People tell me things.

Sometimes I think it's because I must have been born with a "you can trust me" aura. Maybe I look empathetic. Whatever the reason, the upshot is that strangers have always felt comfortable talking to me, sharing opinions or intimate details about their lives. Usually within about a minute of meeting me. This means that 1) I never had the "embarrassed" phase as a teenager. I'd heard it all by age nine. 2) Every time I travel it's an exercise in sociological research.

Take the gruff fellow I met at the gas station yesterday. He was filling up his quad cab pickup, and very incensed over the cost. Bent my ear for fifteen minutes, on all things related to gas prices. "Global warming is a crock," he huffed, "it's effing freezing out here!"

That, for me, neatly summed up how scientists and environmentalists have blown the climate change debate.

The message for the past 20 odd years, you see, has been that we need to reduce pollution because it's one of the chief causes of climate change. This message has failed for the following reasons:

The Scientific Method - Scientists fight amongst themselves, in public, over details. This would be fine if we had a scientifically literate public. This problem isn't helped by the fact that this week's science reporter was last week's lifestyles editor. Consider the following scientific discovery headline cycle:

* Researchers suggest guar gum may possibly improve blood circulation if ingested on Sundays
* Studies link guar gum to improved blood circulation
* Better blood with guar?
* Chewing gum: Does it make you live longer?
* Major chewing gum manufacturers investigating guar, debating new product lines
* Cola bottlers announce plans for guar supplements in your favourite fizzy
* Nation gone guar crazy!
* Scientist at another institute says original guar study flawed; author forgot to carry the one
* Guar.com launched
* Original guar study author claims critic's mother wore army boots. Did not forget to carry one
* Guar industry analysts worried
* Guar critic says did too, did too forget to carry the one
* Another new study: Guar linked to heart disease?
* Guar.com folds, 3500 IT employees now seeking work in India
* Year in review - Remember guar?

Vested Interests -- The people concerned about climate change are researchers, volunteers, and environmentalists - you know, people who are happy to have enough spare change to be able to afford a fair-trade coffee sometimes. Critics of climate change research tend to be car makers, oil companies, and manufacturers - you know, people who are happy to have enough spare change to be able to afford a coffee producing country now and then.

Whither the weather? - The average non-scientific Joe on the street has difficulty believing long term predictions about climate, when we still can't reliably predict if it will rain in Philadelphia next Thursday.

So what *should* the message have been? Air quality.

It's personal: We all breathe. It's scientific: We've got instruments that can tell us exactly what we're breathing in. It's immediate and health related: What was that about asthma rates again? It's tangible: Even guys in pickup trucks know when they can see, smell, and practically chew the smog.

Plus it's really, really tough to spin the benefits of smog: "Just look at that brown sky! Doesn't it just make you want to... to... oh, never mind."

One last ponderable: In most of North America, it's now socially unacceptable to light up a cigarette. But it's still okay to fire up a smoke stack.

I suppose I should be careful. Without these kinds of strange contrasts, I wouldn't have any material for a column. And then I'd have to... ARGH!

Work for a living. Forget everything I just said! No, really...

Humans, it is said, are creatures of habit. That's certainly true, but it occurs to me that some of our habits are more useful than others.

For example, consider the act of making tea. We toss a teabag in a cup, boil some water, put them together to steep and then... dump the teabag in the sink. I'm not sure why we do this, except that there must have been a rash of garbage pail fires back in the 1970's caused by hot, soaking wet teabags. Either that or a kitchen cleaner manufacturer has subliminally encouraged this in its advertisements so we buy their 'tea stain removal' products.

We have a number of strange habits when we're on the phone too. For instance, ask anyone (in North America, at least) at the other end of the call a question that involves shuffling through paper or looking something up. Chances are that, while doing so, they will make a strange noise with their mouth that sounds something like "chew-tee chew-chew-chew." I think this comes from a generation of radio and television conditioning: we know there must not be dead air silence.

Or consider gestures. How many times do you or your officemates gesture to explain something while in a phone conversation, even though the other person isn't able to see it? And how many times are you going to laugh at yourself this week now that I've pointed this out? [Columnist's disclaimer: Author not responsible for laughter causing car accidents if you were talking on your cell phone and noticed yourself gesturing. Indeed, author strongly encourages you to stay off the phone while driving and to stay in your own @#$%^&! lane.]

Speaking of driving, another utterly useless practice is turning on your signal light to indicate that you want to parallel park. This is because in most cities, traffic is so bumper-to-bumper that the person behind you is only three inches away from your tailpipe and couldn't back up to give you any room even if he wanted to. And anyway, he probably won't want to, because he's too busy gesturing rudely at you to move on. Or possibly gesturing at the person he's talking to on his cell phone.

