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Bisbee,
Arizona news, reviews, art, events, history, business and entertainment
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From the editor
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The most important thing you need to know about this gizmo is that you can either plug it in and leave it on all the time or take it with you and automatically power it with the enclosed, easily replaceable 9 volt battery. Also you can change the words manually by tapping the top of the block with a pen or a pencil. 2 words are randomly selected each time from a memory of approximately 1000 words. Beyond that, I encourage you to figure out for yourself how to relate to this quasi-human, previously highly unlikely handcrafted work of art and invention containing not much less than one million possible word combinations. I hope you will find it entertaining and encourage to explore the product's practical applications. from The Inside Story - the user's manual for the Rhymex.
jumpstart
This time of the year the seating outside the Bisbee Coffee Company is usually a good spot for local color. Regulars congregate out there a couple of times a day, get buzzed, spin yarns and pass some time. In the winter the group moves two or three yards to the other side of the big window. But this is summer and we meet Miles Grenadier outside there, sitting back in a chair against the glass, puffing on the last of a Delicado, bushy-eyebrowed, serious in Hawaiian shirt and jeans. This guy is an inventor. "Here it is," he says and places a four inch hardwood box on the table. It's got a red plastic on-off switch on on the side and a window in the front. Miles hits the switch and two words show up in the window: courtesy Hmmm. "It's uncanny sometimes," says Miles. Drummer Bill, more local color, caffeine-buzzing off the seat at the next table, sez, "Does this have something to do with orgone energy, Miles?"
euphoria Miles Grenadier started working on this project of his in 1984. He wanted to create a digital wrist watch that displayed a random word instead of the time. According to a Berkshire Eagle article dated a couple of years later, Miles called his watch "The Wristo" and called the people who would someday wear his watch, "wristocrats." Miles explained it all in The Eagle this way: "Every minute a different randomly selected word from a bank of 3,000 words will be spelled out on the watch's display. A wristocrat uses this word by connecting it with anything he may wish to think about. Because of its convenient location on the wrist, it is an everpresent means of escape from a too narrow (or broad) view of a situation; it can be used spontaneously whenever the wearer thinks it may be helpful to move outside his/her present frame of reference toward a specific randomly selected word. While the human mind, in confronting a problem or situation, is generally limited to the patterns developed in handling similar problems or situations in the past, the random Wristo word can provide a new outside starting point. In filling the '0' or space between what a wristocrat wants to think about and his current word, he is allowed to access other portions of the mind. His thought will move outside its normal range to fill his particular vacuum or ').' As in learning to play the piano, Wristo practice will improve performance." By 1989 the Wristo concept had evolved. In an Eagle piece titled "Clock helps chitchat" Miles said the world wasn't ready for the wristo. He borrowed a Lite beer clock from a place called La Cocina and married it to a big vesrion of the Wristo so that bar frequenters get flashed a new word under the Lite beer sign every thirty seconds. Miles predicted that the first response from the bar patrons was going to be, " Hey, look at that stupid clock." But then, he wrote, "the mind boggles at the plethora of unexpected conversations that will ensue with no other explanations than the suggestion of conversations." At this point we can't help but remember our friend Earl the Pearl, who used to get loaded sometimes and recite random numbers. One time our mother and aunt came to town and we talked them into going out for a drink. It was a fine evening sipping cocktails on the patio of the Queen. We excused ourselves for a minute to go to the restroom and when we returned we found these two blue-haired old ladies from Pennsylvania sitting there wide eyed, utterly transfixed, as Earl, who had wondered unintroduced up to the table, leaned toward them, wide-eyed himself, twisting his mustasche conspiratorialy, whispering, "two hundred seventy-eight thousand, four hundred sixty-two; eight thousand twenty-seven; one million four hundred sixty-nine thousand one hundred ninety-eight, twenty-six trillion, eighty-sev.... " "Hi, Earl," we said. "Have a seat."
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