英语阅读：有趣的小发明

Hi,I'm Steve Greenberg and I am the author of Gadget Nation.It's a book all about offbeat³ gadgets⁴ and the inventors behind them.It's kind of a fun look at a, kind of a strange,bizarre slice of Americana.So many the products that we use everyday are,are, go back to some individual inventors,sure a lot of them come from corporate⁵ inventors,and that's a different story.

But things like "WiteOut",the paper clip,the bobby pin,all those things are individual inventors.America is really about coming up with an idea,a little ingenuity,hard work,being an entrepreneur and making something wonderful out of it.

It was back in 2004, this particular night.I got up to went to get a drink of water and when I came back to get in the bed,I turned and ran into the end bedpost on our bed and glided⁶ back down the bed that night. I thought, why don't I just, you know,invent some bedroom slippers⁷ that have headlights on. Got up the next morning and that's how I got started.

I would hit the snooze button on the alarm clock every day for a couple hours and never be able to get myself out of bed on time.The first thing that came in, that came into my mind was to create an alarm clock that would actually run away from you.And then the idea is that you actually have to get out of bed,to look for it. And in that process, you wake up.

Some of them like my book profiles are kind of, you know, silly, they're not gonna save lives necessarily,but they do represent things that people want.

I need to come up with a solution to an everyday problem which is bird poop.Because I enjoy having the birds out the cage with me,and Mark got tired of seeing the poop on my back and all over the floor.We knew that the solution that we thought we've come up with for our own birds,was actually gonna have a much more mass appeal,than we originally thought.

And if you come up with a talking toilet paper roll. To risk your 401（k） or your kid's college fund over a product like this, I guess it takes guts⁸ and they really are about America,they really are the spirit of America.

offbeat:different from the usual; odd

401（k）: The 401（k） plan is a type of employer-sponsored defined contribution retirement⁹ plan under section 401（k） of the Internal Revenue Code （26 U.S.C. § 401（k）） in the United States, and some other countries.

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