What A Deal

Did you ever want the taste of chocolate but hated yourself for ingesting all those calories?

Or perhaps you love the taste of coffee and enjoy the caffeine kick but hate those extra trips to the bathroom?

Now you can have both with just a quick intake of breath. A Harvard University professor of biomedical engineering has designed a lipstick-sized inhaler containing the taste of chocolate or coffee. It's called "Le Whif."

And you thought I was kidding.

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AN OLDIE BUT A GOODIE

Sally was driving home from one of her business trips in Northern Arizona when she saw an elderly Navajo woman walking along the side of the road. As her trip promised to be a long and quiet one, with many miles to go before she reached her destination, Sally pulled over and asked the woman if she'd like a ride.

With a silent nod of thanks, the woman climbed into the passenger seat.

Resuming the journey, Sally tried in vain to make conversation with the Navajo woman. No matter what Sally said, though, the old woman just sat silently, watching out the window, looking intently at everything she saw, studying every minute detail.

Finally, the woman's eyes alighted upon a white bag that Sally had perched directly in front of the vehicle's air conditioning unit. Intrigued by the package's intentional positioning, she broke her silence. "What in bag?" she asked.

Sally looked down to see the woman pointing toward the bag and said, "Oh, it's a box of chocolates. I got them for my husband."

The Navajo woman was silent for a moment longer. Then, speaking with the quiet wisdom of an elder, she said, "Good trade."

[seen many places, but first in Wit and Wisdom]

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WORD for YOUR WEEK: The word "chocolate" goes all the way back to the Aztecs and appears to actually have begun life as a flavored liquid. The Nahuatl words xococ - meaning "bitter" - and atl - meaning "water" - combined to make the word xocolatl, which became jocolatte when brought to Spain in the 1500s and became a favorite of coffeehouses in later years.

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