Edible Apple

There’s a great Simpsons episode where Homer, in an attempt to collect disability insurance, puts on a few hundred extra pounds of fat. In one particularly funny scene, he attempts to use a touch-tone phone whereupon he hears a recording stating, “The fingers you have used to dial are too fat. To obtain a special dialing wand, please mash the keypad with your palm now.”

Now if only Homer had an iPad back then.

On a somewhat related note, and in a piece of offbeat news, Reuters is reporting that the governing body of Sumo Wrestling in Japan has decided to give out iPads to wrestlers who otherwise have trouble using their larger than average fingers on today’s relatively small touchscreen smartphones.

The sumo association said it will hand out iPads to Japan’s 51 “stables”, or the clubs the wrestlers belong to, with the aim of improving communication among the roly-poly grapplers after some in the past had missed information sent by fax or telephone.

We can only assume then that these Sumo Wrestlers will receive coveted iPad 3G models.

The iPad tablet PC, which starts at 48,800 yen ($570) in Japan, was likely chosen because many stablemasters do not use computers and wrestlers are not good at punching in messages on their mobile phones with their big hands, Jiji news agency said.

iPad or a special dialing wand – we think they made the right choice.