Word: gismo
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...1960s a psychic superstar came along in the person of Ted Serios, a hard-drinking, onetime bellhop from Chicago. Serios' gift was definitely offbeat: he produced pictures inside a Polaroid camera using nothing but his mind and a little hollow tube he called his "gismo." Reporters Charles Reynolds and David Eisendrath, who observed Serios at work in Denver, had little trouble constructing a device that could be secreted inside a gismo to produce all of Serios' effects. The instrument contained a minuscule lens at one end and a photographic transparency at the other. When the device was pointed...
...date of Eisenbud's writing, never has met success in attempts to influence film when the lens opening is taped shut, or when the camera is dispensed with altogether). Between the lens and himself he holds a small cylinder of paper or other material he calls the "gismo" (he typically employs a circlet of blackened Polaroid paper, formed with celluloid tape and prepared by anyone who wishes from their own materials at the beginning of a session, though he has used rings of other sorts of paper, napkin rings, and even the core of a roll of toilet paper...
...sounds like a tense and uncomfortable weekend in Denver, saw no images produced in the course of three sessions (though there were several blackies--which unfortunately seem to be the least convincing effects in Serios's reportory), on one occasion found Serios unwilling to permit their inspection of the gismo and the hand that held it, and returned to write: "Whether or not Ted Serios is a charlatan or a genuine psychic we cannot say. We can only state that whe arrived in Denver profoundly skeptical about his ability to produce what Dr. Eisenbud claims in his book--and left...
...accept a middle line as meaningful in the Serios case. The inquiry team's suggestion fails to cover a number of the conditions, described above, under which Eisenbud asserts that Serios has produced images (is it reasonable to assume, for example, that the miniature optical device secreted in the gismo would pass muster when an objective observer rather than Serios is holding the gismo, etc.). Neither does the posited gimmick explain certain notable examples of Serios's pictures described below. The moderate approach fails because the effect of Eisenbud's documentation is to polarize opinion about the Serios affair. There...
Clobbering Friends. In his bedroom, Paley has an Eames chair facing a thing that looks like a tea caddy, with three small Sony TV sets on it. Picking up a remote-control gismo, he flicks CBS, ABC and NBC into life and says, "You see, I can shut one off and watch the other two." Click. "Or I can shut two off." Click. "Or I can shut them all off," he adds, with a particularly satisfied click...