THE WIND SWEPT BEACH

They make these dispensers for sticky tape, with an axle arrangement and a blade to cut the tape, and the whole thing is weighted by some sand encased in the base. You can feel it when you pick up the dispenser. That's no life for sand, is it?

The GM lobby can't stop pressuring the supermarkets about how they grow their apples, the humanitarian people are screaming about the battery farming, we're getting organic bread and milk shoved down our throats every which way we turn. But nobody's standing up for the sand in the sticky tape dispensers. That seems wrong to me.

If you open those things up there's a whole little beach inside. You know, some shells, a lonely crab wandering across the sand, maybe a seagull swooping in. They don't even know that all their life is is dispensing tape.

If there's a moral to this story it's this - You can fix a lot of things with sticky tape but you'll never fix sand.