A little kitsch with your sums and differences?

I come by my love of gadgets and toys honestly, because my grandfather was a total junkie for such. When my grandmother died four years ago, one of the things we found in her stuff was this calculator that belonged to him. Meet the Kosmos I: the state of the art in analyzing your biorhythms from the comfort of your easy chair in 1977.

I remember Papaw loving this little thing. You put in your birthdate and the current date, and then you can scroll through the calendar to see what your physical, emotional, and intellectual biorhythms did (or will do) on certain days.

Or something. Biorhythms are real phenomena, of course, and rigorous analysis of them may yield useful information. But I’m rather skeptical that a handheld calculator (with no probes or sensors of any kind) is now, or was ever, a useful tool for such. Though the accompanying literature never says it’s a joke or novelty item, Papaw was a practical guy, so I’m pretty confident he enjoyed it only on that level.

Anyway, it’s in great shape. I put batteries in it and it fired right up, so I use it as my primary calculator. I’ve always preferred a calculator with real keys, and it’s got a nice vacuum fluorescent green display and good action. Why not?

Incidentally, the biorhythm functions on the calculator can’t be used anymore. It has the Y2K problem.

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