Hot toy trends From the American Toy Fair include:

• Smelly and gross toys: With Stink Blasters kids can squeeze the heads of such characters as Garbage Truck Chuck or Barfin' Ben, releasing foul smells. Snot Shot is a plastic green play gun that shoots out green goo. Gooze Spladders has one pound of gooey compound in the shape of an eyeball, fried egg or teeth.

• Room Decor: A number of toy makers are going after girls' increasing interest in decorating their own rooms. Lego Systems Inc. has further expanded its arts and crafts kit called Clikits to include more room accessories like a Friendship frame, mirror or a designer desk set. MGA Entertainment Inc., the maker of the highly popular Bratz dolls, is unveiling lamps and swinging chairs.

• Retro: Cabbage Patch dolls, which were popular in the early 1980s, are being reintroduced. Watch for Dream Pets, fuzzy animals originally brought to the United States in the 1950s from Japan. Mattel's Fisher Price is bringing back Elmo again -- this time, he's dancing to E-L-M-O to the tune of the Village People's "YMCA.''

Car color trends

Dupont reports that the most popular colors for cars produced in the U.S. and Canada in 2003 include:

One final thought

You know you are living in the 21st century when:

• Your reason for not staying in touch with family is because they do not have e-mail addresses.

• You have a list of 15 phone numbers to reach your family of three.

• You call your son's beeper to let him know it's time to eat. He e-mails you back from his bedroom, "What's for dinner?"

• Your daughter sells Girl Scout cookies via her Website.

• You chat several times a day with a stranger from South Africa, but you haven't spoken with your next-door neighbor yet this year.

• You check the ingredients on a can of chicken noodle soup to see if it contains Echinacea.

• Your grandmother asks you to send her a JPEG file of your newborn so she can create a screen saver.

• You pull up in your own driveway and use your cell phone to see if anyone is home.

• Every commercial on television has a Website address at the bottom of the screen.

• You buy a computer and six months later it is out of date and now sells for half the price you paid.

• Leaving the house without your cell phone, which you didn't have the first 20 or 30 years of your life, is now a cause for panic and you turn around to go get it.

• Using real money, instead of credit or debit, to make a purchase would be a hassle and takes planning.

• Cleaning up the dining room means getting the fast food bags out of the back seat of your car.

• You just tried to enter your password on the microwave.

• You consider second day air delivery painfully slow.

• Your dining room table is now your flat filing cabinet.

• Your idea of being organized is multiple colored Post-it notes.

• You hear most of your jokes via e-mail instead of in person.

• You get an extra phone line so you can get phone calls.

• You disconnect from the Internet and get this awful feeling, as if you just pulled the plug on a loved one.

• You get up in morning and go on-line before getting your coffee.

• You wake up at 2 AM to go to the bathroom and check your e-mail on your way back to bed.

• You start tilting your head sideways to smile. :)

Published: March 18, 2004

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Kathy Lamancusa is a trend strategis, professional speaker and author who tracks the forces that impact our lives. Over 1.6 million copies of Kathy's books are in print, and she has appeared on numerous television and radio shows including Oprah! She is a public speaker who can offer organizations entertaining and enlightening peeks into what is coming and what is shaping change so that they can better reach their own customer bases.