when you can actually feel the hairs inside your nostrils freezing as you walk your children 100 metres from the car park to their school.

(-23°C this morning with a wind-chill factor of -31°C)