Tuesday’s New York Times featured an article (Anywhere the Eye Can See, It�s Likely to See an Ad) that provided a superficially breezy survey of advertisers’ increasingly invasive strategies for getting customers to eyeball their messages:”Supermarket eggs have been stamped with the names of CBS television shows. Subway turnstiles bear messages from Geico auto insurance. Chinese food cartons promote Continental Airways. US Airways is selling ads on motion sickness bags. And the trays used in airport security lines have been hawking Rolodexes. [. . .]No consumer, it seems, is too young. Some school buses now play radio ads meant for children. Last summer, Walt Disney advertised its �Little Einsteins� DVDs for preschoolers on the paper liners of examination tables in 2,000 pediatricians� offices, according to Supply Marketing, a company that gives doctors free supplies in exchange for using branded products.Some people have had enough. Last month, after some �Got Milk?� billboards started emitting the odor of chocolate chip cookies at San Francisco bus stops, many people complained” But sometime after reading this article, I had a queasy epiphany–perhaps one not uncommon to males in their mid-thirties who read too many yellow-jacketed Victor Gollancz sci-fi novels in their youth. It struck me that today’s world–where it will soon be impossible to walk down an urban street without being sold something–is rather like one of those science-fiction novels penned in the late 60s and 1970s. Not, you understand, one of those bright-eyed speculations produced by, say, Arthur C. Clark, but rather closer to those dystopian visions of John Brunner or Robert Silverberg (only geeks will recognize those names, I fear). But what’s next? Perhaps once the man-made space is cluttered beyond repair, the “natural” world will be exploited. Just think: genetic manipulation of chloroplast to enable leaves to display the Toyota logo…ripening tomatoes marked by the Nike swoosh… songbirds chirping the new Windows bootup tune…