Too much of a good and bad thing

A few miscellaneous things that occurred to me lately:

Has anyone else noticed that automobile manufacturers are going a little overboard with the safety features? The other day I saw a commercial for a car that had seven airbags. Seven! I can't even imagine where they would put the damn things. You had better hope you don't get into an accident, because seven airbags going off inside your car would squirt you out of the sunroof like a giant watermelon seed.

Now they have cars where all four wheels turn. That might sound good on paper, and it probably works great on snow, but to me it just sounds like something really hard to fix. That's if you actually survived the malfunction. Something about hitting an off-ramp at 60mph and suddenly realizing that my front tires are turning right and my rear tires are turning left doesn't really appeal to me. Although if it broke just right, your car would be like a two-ton version of the Krazy Kar I had when I was a kid, and that was always a fun ride.

Now they have headlights that turn too. You start to turn left, and the headlights turn left as well, to illuminate where you are thinking of going. What if I just swerved to avoid a pot hole? Suddenly my lights are pointing directly into someone's living room window instead of actually illuminating the road in front of me. It might be fun to play with though. The night-time joggers would probably get a kick out of it if you just gave the wheel a quick nudge to the left when you were coming up on them. They love that.

This would also be a maintenance issue, I'm sure. Just explaining it to the mechanic would be bad enough. "Hello? Yes, I need to get my car serviced. What's wrong with it? Well, first it went cross-eyed, and now all it does is spin in circles. Yes. I can have it towed in on Thursday. That will give me time to get the home equity loan squared away."

I can't even imagine how much stuff like this would cost to fix.

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In other news, a University of Arizona study identified prime common areas harboring cold and flu-causing germs and the bacteria count per square inch:

· Kitchen sink sponges and dishcloths, 7 billion;
· Kitchen faucets -- 229,000;
· Office phones -- 25,000;
· Desktops -- 21,000 and;
· Office toilet seats -- 49.

Do asses have some sort of inherent anti-bacterial properties that I am unaware of?

Anyway, I'll be eating my lunch in the handicapper stall from now on. (As an aside, I wish they'd move the giant toilet paper dispenser to above the rail. I'm not even handicapped and I can't get toilet paper out of that piece of shit without throwing my back out.)

I thought it was all good, because I had my trusty bottle of Purell. Then I saw on the bottle that it "Kills 99.99% of germs!" I only have second-grade math skills, but even I can tell you this:

.01% of SEVEN BILLION is still a shitload.