Remember "Ginger," the supposedly earth-shattering Mystery Thing that inventor Dean Kamen was rumored to have been working on earlier this year, back in happier times? Well, the enigmatic Ginger -- also called "It" -- will soon be unveiled ... maybe.
Last Monday, Diane Sawyer, host of ABC's Good Morning America, announced that her show will soon reveal the secret invention -- rumored to be a super-efficient personal scooter -- that tech heavies like Steve Jobs and Jeff Bezos said could possibly change the world.
"Well, are you ready?" Sawyer asked on the morning show, chatting with her co-host Charles Gibson. "Because one week from today" -- on Monday, Dec. 3 -- "we're going to reveal right here what It is. And we don't know, either. We don't know if you eat it, or you ride it, or you co-anchor with it. We don't know. But we're going to find out a week from today."
But many who have long discussed the It mystery -- at online forums such as The IT Question -- were shocked that the truth might soon be unearthed. It's possible that Kamen will finally say what he's doing, they reasoned. But it's also possible, isn't it, that Diane Sawyer and ABC News have been the victim of a prank?
"You hear about the Howard Stern fans who call in to TV shows and get past producers," said Jerry Schumacker, a Ginger-speculator in Ohio. "Some people think it's possible that somebody called in and duped Diane."
Schumacker himself does not believe this is possible; he gives ABC more credit than that. But at the discussion section of The IT Question, some people said it was rather fishy that Sawyer seemed so in-the-dark about It and that few other media outlets were reporting the announcement.
"Why isn't ABCnews.com reporting this on their own site?" asked a poster named davela77. "They have to know that Sawyer mentioned this, and the site was running It headlines all through the months of January and February. And now nothing on this? It's mind boggling."
He added: "My best guess is that it was a 'slip' by Sawyer and Kamen has told them that if there is any more word about it before Monday he'll yank it from them. I know Kamen wants to be secretive with all of this, but this is a lockdown. Why does the (revelation) itself have to remain so secret?'"
ABC News refused to comment on Sawyer's announcement. A spokeswoman acknowledged only that Sawyer had indeed mentioned It, but she would not answer questions about the possibility of a hoax.
Kamen could not be reached for comment, either.
This tight-lipped attitude didn't comfort any of the Kamen-watchers, many of whom seem to have conspiracies on the brain.
Perhaps what discomfited Dean fans the most was the unexpectedness of Sawyer's announcement. After all, the world has changed a great deal since Ginger first made the news back in January, when for a short while its mystery seemed to captivate the entire country. Few of the Kamen-watchers were really expecting any big news to come now -- in these dark times -- which is why they looked upon the Good Morning America thing with skepticism.
Indeed, looking back, the Ginger story was one of the Internet boom's last hurrahs, its mystery appealing to a society that had been lulled into believing that technology alone could deliver it from the ills of the world.
People know better now; technology is no longer chic, no longer a cash-cow and no longer infallible. And so, unless Ginger is a cheap device that can sniff out "weaponized" anthrax, can it ever be as big as Kamen and others had predicted?
Schumacker suggested that perhaps it could. The rumor, after all, is that Ginger is a "personal transportation device" that uses a gas-free Stirling engine, "and of course if there is this new power source involved, it could change the whole dynamic of (the United States') relationship with the Middle East," Schumacker said.
"And if this turns out to be a fun machine, that would be a neat thing to take peoples' minds off the world's problems," he added.
