Word: gadget
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...takes to the trees occasionally to fight for right, but with obsolete weapons. The Wild West gunfighter endures, though an hombre who traditionally hates kissin' and gets his kicks by digging spurs into horseflesh seems equally ill-adapted to the times. The exquisitely contemporary hero is girl-happy, gadget-minded James Bond, whose legend has already tempted a host of imitators to bland larceny. Now five new spy spoofs reverently ape Bond, with more a-making to catch the rich financial fallout from Goldfinger and Thunderball...
...garbage (onto a conveyer belt moving under the street), vacuum rugs, wash windows, cut the grass. Edward Fredkin, founder of Cambridge's Information International Inc., has already developed a computer-cum-mechanical-arm that can "see" a ball thrown its way and catch it. Soon, Fredkin expects his gadget to be able to play a mean game of pingpong...
...swift trucks, trains and planes. As soon as it hits a post office, though, the mail creeps through the hands of human sorters who faced 72 billion pieces of mail last year. To speed up sorting, the Post Office Department is pinning its hopes on a new electronic gadget: an optical scanner that reads machine-printed addresses and sorts mail 15 times faster than the most efficient postal clerk. Introduction of the device, says Postmaster General Larry O'Brien, "is as much an historical event as the issuance of the first U.S. stamp in 1847 or the first city...
...above it was fitted with bulletproof glass. Behind the sandbags and peering through the window, Air Force Major General James Humphreys was all set to start a long-distance operation. With a scalpel attached to a 6-ft. pole, and a pair of pincers that looked like the gadget used to pluck a cereal box off the top shelf of a grocery store, Surgeon Humphreys was going to reach through the opening in the wall and remove an ostrich-egg-sized lump from the back of a Vietnamese farmer...
...sense, the younger Californian artists show American art at its last frontier. They do not mind being "funky," that is, casual, deliberately corny, explorers of the American vernacular. In the ambiance of the gadget, the dragster with painted flames in its exhausts, the never-closed supermarket with motorized shopping cars, the West Coast artist has become his own deus ex machina. They are part-optimistic, part-spooky gardeners in a garish no man's land between art and reality. Like the man who built the Watts Towers, they might, when finished, just move away and never come back...