A Few Last Details In "How To Be Ethnic..."

I wanted to summarize the board's objections to Freeman Riefenstahl's suggestions for operatic contributions to the Festival of Man but find that I have already done so. See An Opera For Man. One detail I missed was that Adzel suggested Chinese opera but Riefenstahl replied that the Chinese themselves would be doing that.

We have seen that one future gadget projected by Poul Anderson was an "infotrieve" (scroll down), which seems to perform the functions of an internet-access computer. When James Ching persuades Freeman Snyder to agree to Adzel singing Fafner and playing the dragon for Chinese New Year, Snyder is seated:

"...behind his desk, surrounded by his computers, communicators, and information retrievers..."
-Poul Anderson, "How To Be Ethnic In One Easy Lesson" IN Anderson, The Van Rijn Method (Riverdale, NY, 2009), pp. 175-197 AT p. 194.

Thus, it seems that computers compute, communicators communicate and information retrievers retrieve information but these functions have not yet been combined into a single device.

"How To Be Ethnic..." is fascinating but short. Having again analyzed this story in as much detail as possible, we have to move on but it might be good to stay with the theme of Adzel.