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.

If you have any doubt that the so called battle of the sexes was getting more complicated and confusing, you only have to look at a newspaper. No, not the personal ads section. Dating has always been complicated and confusing. This is because no one has ever enacted "truth in advertising" legislation for first dates.

I mean you should look at the headlines and the columns, and you'll see that things are so muddled that some combatants don't even know what side they're supposed to be on.

For example, the now-retired Senator Kay O'Connor of Kansas once went on record saying that if it came up again, she wouldn't support a move to give women the right to vote. Indeed, she firmly believes that the erosion of family values all started with allowing women to vote, which in turn led to all sorts of awful things like women going to university, having careers, or worse, getting elected to the US senate.

Meanwhile, Dr. Raj Persaud, a psychiatrist in London, has floated the idea that men should be banned from power. He based the idea on results from studies that suggest that the more women there are involved in politics, the less likely a country is to wage war. Of course, he might change his mind once he's read the results of a new study, which showed that when men are shown pictures of good looking women, they can't think straight and end up making bad decisions.

What does all this mean? Well, there are four possibilities:

1. Senator Kay O'Connor will probably never win any of those trailblazer awards from organizations that honour women's achievements.
2. Dr. Raj Persaud has never heard of Margaret Thatcher, Mary Queen of Scots, or Boudica.
3. Parents of high school and college age guys everywhere can't believe someone did a study to prove what they knew already.
4. We really need to get a handle on which of the male/female "differences" are truly hard-wired and which are just cultural.

So the interest of advancing gender relations, I now present some preliminary observations on male/female traits:

Leaving the toilet seat up - Given that men, with a sufficient amount of electro-shock training, can be cured of this habit, it's probably not genetic.

Compulsive or recreational shopping - Although this trait is supposed to be deeply rooted in the female psyche, amazingly it only seems to manifest itself in women who A) have lots of disposable income and B) are exposed to lots of ads telling them that recreational shopping is deeply rooted in the female psyche.

Watching sports - Traditionally, men are supposed to be inclined to follow professional sports, while women are not. This is because traditionally, the 'big game' provided a really good excuse to put off mowing the lawn, pruning the hedges, or fixing the stove. Check the audience in any stadium now and you'll find a near 50/50 split. This is because women have discovered that a big game provides a really good excuse to put off doing the bills, cleaning the bathroom, or fixing dinner.

Going out - Men have for years complained that they can be ready to go out in 10 minutes or less, while women can take up to an hour or more. This is not because women are naturally indecisive or slow. It is because men have not been expected to tuck the kids into bed, give final instructions to the babysitter, check that the burners on the stove are off, make sure the tickets are in her purse...

Men are tough, women are the weaker sex - I think we can safely say that neither sex is genetically predisposed to being either tough or weak. This is because some women actually volunteer to have bikini waxes, while some men cannot handle a simple cold without large quantities of drugs.

Asking loaded questions - Recently men have complained that women often ask loaded questions like "Do I look fat in these pants?" to which there is no good answer. Men do the same thing. The male cultural equivalent is, "Do you wanna piece of me?" usually said to another male in a bar after a collision. Again, there is no good answer.

Of course, perhaps there is no good answer to loaded questions involving gender differences either.

We writers like to take up causes and point out injustices whenever we can. We do this so that we can rationalize a job that requires us - requires, I say - to sit in comfy computer chairs and slurp caramel machiatos.

So it is with a great deal of caffeine-fueled righteous indignation that I bring the plight of the lowly garden gnome to your attention.

I wrote about these poor creatures a few years ago and sadly, even though 2004 supposedly marks the Year of the Gnome, not much has changed for this group.

Every year, thousands of innocent gnomes are hunted down in their natural habitat, the forest, and taken prisoner. They are then sold by the truckload by well known home improvement retailers, which I won't name in this space for fear of lawsuits, but which may as well be called Gnome Depot.

City dwellers buy them and put them in urban gardens, turning them into, well, metrognomes. It's a hard life - gnomes are forced to inhale car exhaust, listen to the constant roar of traffic and noise, and endure the changing seasons without so much as a toadstool for cover. Many have been injured in lawnmower accidents or poisoned by fertilizers and weed sprays.

"Few other groups in this day and age are allowed to suffer such indiginities with society's implicit permission," says one of a growing group of radicals, writing under the gnome de guerre 'Larry.' "When will our people rise up and whack our oppressors on the ankle?"

Even worse, gnomes must face this hardship alone. Rarely are gnomes ever placed in gardens in pairs, and they're never, ever allowed female companionship.Indeed, the so-called International Association for the Protection of the Garden Gnome was so horrified that anyone should think of female gnomes that it fined a fellow named Reinhard Griebel £45 for raising the issue in 2002.

"It's tough out here, all by yourself," says one gnome, an aging veteran of the Toronto landscape. His face is lined with cracks and his pointy red hat on his balding head only just covers that worst of hairstyle offenses, the gnomeover. "And what are you going to do if you escape? It's not like you can go find yourself a wife and go gnomesteading."

Indeed, the annual round up of male gnomes from the forest has many ecologists wondering how much longer the exploitation can continue before gnomes become extinct in the wild. "We still know very, very little about these people," says Dr. Paul Imer, a member of the Gnome and Garden study group. "We've not even had a chance to study their DNA, you know, their gegnome."

What would it take to turn life around for these oppressed garden creatures? "Gnome rule," says Larry without hesitation. "Our goal is to set up a provisional government within a year, staffed by by those who have escaped their captors or that have been liberated by our human sympathizers in the Garden Gnome Liberation Front. Then we will set up a search and rescue group called Gnome Free for the systematic emancipation of the rest of our oppressed brothers."

Personally, dear readers, I'm torn on this issue. Usually I am all for freedom and liberty. However, if Larry's group succeeds, well...

... then I'll have nothing to write gnome about.