The Gadgets Page

• RT @SproutCubed Two radishes planted on the same day. Small one was next to the soaker hose & big one 6 in away. http://twitpic.com/6fmdu #

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When we visited my grandma in Wisconsin, Stacey and I were enthralled with her automatic card shuffler. We found it in the hall closet of her house. It was a gadget that she had bought long before and never used anymore. It looked exactly like the one in this video, right down the the gold foil and imprints of the card suits on the side.

What is missing from this video is the sound of two girls laughing hysterically each time it shuffled the cards. I think Stacey was three years old that trip and I would put the cards in machine and let her push the button. She would squeal and laugh, which would make me laugh.

We were a family that played ALOT of pinochle, so Stacey and I were able to shuffle cards by hand from the age of five, so the idea of a machine to shuffle cards was funny to us. It was so much easier for me to shuffle the cards WITHOUT the machine, that it seemed like such a fantastical gadget to even exist.

Card shufflers are still made and sold today and look remarkably similar. Here is one made by Bicycle:

• Bicycle Automatic Card Shuffler at Amazon.com

For a little over ten dollars, you can get a machine that doesn’t actually shuffle cards any better than you could do yourself by hand. In fact, the shuffler was so exact that it just took one card from each side of the machine. The randomness of hand shuffling is actually BETTER for mixing up the cards, and my hands don’t require batteries.

If you need to entertain two young girls, however, the automatic card shuffler just might be the trick.