Some of our habits have good intentions. I suspect most of you, either at home or at the office, have a place at your desk for pens and pencils. This will either be in the right-hand drawer, or in a battered coffee mug that says "I listen to CHUM FM Radio!" on the side. Time for a quick survey. How many of you:

A) Don't have any actual pens or pencils in your special 'pen and pencil place' because you've absentmindedly left them near the copier or other people have filched them?

B) Have 38 pens that don't work because they have no ink, and 15 pencils that don't work because they haven't been sharpened in five years and you have no idea where you put the sharpener?

C) Don't have a special 'pen and pencil place' because some dork who was gesturing while talking on his cell phone in the car accidentally crashed through your office and mashed your desk?

Of course there are some habits with historical legacies that may have made sense once. Many of us still say "knock on wood" or "touch wood" when we want to prevent a jinx on whatever we just mentioned. The problem with this of course is that very few of the things we own these days are wood and somehow saying "knock on MDF product" or "touch plastic" just doesn't have the same ring to it.

And talking of ringing, there's the phone. I'd sign off on this column now, except that I can't find a working pen.

Just as well you can't see me gesturing rudely about this.

As amazing as the human body is, it has some serious design flaws that I want to discuss with whomever's in charge.

I say this because as I watch my sons grow, it occurs to me that certain systems could have been put together a lot better. (Hey listen, when you're up for your third feeding of the early morning you can't help but think that there's got to be a better way...).

For instance, consider the human digestive system. It is clearly designed for an upright, bipedal creature. Food goes in at the top and is meant to slide down. Unfortunately, while your average baby deer can walk within a couple of hours of birth, human babies can't even sit upright for several weeks. Babies are, however, exceptionally good at swallowing air and trapping it deep in hard to release places like, say, the middle left toe.

As a parent you will try anything to help your cranky baby get rid of gas: you'll put him over your shoulder, across your lap, over your arm, or dangle him by his feet.* Indeed, we've tried putting our wee one in so many different positions that my husband reckons we can now write a book called: The Karma Burpa.

It's also not particularly clever to have a food intake system share the same plumbing as the air intake system. This is because babies have all the patience of a New York cab driver when it comes to eating, and forget to do vital things like, oh, breathe between mouthfuls. This means that contrary to popular belief, a baby's first words are not things like "mama" or "dada" but rather "grlp" and "snrk." See also deeply trapped gas, above.

Not that our first words are particularly useful anyway. We humans are for some reason not born with the ability to communicate with our elders effectively. Any attempt to compile a Newborn to English dictionary might look like this:

I'm hungry: Wah
I need a diaper change: Wah
I'm bored: Wah
I need a hug: Wah
I'm about to spit up on that shirt you just changed into: Wah
I've got air trapped in my middle left toe: WAAAH

It also doesn't help that humans have no idea what all their various bits are for or how to control them. A child doesn't know she has hands or how to use them and in the meantime she'll whap herself in the nose or pull her own hair and wonder why it hurts. The relationship between cause and effect isn't learned for quite some time; indeed, in some people, not until middle age.

Perhaps the most important flaw humans have though, pertains to the need for sleep. Personally, I've never been a big fan of sleep: it takes me forever to fall asleep, I resent the amount of time it takes out of my life, and once asleep and comfy, I hate trying to drag myself out of bed in the morning. But now I have another reason to dislike the need for sleep - there is a fundamental mismatch between a baby's sleep schedule and that of their parents. And all I can say to that is:

Well good thing handle sleep deprivation I can it's a.

You'll have to forgive me if there are a lot of typos in this week's column. I'm suffering from severe retinal burnout.

It happened about a week ago. I had just received the Christmas catalogue, and since I have wee ones to shop for, I went straight for the toy pages. And suddenly, without warning, I came to the "girls' section."

How did I know it was the girls' section? Because it was absolutely ablaze with pink. There were pink dolls. There were pink clothes. There was pink print and even the page was pink. I had no idea there were that many variations of a single colour. I expect the catalogue printer went stark raving mad on this project, having to pour pot after pot of Fuchsia Temptation, Crafty Carnation, and Potted Petunia #3 into the press.

After I'd stopped writhing around on the floor, screaming "My eyes! My eyes!" I had another look through the catalogue. I was prepared to forgive the retailer (which I don't want to name in this space, so we'll call it Shears) that one lapse into bad stereotypes.

