So the other day my wife is watching Home and Garden Television when all of a sudden I hear her cry out "Come quick! You've got to see this!" I ran in to the living room, and there on the screen is a brand new, fully modern Kitchen Triever.

The house we live in has a Kitchen Triever in it. Made by Sperry Rand and installed in 1973, it's something you'd have seen on a "Homes of the Future" newsreel from the late 1960s. You can see a complete schematic at the Kardex site linked above, but basically it's a big Ferris wheel of shelves, fourteen in all in our case. Most people, ourselves included at the time we bought the house, have never seen anything like it. Tiffany's mom says they use a similar device for document storage at the Harris County courthouse.

Anyway, HGTV was at the International Builders' Show 2001, which is where they found the updated Triever. This one has a numeric keypad so you can enter the number of the shelf you want it to rotate to. It even has a bar code scanner. You can program it so that if all canned goods are on a particular shelf, then when you come home with a bag full of groceries you scan a can and it goes right where they belong. Hey, we may not have flying cars yet, but by God we've got bar-code automated shelves.

By the way, the keynote speaker for this year's show is Rudy Giuliani. I don't really have a point to make about that. I just found it amusing.