One of the scourges of modern life in the Western world is reality TV programming.

No, wait, that's unfair. Reality TV programming is really only a minor plague. What truly is a scourge is: product packaging.

I'm fairly lucky - I'm pretty good at beating my way into packages, and if I have to buy a product frequently, I can eventually work out a trick or two for getting into the package quickly. However, there are still several types that defeat me. For example:

Potato chip bags -- With most bags, you just need to grab one side in each hand and pull the top seam apart. However sometimes the bag has been pumped so full of air that there's not enough slack to grab. Worse, the seam may have been heavily glued, which means you really have to pull hard. The result? A chip shower when the bag finally rips open.

Pull tabs -- Pull tabs are little strips of material embedded in packaging, which are, in theory, supposed to help you rip through the package more quickly. In reality, there are two types of pull tabs: those that break in half as you're pulling them, and those that slide right out of the package before they've cut through anything.

Yoghurt lids -- Individual servings of things like yoghurt or pudding are often capped with a thin sheet of plastic. You might be lucky enough to find a tab to pull the plastic away. You will never be able to get it to come off in one piece. Indeed, many a lunch break across the globe has been wasted trying to remove enough shreds from one of these containers to wedge a spoon in.

Toys -- Most of our toys are manufactured in China these days and so perhaps manufacturers have become a bit paranoid about things coming loose on the boat trip over. But does Barbie really need to be strapped in with no less than 32 machine-tightened ties?

Twist off bottle caps -- Hands up all of you who have fallen for the line on the bottle that says "easy twist off cap!" Oooh, that's some nasty scarring you've got there.

Magazine mailers -- If you take any magazine subscriptions, you may have noticed that your favourite periodical now comes in a sealed plastic bag. This presumably is so that it arrives in pristine condition, allowing you the pleasure of making it into a dog-eared wreck yourself when you attempt to undo the bag.

Styrofoam packing -- Styrofoam has to be one of the most annoying packing materials ever made and it comes in two forms. The Styrofoam "peanut" comes complete with static electricity, so that individual pieces leap out of the box and on to your clothes, your hair, your furniture and your carpet. Moulded Styrofoam is great at providing an exact fit for the appliance packed in a box - so exact, there is no room to slide fingers in anywhere to lift the Styrofoam away.

Meat trays -- Speaking of Styrofoam, meat at the grocery store often comes in a foam tray covered with plastic wrap. These packages start leaking approximately 2.3 seconds after being put together.

CD wrappers -- Compact discs come in jewel cases, which are in turn encased in plastic. This plastic is quite possibly the strongest substance known to man; the plastic is shrink wrapped on, so there's nothing to grab. CD packaging, not the price of music, is probably the single biggest reason why people prefer to download their music from the Internet.

More than just a minor inconvenience, bad packaging caused something like 60,000 injuries in the UK in one year - presumably when people finally gave up and went for the knife, scissors or razor blade.

Worse, most of these package types aren't recyclable. Take those yoghurt lids for example. Even assuming that only 10,000 kids in my municipality have two yoghurts per week in their lunches, that's 1,040,000 bits of plastic to the landfill every year.

And with that much packaging in the landfills, it's going to take years of beating our way in to clean them up.

This week, I have good news for all of you poor slobs who are out there doing crazy things like watching what you eat and working out. There's no need! The world's junk food manufacturers are going to look after us.

For example, according to a Reuters' report, a prominent chocolate bar maker announced that it was doing its part in the battle of the bulge: it was cutting its king-sized bars in half. It is not, however, actually removing the other half from the package. No, instead it plans to market the halves as two bars in the same wrapper, thereby making it, and I quote, "shareable." For the record, the minute everyone who reads this column is suddenly struck with a case of Chocolate Bar Generosity Syndrome, I want your first thought to be: Chandra.

Meanwhile, a major hamburger retailer, which I won't name in this mcspace, has added salads to its menu. Presumably this is because nothing counteracts a ground beef patty with lettuce and mayonnaise than greens layered with bacon and ranch dressing.

No word yet though on whether a famous North American convenience store will jump on the healthy eating band wagon any time soon. It currently sells soda pop in cups that clock in at 1.3 litres in Canada, which is approximately as big as three football fields in American terms. It used to boggle my mind to think that anyone could consume that much liquid in a single sitting; of course, this is before I discovered the Englishman's capacity for ale.

While portion size reduction can only help, I suspect there are other factors at work in the obesity epidemic. For instance, according to the World Health Organization, the average American ate 147 pounds - yes, pounds - of sweeteners in 2001. I'd say that's the equivalent of eating your own body weight in sugar, but clearly when you eat that much sweetener in a year, your body weight is an upwardly mobile and hard to track number.

Further, about 62 pounds of that amount was high fructose corn syrup. Now I know what you're thinking: you're sitting there, saying to yourself, "Ha! Ha! Silly columnist! Obviously I am safe because I did not drink 62 pounds of corn syrup last year." To which I reply, "Ha! Ha! Silly reader! That's what I thought!" Then I started looking at the ingredient lists and found it in things like iced tea, lemonade, jam, fruit drinks, and bizarrely, a package of boneless, skinless chicken breast meat. I'm not sure why anyone thought I might want my chicken sweetened, so I can only conclude the chickens themselves drank a lot of cola on the farm.

Now before the farmers start pelting me with corn awareness pamphlets, let me say that there's probably nothing wrong with corn syrup sweeteners per se. It's just there's an awful lot of it and other highly refined products in our food supply these days. We've developed lazy palates - we want things super sweet or super smooth and super sized.

