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Can't wake up? Me neither. Luckily,
Takuya Sato is working to solve our problems. The inventor first
came to my attention with a brilliant Japanese app called
MorningBomb. You download it to your phone, set the time that you
want to be out of the house, and then go to sleep.
The "bomb" (a loud noise) will go off if you are not up and out of
your home by that time.
There are the two genius things about this app:
1.) The bomb cannot be turned off so you can't cheat.
2.) It detects where you are so you can't lie to it.
(ME: "I'm up! I'm up!" APP: "No, you're not, you @#$% liar.")
The ONLY way to shut it down is to get up, get dressed, and travel
a set distance away from your house. The app is a bit like an
Automated Mom, forcing us sleep-junkies on to the street,
SOMETIMES IN PAJAMAS.
But then it ran into trouble. Moms can't be uninstalled, but apps
can, mua ha ha ha! Many users started deleting it.
So Takuya crafted a gentler version for the wimps among us. The
new one, called Morning+ (Morning Plus), detects whether you leave
your home on time and, if you do, a sponsor gives you a
metaphorical pat on the head by donating one US cent to a charity.
The last I heard, from a report on Japanese website erocketnews24,
he hadn't found a sponsor yet, so was using his own personal
savings, and had donated 320 yen, the equivalent of US$4, to
charity.
Joke: How do you wake up Lady Gaga?
Answer: Po po po poke her face.
A shopping mall in China has built a non-moving escalator. It has
glass sides and a black rubber rail but doesn't do anything.
People get on the bottom step and just stand there, waiting for
the machinery to clank into action. Even more weird is the fact
that it doesn't move makes people feel dizzy and unstable, as if
they are about to fall off.
I once lived in an ancient apartment block at which you had to
pull open the elevator door by yourself. We used to time our
friends to see how stupid they were. The record was set by a
stockbroker who stood there for three minutes before realising he
had to open the door.
One evening recently, a snake bit a farmer in a paddy field in
Nepal. Mohammed Salmodin went home, got a torch, found the snake
and bit it. The snake died, the BBC reported. Of the bite? Or of
humiliation?
Look! An evil male attacking a poor defenseless woman! A pair of
have-a-go heroes stopped their car and leapt out on to the verge.
They grabbed the guy to let the woman escape.
Which is when they started listening to what he was saying and
realized that HE was the innocent victim and SHE was the mugger
who had robbed him.
This story, which took place in the US state of New Jersey
recently, was sent in by a reader to make his point that being
male was worse than being female these days.
And it arrived as part of a flurry of missives triggered by an
earlier assertion by this columnist that being a modern guy
sucked.
Reader Otis Schindler said men were told to "take it like a man"
if they got weepy at women's movies, but he had never heard a
women being told to "take it like a woman" at a man's movie. Good
point. Christian Fardel said teenage girls were often adorable,
but you rarely hear that said about teenage boys.
Yet as emails and comments poured in, the balance soon swung the
other way. A female reader named Onita asked: "Can you men push
something the size of a watermelon out of a space in your body
meant for a grape?" She may have been talking about having babies,
or it may be a reference to some sort of fruit therapy. What goes
on inside women's spas remain a total mystery to me.
A reader named Connie wrote: "Not only can men write their names
in the snow, but their personalities are so simple that doing such
things gives them enormous pleasure."
I eventually compiled the notes into a list of:
Ten Clear Advantages Of Being Male
10) Two pairs of cheap ugly shoes are all you need your whole
life.
9) Need to pee? You can unzip whenever you feel like because the
whole world is your toilet.
8) You can say stupid unfeeling things because "he's a guy, what
do you expect?"
7) Evil food companies, all run by men, put everything in jars
that only males can open.
6) A barber costs a tenth of the price of a hairdresser and does
his job in eight minutes.
5) If you get to the age of 30 without being married, no one
commiserates.
4) Your name stays the same, however many people you marry.
3) You can buy enough underwear for two years in two minutes from
one stall for small change.
2) If your suitcase gets lost, it doesn't matter because you wear
the same thing every day anyway.
1) Your entire morning routine takes two minutes, or three if you
include a shower.
THIS WAS A PRETTY powerful list, so I hoped the guys would have
something to match.
But scanning all the comments and emails, I found ONLY FIVE items
for a list of:
Five Clear Advantages Of Being Female
5) You can win a job interview using only your cleavage.
4) You can make infants stop crying by magic.
3) You can change how you look every day.
2) You have a lie detector built into your inner ear.
1) You can get 1,000 hits on YouTube by eating a popsicle.
Not bad, guys, but let's face it - the women win this argument, by
dint of the simple fact that 6.) Women ultimately win all
arguments.
Nury Vittachi is an
Asia-based frequent traveller. Send ideas and comments via
www.mrjam.org
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