We're addicted to batteries....

In Sunday's New York Times, there's an interesting article on the Master Lock company's new g.l.o. pad lock, that glows. I originally thought great, another thing that uses more batteries to go into a landfill, but to my pleasant surprise, it gets its electricity from a mechanical generation system. Pretty dang cool. I'm still not big on novelty for novelty's sake, and the price of twice as much is going to pain a lot of parents who really can't afford the extra expense. But at least it doesn't use batteries.

Growing up as a kid, and I'm showing my age here, batteries were a big deal. They were expensive, didn't last a long time and if a toy needed batteries, I just didn't get it. Now everything and I mean everything has batteries, and in the pursuit of wirelessness, there are more batteries. I broke down and got a cordless mouse and keyboard set, of course it needed batteries. Cordless phones more batteries. Handy dandy pedometere. More batteries.

We can't toss them in to the landfill (well we shouldn't) but we just need more. OUCH! I look around at all my toys (yeah yeah yeah, the difference between men and boys is the price of their toys) and I realized I need to go on a twelve step program.