Hi Carolyn,
Just got back from a short trip "down country " for a family function or two. A self-professed fan of the "punkin", such as yourself, would have certainly appreciated the scenery. We tried some highly rural routes to shorten the trip and feed our need for " splorin" and, let me tellya, there were gourds galore in the fields and roadside stands and on the sidewalks of small towns. It was a gourd gourmands' Valhalla.
I must confess to not being a pumpkin person. The taste is okay in a pie or cake but it runs a pale and distant second to the almighty apple on my list of harvest favorites. I count myself lucky to be living smack dab in the middle of orchard country here. A just picked Macintosh apple sliced up and lightly dusted with freshly ground sea salt is sweet ( and a bit tart ) music to my taste buds. Somebody at a fledgling computer company in Cupertino, California, once upon a time, liked them too and used the name for a new line of computers. The rest, as they say.....
Okay, I simply have to come back to the most wished for " sci-fi gizmos " topic you were exploring a couple of posts ago. The cloaking device surely has appeal for me, although it would carry with it the risk of being invisible at the wrong place and the wrong time and seeing something you'd later wish you had not. It's the kind of thing that could be put to just as many bad uses as good, however. Mind you, that could be said about almost any advancement, like writing, I suppose.Certainly agree about the teleportation stuff. Who wouldn't. It wouldn't mean the end of more traditional and tactile modes of transport, I'm sure, but when expediency is the main concern, how could it not be preferred. It made me think back to the Concorde supersonic airliner again. It offered a half the time but twice the price alternative - and where is it now?
The visual telecommunication item immediately made me think of " Metropolis " , the 1927 silent film by Fritz Lang that featured just such a device. It also reminded me that both my LSBH and I have iPhones with this capability. We've had them for a few years now and never made use of it. She has stated categorically, more than once, that " just hearing you is enough"
hmmmmmm....
Interesting to see that the light saber " an elegant weapon for a more civilised age " makes it to the top of the list. Elegant it may be , but it's still a weapon. In the wrong hands it can still be put to less than elegant purposes. Gotta admit, though, it would make one funky grass trimmer or whippersnipper. I guess that would be kind of like using a Ferrari to scoot down to the 7-11 for a quart of milk, though. 
Actually, topping my list of sci-fi gizmos that should be real is the replicator. Well not actually the Star Trek replicator that pumps out Earl Grey for Captain Picard but something more personalised. I'm thinking something more along the lines of the " Nutri-matic " gizmo that Arthur Dent encountered in The Hitchiker's Guide to the Galaxy. " When the Drink button was pressed ", as Douglas Adams explains it, " it made an instant but highly detailed examination of the subject's taste buds, a spectroscopic analysis of the subject's metabolism and then sent tiny experimental signals down the neural pathways to the taste centers of the subject's brain to see what would go down well. " A thoughtful family member presented me with a set of the complete works of Douglas Adams for my birthday a couple of weeks ago and I have decided to make use of that new comfy little alcove that used to be the breakfast area in our old kitchen, as a reading area. I'm revisiting The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy and the rest of his novels over the next while. I'd forgotten just how enjoyable his writings can be.
So, let us to the riddles go. Carolyn, I think that all of this HLC stuff you were dealing with at school has made you razor sharp for riddle guessing, and riddle creating. You were dead on right about my last offering. As for yours, I have to throw myself at your mercy because I simply can't crack it. I can only guess that it's some sort of fastening device like Velcro. The leverage part is still throwing me off, though.
Anyhow, I toss this one back 'atcha !
Nine defenders with leather hands
Try to thwart one, two, three or four individuals
attempting to get back to where they started
Catch ya later,
Don
BTW - I hope the end result of all of that t dotting and I crossing you were doing at school is a good one and justifies all of your efforts.
All images sourced from Google Images
Fig. 1 - www.ivanbroker.com
Fig. 2 - www.carlywilkiesteven.com
Fig. 3 - www.sott.net
Fig. 4 - en.wikipedia.org
Fig. 5 - en.wikipedia.org
Fig. 6 - en.wikipedia.org
