Hey Max, your shoe is ringing

I enjoyed Howard Leff’s “Envy? Has a Ring to It” [June 2]. It especially caught my eye because my brother Danny owns Maxwell Smart’s shoe phone! He has 4,000 items from spy movies and TV series in his Spy-Fi Archives (odci.gov/spyfi/index.html).

A few years ago the CIA contacted him and asked him to bring the best items from his collection to CIA headquarters for a private exhibition; he also had a display recently at the Reagan Library. The shoe phone was the star of the show -- even beat out Austin Powers’ glasses and Tom Cruise’s gadgets from “Mission Impossible.”

Jerry Biederman

West Hills

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Howard Leff’s article on cellphone envy made me laugh and depicted a very truthful phenomenon in our midst -- rampant, hurtling technology that one can never quite keep up with. At times I think that the only useful purpose of much of this gadgetry is to make the recent past, say 1985, look quaint, before text messaging and blogs.

Grady Miller

West Hollywood