Technobabble

Looney Tunes It seems there is yet another reason to be thankful you don’t live in New Jersey: The Garden State just imposed an iTunes tax on downloads. Now all you Interweb shoppers know you are supposed to declare all nontaxed purchases to our friends at the IRS every April, but NJ is now going to make sure you do, not only with downloaded songs, TV shows and movies from iTunes, but also for tattoos and tanning. Let’s hope the Govanator doesn’t follow suit.

More Crap Two more toilet-tech stories this week. Have you seen the small charms that some people hang from their cell phones? They are really popular in Japan and apparently one of the most popular, adorning some 2.7 million phones, is a shiny golden turd. Supposed to be good luck. Why not? And with some luck, NASCAR fuel specialist Dean Gokel’s high-end gasoline made from pig waste can not only decrease our dependency on petrol from other countries but could solve the problem of disposing of highly toxic pig poo. Frank Bell, the president of Waste Elimination Biostill Systems, Gokel’s fledgling company, says, “This guy can take a gallon of piss, shit and water and turn it into a gallon of gasoline.” But if cooking oil turned into fuel makes exhaust smell like french fries, what will “pigoline,” as they are calling it, make our streets smell like?

Future Proof Then again, cars are so 20th century. Why drive to somewhere like Lake Tahoe or LA when you can take a rocket to Jupiter? Just be careful whom you fly with as the private rocket SpaceLoft XL, built by UP Aerospace, crashed just after take-off this last month from Spaceport America in New Mexico. None of the cargo was human, but there is a race among private companies to get people into space, so it won’t be long. And if this story doesn’t make you feel like we’re living in the future, here is some more proof: the Actroid DER2 (pictured) fembot is here. This very human-like android successor to the Actroid DER is thinner and capable of more expressions. The fembot is not available for purchase but you can rent “her” for about $3,500 for five days. It’s spooky how real she appears in the YouTube videos: www.newlaunches.com/archives/actroid_der2_fembot.php

FemPhone Now I am very in touch with my feminine side, but this is one cell phone I may not need all the functionalities of. It’s not the pink color of the Mitsubishi D702iF I’m drawing aversion to, it’s the ability of this small clam-shell mobile to track a female’s biological rhythm to help her conceive (or not conceive) during her most fertile period. Very helpful technology indeed. Wonder what the warning ring tone for “very fertile” is.

Side Note I am writing this fortnight’s column from Argentina, where the six people presently in my hostel are all on the Internet. The Argentine woman running the hostel is on the establishment’s computer, an Austrian guy is on the one guest desktop machine, and the four USA dudes (including myself) are all on their Apple laptops. Welcome to international travel in the 21st century.