Tax time is no fun at all. There’s all the paperwork and about a hundred other complications. It isn’t that way in Sweden. To file taxes in Sweden all you have to do is open a new text message, enter your Social Security number and a security code sent to you by mail, and zip it off to the Department of the Treasury.

This is how many Swedish people will file their income taxes in May. They’ve used this system for the last five years. But there’s a catch.

Ah, the Swiss. While Germans have been busy doing useful things with street lighting, the Swiss have been busy treating people who actually still play a Sony console for injuries.

Here’s the story. Swiss scientists have ID’d a new skin disorder that they believe came from prolonged gaming. They’re calling it “PlayStation palmar hidradentitis,”, a condition where painful lumps appear on the palms. The diagnosis came when a 12-year old girl visited a Geneva hospital with hand lesions. Allegedly from a gaming marathon that lasted hours. She fully recovered after a ten-day break from the PlayStation.

You want to eat healthy, but it’s hard. Those nutritional labels are small for a reason. So they are hard to read. You’d rather focus on how delicious those chips are going to taste in an Oreo sandwich. But some of us actually want to know what we are putting in our bodies. Some people are obsessive about it. Whether you are just watching your sodium intake or you believe that too much high fructose corn syrup will give you erectile dysfunction, it could sure be easier to read those labels with a shopping cart like this.

These carts feature a built-in magnifying glass so you can easily read the package as well as have a closer look at the shrinking boxes they are giving us for the same money. The carts can be found at a co-op in Geneva, Switzerland, but I think we here in the US could do with some.

Behold. Now you know what A-hole bankers use to sign checks back and forth to each other. It’s called the 1010, a limited edition 18k gold pen from Swiss company Caran d’Ache. The idea is that this piece is to “celebrate the special genius of watchmakers.” It gets the 1010 name because of the look of a watch’s hands at that time of day or night. This expensive and ludicrously fancy update to the feathered quill pen doesn’t even have working gears. Those gears are all non-working, making this an expensive ruse with another ruse.

Some other allusions to timepieces include the clip that looks like a watch hand, the decorative balance wheel mounted between two rubies under a sapphire dome, and then there’s the tiny tick marks etched around its barrel. It even has a ruby-studded piston pump to move the ink from its interior to its nib. That’s right I said nib.

What is this new pretty thing? Surely that’s too nice to be a phone. It’s Motorola’s latest, the premium Aura handset, and it’s all about design. It was inspired by high end swiss watches. The phone’s switch blade design all by itself is driven by over 200 parts and 130 of them are ball bearings used to open the handset up to an estimated 100,000 times before failure. It doesn’t end there.

The display is the work of fine engineering too. Just 1.55-inches in diameter, it’s the “world’s first” circular cellphone screen and features 16 million colors and 300 dpi clarity. I guess it doesn’t hurt that it’s coated with 62-carat sapphire crystal too, in order to prevent scratching. The phone is quad band with GPRS and EDGE featuring 7.3 hours of talk time, 2GB, AGPS, stereo Bluetooth, microUSB port, and 2MP camera. It will be available starting December 4th for $2,000. Fine watch quality, fine watch price.