This is, after all, the 21st century. Surely my children could look forward to way cooler toys than I had? Robots and holograms and computer games? So I kept turning pages. The girls were shown with ... kitchen sets. Sewing machines. And... baby dolls with strollers. The boys were shown with power tools. Cars and trucks. And in one amazingly bold bit of gender crossover, one piece of cookware -- yes, wait for it -- a toy barbecue.

Waa. Hoo.

I know what you're thinking: here she goes with some feminist rant pointing out that we've had female prime ministers, space shuttle pilots and national security advisors, and that our girl toys need to be updated accordingly. But no, smug reader, I'm not, because 1) I have three sons, and so actually I'm more concerned about what this does for them and 2) I snuck in those points just a minute ago and now don't have to resort to a rant. So, ha.

Am I worried about the effect that pink catalogue pages will have on my sons? Well no, although I do plan to hand them sunglasses before they open the catalogue, just as a safety precaution. I worry because the gender thing doesn't stop there.

We now have girl drinks - usually refined cocktails, and usually pink, and boy drinks - cheap beer by the keg full. There are men's razors and women's razors, because clearly the colour of the handle makes a tremendous difference as to how close a shave you get.

Movies are classified as either "chick flicks" or um, "Richard flicks." Chick flicks are those that have dialogue, emotion and possibly even complex plots. The other kind involves cars and trucks, and things blowing up. We've even had a men's movie star recently call people of a certain political persuasion in the US "girlie men."

All this means that my sons are going to grow up in a world where the media image of the ideal man depicts someone who only understands power tools, and loud explosions - the kind you make with dynamite, or the kind you make after drinking a lot of beer. So I'm thinking... getting them to apply themselves in English class might be a bit of a struggle. Heck, even math class might be hard work.

Needless to say, I won't be buying from this catalogue any time soon. I want toys that will make them think, make them use their imagination, that will prepare them for gender equality and life in the 21st century, and of course most important of all, that I can play with too. Er, just to make sure they're okay of course.

And meantime, I'll tell my sons: if men are from Mars, and women are from Venus, it's because we've worked very hard to put them there.

I'm just not sure why.

As a writer and commentator, I consider it my civic duty to warn people about potential hazards. So, dear readers, take note: there is a bomb in your refrigerator.

No really, I mean it. In fact, there may be as many as 12 incendiary devices in your fridge. I say this because according to a news report I saw last night, people all over North America are being maimed and injured by exploding eggs.

This is because lots of people are apparently trying to cook their eggs in the microwave... whole. Unfortunately, one of the nasty properties of sealed containers, like eggs, is that they don't do well under pressure. Nuke them for too long and you'll have microwave shrapnel in the wall, and of course, egg on your face. A trip through the kitchen will be like, well, walking on egg shells.

And when your appliances start blowing up, it really makes you think about the fragility of life... and all the other big, eggistential questions.

What really worries me though is that my microwave instruction manual clearly says "Do not attempt to microwave the following items: soda cans, eggs in the shell, hand grenades, sealed glass bottles and/or nuclear devices. The Surgeon General suggests that doing so may cause small objects to hurtle toward your softer bits at high speed." This must mean that people are operating complex devices without reading the manual, or they don't understand the warnings.

Either way, perhaps a brief household safety primer is order here:

Electricity - I know Uncle Bob once said that sticking a knife into the toaster was a quick and cheap way to get a perm, but do you really want to smolder for hours afterward? Or forget most of your high school years? Try to avoid direct contact with this stuff.

Toilet Bowl Cleaner - Never mix this with bleach, as it forms a deadly gas. Recent research suggests that this gas can later solidify into a blob and Hollywood has already demonstrated how dangerous those things can be.

Gasoline - In general, it's a good idea not to combine gasoline with any of the following items: matches, a lighter, household chemicals, Uncle Bob.

Shampoo - Okay, maybe this doesn't qualify as a safety hazard, but darnit it smarts when it gets into your eyes. Be careful.

Garden Hose - Often overlooked by safety experts, this common item deliberately drapes itself across high foot traffic areas, causing people to trip and fall. As deadly as the common garden rake, it is also known for hiding in tall grass and attacking lawnmower blades. Handle with care.

Power Tools - You should never use any of these without a) safety glasses, b) safety boots and c) keeping Uncle Bob at a distance of about 30 meters.

Step Ladders - Don't let a black cat walk underneath them. Or was that breaking them caused seven years bad luck? Or maybe you're not supposed to open them inside the house. In any case, just remember that the top rung is not a step.

Dark stairwells - Either install an overhead light or keep a flashlight handy when negotiating these, otherwise that thing that goes bump in the night will be you.

Scissors - Don't run with these. In fact, if you took any of this safety primer seriously, perhaps you should put them down and back away. Slowly now...