Mysql multiple counts on one line (reports)

I like to poll the contents of multiple tables over time in order to track the progress of certain processing tasks I do. I used to perform individual counts for each table and kept doing that out of habit. There's a much nicer way to do this and have the report in a single result. I tend to keep track of the elapsed time using the unix_timestamp() function (this returns the number of elapsed seconds since Jan 1st 1970 as an unsigned integer).

First set up the initial variables (those to compare against - this is time 0)

PaulBo@test_db:SELECT @time:=UNIX_TIMESTAMP(), @apples:=(SELECT COUNT(*) FROM apples), @oranges:=(SELECT COUNT(*) FROM oranges);

Then, let some time pass and poll the tables for changes:

PaulBo@test_db:SELECT UNIX_TIMESTAMP() - @time as elapsed_time, (SELECT COUNT(*) FROM apples) - @apples as d_apples, (SELECT COUNT(*) FROM oranges) - @oranges as d_oranges;
+--------------+----------+-----------+
| elapsed_time | d_apples | d_oranges |
+--------------+----------+-----------+
|          435 |      230 |     12887 |
+--------------+----------+-----------+
1 row in 1 set (0.00 sec)