Well, now. Winter in North America is an exciting time, you bet. The roads are saltier than Chinese take-out food—too much salt for low-sodium classic British cars—and the next time the driveway needs to be shoveled could be the one that punches your cardiac ticket. What to do?
It's hard to ignore the smothering irony of steep food and oil prices versus cheap and available technological doodads. The cost of gasoline rides a crazy roller coaster between $2.00 and $3.00 per gallon—this depends on complex factors like one of ten thousand Saudi princes getting a paper cut while counting his money, or a mother duck leading her ducklings across the truck entrance of a Texas oil refinery, effectively blocking shipments at their source.
Meanwhile, in sunny, cheerful, and decadent Las Vegas you can forget about your nutrition and transportation worries by attending the CES—the annual Consumer Electronics Show. This show is a rowdy, circus-like marketing extravaganza designed to introduce new gizmos and whatchamacallits to an eager and adoring public. If you can't find something shiny and expensive at the CES, you are already dead and have just not yet figured it out.
One of BritBox's favorite new toys is the amazing little nugget called the Apple iPod Shuffle. It looks like a refrigerator magnet but is packed with 1Gb of memory—about 240 songs worth. Sweet. The little guy sells for only $79.00 and it's hard to believe that this kind of technology is available to the boys and girls on the street. What fun they'll have!
Don't tell them that replacement batteries are $59.00.
It's hard to ignore the smothering irony of steep food and oil prices versus cheap and available technological doodads. The cost of gasoline rides a crazy roller coaster between $2.00 and $3.00 per gallon—this depends on complex factors like one of ten thousand Saudi princes getting a paper cut while counting his money, or a mother duck leading her ducklings across the truck entrance of a Texas oil refinery, effectively blocking shipments at their source.
Meanwhile, in sunny, cheerful, and decadent Las Vegas you can forget about your nutrition and transportation worries by attending the CES—the annual Consumer Electronics Show. This show is a rowdy, circus-like marketing extravaganza designed to introduce new gizmos and whatchamacallits to an eager and adoring public. If you can't find something shiny and expensive at the CES, you are already dead and have just not yet figured it out.
One of BritBox's favorite new toys is the amazing little nugget called the Apple iPod Shuffle. It looks like a refrigerator magnet but is packed with 1Gb of memory—about 240 songs worth. Sweet. The little guy sells for only $79.00 and it's hard to believe that this kind of technology is available to the boys and girls on the street. What fun they'll have!
Don't tell them that replacement batteries are $59.00.
