I was deeply touched today by a connection made by BoingBoing.net. This week the genius inventor Ronald Howes, creator of the Easy-Bake™, died at the age of 83. The connection: it's in the year Europe discontinues the 100W light bulb, the energy source powering his great invention. Best creative abuse of a light bulb ever. We had one of these when I lived in the US as a small boy. *sigh*

"He always had the coolest stuff on earth that I could mess around with," such as phosphorescent powder he was testing for various glow-in-the-dark applications, his son said. But Mr. Howes always realized that the Easy-Bake Oven was, in his son's words, "the big one" in his career.

About 20 million Easy-Bake Ovens have been sold since they went on the market in 1963. Over the years, Mr. Howes' constant tinkering with possible new products was never confined to office hours. "We no longer have a garage in our house - it's a physics lab," his wife said. "You can hardly walk around in it."