Tuesday, March 11, 2008

You Got the Right String Baby, but ...




... the wrong yo-yo ...

A link to a documentary in progress, "The World on a String," about the history of the yo-yo, aka the "return-top," in America. Fascinating stuff, if you grew up playing with these things, as I did.

Today, kids do things with these we couldn't dream of with the old wooden-axle models.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Is there a deadly martial art that employs the yo-yo? If not, there certainly should be. Or perhaps the yo-yo, with suitable war-like modifications, could be introduced to silat.

Steve Perry said...

Supposedly the yo-yo was originally a weapon, but I can't see it. Even a larger version wouldn't be efficient, and the small version might knock a bird off a branch, but you'd have to be standing so close as to make most birds nervous.

Sport boomerangs were never really weapons, either. The war version would fly straight for as much as two hundred meters -- the farthest a human could throw anything, back in its day, and was heavy enough to do damage, but it didn't come back. The toy versions, supposedly used for bird hunting, don't come back if they it hit anything, either.

The silat version would probaby be along the lines of, "Here, look at this." And while the guy was examining the thing, you clock him ...