As The Washington Post reported, noting that some Secret Service employees call the road show “the Secret Circus,” one 29-year-old agent who was forced to resign after the Cartagena meshugas is protesting that he did not know the two women he brought to his room were prostitutes. Like Dudley Moore in “Arthur,” he just thought he was doing great with them.

My colleague in columny Maureen Dowd charged recently that Vice President Cheney and his aides ''shoehorned all their meshugas about Saddam's aluminum tubes, weapons labs, drones and Al Qaeda links into Mr. Powell's U.N. speech.''

Two weeks before, in a review of local delicatessens, Erik Himmelsbach wrote in The Los Angeles City Beat that the corned beef in Brent's deli was high quality but that the dignified restaurant was ''missing the mishegoss associated with the deli experience.''

Mishegoss -- Himmelsbach's spelling better reflects the pronunciation of the Yiddish term (mish-eh-GOSS) than Dowd's -- is rooted in the Hebrew adjective meshuga, ''mad, insane.'' But as Leo Rosten noted in his classic ''The Joys of Yiddish,'' mishegoss is more often used in a light, amused, madcap vein: ''a wacky, irrational, absurd belief . . . a piece of tomfoolery'' or, in another sense, a foolish fixation: ''She has a new mishegoss -- that the neighbors are trying to ruin her.''

Not only did these new gadgets spawn all the marvels and meshugas we now lump under the term "digital technology," they ensured the mass production of American culture itself, creating an entirely new sort of entrepreneur — the zeitgeist wrangler. Jane Fonda discovered aerobics and soon the rest of us were crunching and shopping for ankle weights.