Once you've started playing Contraptions, it's awfully hard to stop.
The program begins with the chess-playing contraption known as the Turk, a machine — or was it?
Strange contraptions — a pendulum playing a harp, a Tesla coil to zap bass tones — were arrayed around Bjork, her band and an Icelandic early-music choir.
After losing $10, Mrs. Ryan let out a theatrical groan, offered up a few expletives and dislodged herself from the gambling industry's latest novelty, Pedal 'N Play, a contraption that casino officials hope will alter the less-than-salubrious image of gambling patrons.
A video starts playing showing a Rube Goldberg-like contraption.
Instead of playing as Donkey Kong, you control a contraption consisting of your Mii in a plastic bubble, above two wheels attached by springs.
They had already married, had children, sent them off to college, attended their weddings, and were waiting excitedly for grandchildren, who'd come to play on the wooden contraption that could dangle them upside down for hours, or break their ribs if they sprang free.
Mike Epps, once again playing a silly, motor-mouth sidekick, helps hold up the comic end of this awkward contraption, as does Steve Harvey as a drunken radio D.J.
It sounds like the work of several guitarists but it's just Manzanera playing through a complex relay of distortion, repeat echoes and vari-pitch, using a specially built contraption that worked just once.
The metal-and-wood contraption, which was designed to look like a man and was dressed as a sorcerer, amazed audiences by playing master-level chess against human opponents around the world, for seventy years.
At times of greatest narrative moment - his mother lying dying on a sofa, spitting bile into a plastic contraption; a friend's attempted suicide - the narrative is invariably displaced by a television programme that has been playing in the background.
