Two thousand years from now, when genetically mutated bacteria rule the Earth, they will look back and ask themselves what it was that finally ended the reign of the lowly human being. I'm pretty confident that they will trace the answer back to a restaurant called uWink, which opened in the Hollywood & Highland shopping mall over the weekend.

Not that uWink is a restaurant. Oh no. It's an “interactive dining experience”, created by none other than Nolan Bushnell, the man who invented the Atari video games computer (and who will soon be played by Leonardo DiCaprio in a Hollywood biopic).

There are no waiters, only individual touchscreens - one for every diner - which means that ordering food is pretty much indistinguishable from ordering an electric nose-hair trimmer on Amazon, only with a delivery time of minutes, not days. To cater for fussy types - ie, Americans - every order can be customised (such as “make mine a house salad without the tomatoes, the dressing, or the lettuce, but with a cheeseburger and fries on the side, thanks”).

But the real gimmick is the entertainment offered by the touchscreens. You can play video games against your fellow diners. You can watch movie trailers. You can take magazine quizzes.

And if you don't want to sit at a table you can sit at the predictably named iBar, a 12ft touchscreen surface on which you can play Pong, draw virtual pictures and order Martinis that induce an interactively entertaining state of drunkenness. In other words, you can completely occupy all of your senses without so much as having to look up at your table companions, never mind actually do anything so tedious as engage in conversation.

Married couples will love it.

It was inevitable that such a restaurant would open - uWink is simply the logical extension of what mealtimes have become for the Facebook generation, another opportunity for pointless interactive fiddling. This is troubling, because if there's ever an extended power cut, we might forget how to eat. And we won't be able to ask anyone for help, because communicating via speech will be as obsolete as doing so via smoke signals. By that time enough bacteria will have collected on those touchscreens - imagine the layers of fingergrease - for them to launch a successful and long-overdue bid for global domination.

You read it here first.

Milking a trend

Speaking of the Facebook generation and the threat to humankind represented by ambitious bacteria, a growing number of Angelenos are refusing to drink pasteurised milk. Instead, they buy their milk “raw” for insane prices of up to $16 a gallon. Presumably these are the same people who refuse to vaccinate their kids, thus reintroducing measles to the United States.

The argument against pasteurisation is that it removes some of milk's nutritional benefits. It also happens to get rid of E. coli, campylobacter, brucella, listeria, and salmonella - but for people who've never experienced these (like those who have never experienced measles) it's no biggie.

It's illegal to sell raw milk in many states outside California, but the trend is catching on nationwide, with raw milk proponents in other parts of the country getting around the law by purchasing their own cows, or taking part in “cowshare” schemes.

To see how all this will end you need only to observe a federal court case in Seattle, in which the owners of a dairy have just pleaded guilty to selling tainted raw milk that left two children on life support.

Borderline case

I have discovered a way to travel via timewarp back to the mid-1990s - when we ignored the world's rapidly dwindling oil supplies and instead lost sleep over the apocalyptic horror of our video recorders displaying the wrong time and date after midnight on December31, 1999. To activate the timewarp you simply drive south from LA to the border, beyond which the Mexican Government sells subsidised petrol for $2.50 a gallon (the equivalent of 33p a litre). Unfortunately, this means that you also have to spend two hours idling your engine in a traffic jam at the border crossing, thus warming the globe by a few more degrees. On the upside, you take money from the Mexicans - a novel experience for most Americans.

Summer in the city

It's summer, which means that it's hot in LA. Every year this seems to come as an unpleasant shock to the Los Angeles Times. Under a breathless headline, it reported yesterday that “a heat wave... sent hundreds of thousands of Southern Californians to beaches this weekend and left them searching for new words to describe their misery”. Ah, yes, the misery of sunny beaches in LA. What could possibly be worse.

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