Word: gizmo
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...turned into something delicious by a touch of nutmeg and a hot oven. Except that the mist comes from dry ice stuck in a grinning skull, the whisper in the trees from nylon ghosts hung in the boughs, and the pumpkin, made of bilious orange plastic, has a gizmo inside that groans "Whoooooooo ..." as you walk past. Halloween is upon us again...
...dashboard and doubles as a battery charger. Less expensive is C. Crane's model, but it's nearly as big as the player itself. The iRock 300W is smaller, but it plays through only a measly four frequencies. I chose the new iTrip from Griffin Technology, a stylish gizmo roughly the size of a roll of Tums. It fits neatly on top of the iPod and costs just $35. Also, it works over several frequencies, the signal never drifts, and it's easy to program...
...romantic as well as big, the obvious area is the environment. Several of the candidates have proposed dour, incremental "energy-independence" schemes that feature many of the worthy, ho-hum notions of years past--conservation, fuel-efficiency standards and the like. But the fun part of the environment is gizmos. The President, a gizmo kind of guy, embraced the hydrogen car. The Democrats could do that and more--nuclear fusion, wind power, digital interstate highways (a computer chip in your car locks you in at 70 m.p.h. a safe distance from the cars in front of and behind you). Whatever...
...Renaissance is starting," you're reading a line from a Woody Allen story. Real life rarely offers such prescience, even from the people paid to deliver it. Some of the days commemorated in this 80-year retrospective slipped by unnoticed at the time. Who could imagine that a gizmo to help techno-nerds talk to one another with their computers would so radically alter how we all would connect with one another? Other days might not have made the list at all if it had been put together a decade ago. History comes with its very own Doppler effect...
SONY ERICSSON P800 This silver-and-blue gizmo looks like a phone with a camera fused onto its backside, but the P800 packs a surprisingly decent PDA (using the Symbian operating system) under its lid as well. I admit I had my doubts at first. The cheap, plastic stylus and the miniature virtual keyboard that pops up onscreen do not immediately inspire confidence. But with a little practice, anyone with good eyesight and a steady hand can get used to writing with it. The PC software that Sony Ericsson includes for loading MP3s onto the phone never did work...