“If you can't explain it simply, you don't understand it well enough.”

- Albert Einstein

There are many differences between men and women. If this statement comes as a shock to you then let me just ask you this one question. When you're out at a restaurant and need to go to the bathroom, which door do you choose? The one with the “men” sign and a simple stick figure? Or the one labeled “women” with the triangular shape; you know the kind of girl only Pablo Picasso could love?

This might be a roundabout way to get your attention but the point this week is this: Do we really need to have so many different labels on everything? From streets, elevators, ATMs, and DVD players; everything has to be labeled as to what it is and what it does.

I'll admit that when I buy a can of soup and it has “tomato” written on the side it, it is sort of nice that something made from tomatoes is actually packaged in the tin can, but it's the obvious things that have the contents written all over the packaging that annoys me most.

Take bread for instance. Maybe you're a little hungry and the only thing that will satisfy you at the moment is a good old fashioned peanut butter and jelly sandwich. Unfortunately you need to get some supplies so; you go to the store and buy a loaf and right on the see-through plastic sock, it says in bold letters “BREAD.” Is there any one of us that has ever looked at that bag and thought hmm I wonder what this could be? “Sure, maybe you had a moment where you might have mistaken it for a really large kiwi, but that was only after it had been sitting in your fridge for a month or two. And if that is the case, then the only label left to read should be, “Warning: don't eat the fuzzy wheat.”

For a prime example of too much information just go into my kitchen and take a gander at the toaster. There is the settings button that, in theory, allows you to decide the type of toasting you want from your bread. (Again with the bread I know!) So anyway it has on the dial, numbers ranging from one to 10. OK, fine, but maybe you don't like numbers, then what? It also has the words “lighter” and “darker” printed next to the numbers. Still don't understand? Don't worry, they have you covered because aside from the first two instructions there are little pictures of bread in the various cooking stages going from “light Caribbean tan” to “start all over because now it's a charcoal briquette.” Now I like options as well as the next guy but seriously, do the companies feel that everything has to be spelled, or in this case drawn out for us? All I know is all this typing has gotten me hungry so as soon as I'm done here I'm going to - what else? Make a sandwich.

Auburn native Bradley Molloy's column appears here, each

Sunday, in The Citizen.

He can be reached at

lovonian@hotmail.com