And the problem is that our bodies don't seem to be designed for taking on that much highly refined or processed food on a constant basis. If you'll forgive a little scatological etymology (translation: word history best not discussed in polite company), consider pumpernickel bread. Pumper comes from a German word meaning 'breaking wind,' while nickel means 'demon' (translation: your body could extract nutrition from the bread, but by heck it had to work like the devil for it).

I'm definitely not one for glorifying the old days and I admit there was a really good reason why people switched from 'old world' pumpernickel to other kinds of bread, and that is: you can also build brick-type houses out of pumpernickel loaves.

It's just that eating a peanut butter and jam sandwich on white bread with a glass of iced tea may well be the digestive equivalent of sticking your finger in an electrical socket.

What's that? Oh, sorry.

Didn't mean to ruin your lunch.

In other parts of the world, people have to deal with floods, forest fires, and earthquakes. In the US state of Iowa, residents have had to deal with a plague of ...fraudulent door-to-door meat salesmen.

I kid you not. Apparently scam artists have taken to offering homeowners cut rate shipments of meat, claiming that a restaurant had ordered it but couldn't take the whole load or that the next door neighbour for whom the shipment was intended wasn't home. Amazingly, the meat turns out to be very expensive and poor quality, and that little sheet of paper you signed is a binding contract.

Now, call me a sceptic, but if someone knocked on my door in the middle of the afternoon and offered me meat, I'd have the following questions:

1. Er, what sort of meat exactly? We talkin' grade A beef here, or an escaped alpaca that had an unfortunate rendezvous with the front of your van?
2. Won't my neighbour be slightly upset if I take delivery of his food? I mean, only last week I tried to accept that brand new home theatre system he'd ordered and he was a bit touchy about that.
3. What is it, exactly, about my front door that leads you to believe I'd be tempted to buy a crate full of bargain mystery meat from a complete stranger who showed up out of the blue? Really, I'd like to know, so I can make the appropriate adjustments to my front door.

I really can't blame the scam artists. After all, they're just trying to take advantage of that most fundamental human trait: the capacity for wishful thinking. It's that weird desire to believe that just this once, the gods (in this case, the God of Cheap Hamburger Patties) have smiled upon you.

This quality is responsible for a variety of problems. For instance, most people who have an email address have received junk mail or spam. Experts believe that the way to stop spam is to create sophisticated junk filters, or press criminal charges against 'spammers.'

I say, no, the only way to fix the spam problem is to hunt down and injure anyone who has ever purchased something from a junk email. I would suggest stoning them with packages of "Available at Awesome Discounts!" Viagra or whacking them printouts of "Best Rate Mortgages!" amortization schedules. If we keep that up, eventually the market for these products will dry up and spam will go away.

A related problem is computer viruses. Most people get computer viruses because they can't resist clicking on files that sound interesting. If I were to meet someone who had opened a strange, unexpected email attachment, I would ask them:

1. Didn't it surprise you that, um, your mother had supposedly emailed you a photo of a naked Jessica Simpson?
2. Can you explain why you went ahead and opened a file that was supposedly a photo of a naked Jessica Simpson that had been sent, er, by your mother?
3. Come to think of it, why did your mother open the photo of a naked Jessica Simpson?
4. Have you and your mother discussed this with a psychiatrist?

Okay, I suppose I shouldn't be too hard on our tendency to hope for something better. After all, some of our greatest inventions, like the airplane, came about because someone said something like, "I wish we could fly."

I just wish they hadn't also wished for airline food.

Pardon me for saying so, but your shoes are stupid.

I don't mean to say that your shoes look stupid, although what you were thinking when you wore that blue and pink pair out last week, I do not know. What I mean is that your shoes aren't very intelligent.

Adidas announced some time ago that it had developed a "smart shoe." This shoe contains a microprocessor and a tiny screw and cable system, which adjusts the cushioning provided by the shoe - based on measurements of your size and stride. Three years of top secret research went into the making of the shoe, which company officials say "senses, understands and adapts."

Now, this is very clever technology, and I can see where long distance runners, hikers, or even wait staff would have a need for a shoe that provides the ultimate in comfort in every step. However, I can't help thinking that there are better places for this sort of application.

For example, I would love for my coffee pot to sense, understand and adapt first thing in the morning, because goodness knows I can't. A truly intelligent pot would not only brew a fresh cup for me, but add the sugar and milk and bring it to me while I'm still struggling to figure out what day it is.

Our car could be a lot smarter than it is. I wouldn't mind if it could sense when some idiot is about to cut in front of me; it could do some pre-emptive honking and rude gesturing to prevent the cut off from happening altogether. Better yet, given gas prices lately, an intelligent car should be able to figure out how to convert itself to a hydrogen powered vehicle. It could make rude gestures at the gas station as we drove by too.

My computer could be a heck of a lot brighter. I would love it if it would sense that the operating system was about to crash and well, not crash. It should be able to know that I am not interested in emails about cheap or forbidden software, hot stock tips, or discounted drugs. And the CD ROM tray really would be a cup holder - one that dispensed either hot tea or strong scotch, depending on the type of day you were having at the office.

While we're at it, why hasn't someone invested three years of top secret research into making smarter politicians? Consider my local provincial premiere, Dalton McGuinty, who's method for handling a $2.2 billion yearly deficit a while back was to jack up driver's license fees by 50% - a move which will raise a whopping... $3 million per year. Surely a microprocessor, screw and cable system would be able to figure out that if you're going to gouge a taxpayer, you could at least make it count for something at the other end.

Finally, when it comes to things that sense, understand and adapt, I think I want something like that for my laundry system. A clever washing machine would sense that the hamper is overflowing, understand that I am no more interested in it today than I was yesterday, and adapt by coming upstairs to fetch the clothes. Furthermore, it would toss the washed clothes into the dryer and take them out and fold them at the right moment so that no ironing would ever be required.

I'd even let it wash my stupid shoes.