And his standard piece, "Caught" (1982), is a fail-safe contraption, making use of a strobe light so that a dancer (on Tuesday, a blond Adonis named Eric Bourne) appears to walk on air and fly.
She could be excused, though, since it was her first time using such a contraption.
Dummett liked to use the then newfangled white boards, on which he wrote using variously colored water-soluble pens, erasing by means of a contraption that combined the qualities of a water pistol with a square of blotting paper.
And, of course, to use the keys to type you still had to put the Frankenstein-monster of a contraption down.
He had to block the use of a Russian-made device for her tracheotomy, declaring, "Maybe Dr. Pavlov used that kind of contraption with dogs at the turn of the century!" In general, Dr. Klesarev said, this is a typical exchange: "I call the central pharmacy and say, 'I need this,' and they say, 'Oh, we don't have the money, and you can't get it.' "So you get the money from the relatives.
To discuss: In an optional session of a Northwestern course on human sexuality, a man brought a woman to climax, on stage, using a contraption called a "fucksaw".
In Italy, the meat would next be hand cut, but Mr. Bertolli uses a German contraption consisting of a spinning bowl with a rotary knife whirling vertically inside it.
To test fishes' camouflage abilities, researchers used a multiarmed contraption to take videos of fish from various angles as the sun moved throughout the day.
Digital equipment now exists to measure riders' progress, but the New York races use an antique set of British rollers from the 1960s, a contraption of pins and pulleys whose low-tech look and loud colors recall a Coney Island ride.
My friend, who lives in California, is a mother of three with full-time access to her own loo; the gory logistics of using this contraption in a public toilet were too horrible to contemplate.
