My office neighbor is the talented Darby Hoover, who you may know from seat 12, Row 48 at last year's Oscars where she went to make them less wasteful. Do not blame her if they were not funny or short enough, she didn't get on that committee. On Friday, I heard her muffled laughs and shouts of amazement as Chris Colin interviewed her for this piece about why tubes of Neosporin now come in tiny plastic "travel totes". Apparently, Johnson & Johnson thought thethree inch tubes weren't portable enough and moms were losing them in their oversized handbags.

Maybe Heather can comment on this, but the moms I know either carry full on first-aid kits or they're using bags with so many tiny pockets that a little red pouch isn't really going to be the deciding factor in digging out a tube of neosporin. The explosion of stuff that comes with having kids is not improved by encasing said stuff in more stuff, especially flimsy, petroleum-sucking plastic stuff, much less those vicious hard clamshell cases tough enough to have spawned their own side industry of stuff--tools to open hard plastic clamshell cases. I agree with Colin here, if we could get the clever minds of marketers at J&J to work on reducing stuff and making stuff work better, we could probably be running our computers on avocado rinds. Mmmm....avocados...