[Index]

LL :: Volume 4 :: LR
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  Keeping Both Heads on the Ground
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*   Devices for Living
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  HelvAstre Emergency Unit. Exactly what you'd expect from the Swiss space program: a tool containing everything you need in a shipboard or station emergency. It's a fat cylinder, about four cm wide and twenty long. One end is a flashlight, which can be activated by switch or by squeezing the tool anywhere -- and it also automatically turns on a dim location glow if the ambient light level drops below standard room illumination, and turns on full power if the light level drops below human dark-adapted minimum. The other side ends with a strong magnet, which can be pulled off; it's attached to the body by a retracting reel of 500-kg nylon cord, on which is strung a hook which can be slid along or locked to the cord. Pulling the end off also lets you get at the stuff inside the casing, which includes anti-nausea and painkiller pills, a roll of gauze, a tube of vacuum sealant, a radio beacon, and a miniature fan you can clip to your collar to keep air moving past your face. About the only thing missing is a spacesuit, and if they could have fit one into the volume of a hot dog, I'm sure they would have. And the total mass is under a kilogram. This thing is a must for stationers and crew; buy one for each person, and another hundred to stick to the walls in every room and corridor.

Pennyfarthing Roller Skates. Get that high-heeled look from your roller skates. Little wheel in front, big wheel in back. Available in standard and in-line designs; bright red, shiny black, or satin white.

Voice Box. A power strip with a microphone. Hold down the "memorize" button and say a phrase several times; the embedded circuitry will record it. Thereafter, if that phrase is heard anywhere in the room, the Box will switch on the devices plugged into it. Each outlet on the strip can be programmed with a different command, optionally with separate commands to turn the outlet on and off. Available in two, six, and ten-outlet models.

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*   Playing With Reality
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  SimNothing, Mintis

The perfect sim game for the person who hates simulations! Simulates a world where absolutely nothing is happening! Occasionally pops up a newpaper whose headline is always "Nothing happened this year." You can set the tax rate, temperature, and breeding parameters, but since nothing has income, heat, or sex, it doesn't matter. Zone your nothing as Boring Nothing, Empty Nothing, Vacuous Nothing, and Lack Of Anything, and then try to figure out the difference. A four-dimensional full-color stereoscopic graph window displays nothing all the time.

After twenty hours of play you get a Llama Dome.

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*   Gourmet Corner
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  The new fast-food fad is specialty sandwiches on brightly-colored bread. Salami on blue, roast beef on turquoise, cheeseburger on scarlet, meatball hoagie on green. This has actually been in demand for years, but MhicDonall Food Technologies has just recently figured out how to manufacture colored breads which won't bleed dye into the sandwich filling. Food Flash and BriteBurger stands are popping up in every shopping mall. The rumor mills grind that the next advance will be luminescent breads.

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