Today's home offers all the comforts we need.(News)

Byline: Jack Mabley

My favorite gadget at home is the garage door opener.

The TV zapper comes close, but it can't compete with memories of years of getting out of the car in a driving rain or a blizzard to pull open the garage door.

If the door opened out instead of up, I often had to fight snow drifts.

I have a personality quirk that resists change. From my 40s on, I (and usually my wife) vowed we'd never have a second car. Or a dishwasher. Or a microwave oven. Or cable TV. Or a garage door opener. Or a TV zapper. Or a cellular phone.

Of course we enjoy all of these conveniences and necessities and luxuries now except for the cellular phone, which I still don't want.

Why the initial resistance? I wish I knew.

My wife and I are enjoying the first week of our 60th year of wedded bliss. (She was a child bride, just out of her teens.)

We don't feel particularly old. I still have a full-time job. She has a full schedule of volunteer work. We're both active tennis players.

We sat in our old-fashioned living room in our old-fashioned home and concluded that we were, and are ... what's a nice word ... unconventional.

We have absolutely no interest in the home of the future with all its gadgets and computers and buttons that are supposed to make life easier.

In my mind they're just a lot more things to break. The coming century will bring the glory days of repairmen charging $75 an hour.

How does this one grab you? It's the toilet of the future (as if our present loo isn't adequate).

The toilet of the future has been built by Matsushita Electric in Japan, where the electronics people hope to cash in on the home of the future.

U.S. News describes this toilet as a cross between an ejector seat and an electric chair.

As you balance on the seat it records your weight. You grab the electrodes on the arm and your body fat is measured. When you finally get down to business a sensor in the bowl measures ... uh, the contents, and sends the data to a central control, or to your doctor for analysis.

Thanks, but no thanks. I'll leave the toilet that thinks to Generations X and Y.

Fran and I are unconventional in ways I won't dwell on. I'll build a case on our rejection of all the technological marvels that await us that we don't want.

The future lounge chair will massage you as you watch a huge, crystal clear TV screen bringing you the same yuck that you get today on your dinky TV set.

The chair will have space for a phone, and a zapper to which you give spoken directions.

You can phone a nearby restaurant for delivery of dinner, or even push some buttons to activate an oven in the kitchen.

All this without leaving your chair. Your body can atrophy along with your brain.

If you get out of your chair to, say, use that marvelous toilet, rooms will automatically heat or cool, light up or darken.

I think Bill Gates has this stuff in his new $50 million home in Seattle. The only thing I envy about Gates is the view from his porch, if he has a porch.

Everybody except you and me will have cellular phones, and I'm not sure about you. The atmosphere will be saturated with phone messages from anywhere to everywhere.

You won't even have to go shopping. You can do it on the Internet already without leaving that lounge chair.

All of these wonders are going to be very expensive. The manufacturers aren't in it to help mankind. They're in it to make money. They want to build their own homes like Bill Gates.

They won't do it with my money. Unconventional is somewhat synonymous with comfortable and contented.