Somehow, the whole unlikely contraption held together, critics hailed it as a rare gem of English pop - and it didn't sell.
Jobs, with incisive assistance from his design team, reshaped the personal computer from a wobbly, Professor Branestawm-like contraption lashed together at the back of a garage, or from an early Moog synthesiser lookalike, into a kind of digital jewellery.
"Not with these kind of questions, guys," she said, after appearing in wings, thigh boots and a burlesque-influenced bra and pants contraption lashed together with black ribbons, "this is stupid.
And the only thing protecting Lake Michigan from the menace of a voracious invading predator that all agree will decimate the ecosystem is a quirky Rube Goldberg contraption put together by the Army Corps of Engineers, Coast Guard, and EPA.
Now, as Tom Friedman has pointed out, the party is an empty shell of its former self, the rusting hulk of a Rube Goldberg contraption slapped together to garner the support of Christian fundamentalists, the gun lobby, the Tea Party, global warming deniers, birthers and other right-wing conspiracy theory nuts.
As a child, Thomas Heatherwick was a fan of the comic inventions of W Heath Robinson, whose best drawings – the Automatic Back Scratcher, the Self-Operating Napkin – featured ingenious contraptions held together by cogs, pulleys, steam kettles, candles and lengths of knotted string.
Even the wildest contraption should hang together internally.
And the whole contraption was put together by Ms. Little's husband, Mike Hatch (a recording engineer, handy with a screwdriver), as a solution to the peculiar problems of a work she plays with Simon Rattle and the Berlin Philharmonic on Wednesday at Carnegie Hall and next Sunday at the Kimmel Center in Philadelphia.
