How to Do Nothing with Nobody All Alone by Yourself by Robert Paul Smith Read Free Book Online

just about the same size and shape
as in the drawing. Now put it on a book, so that one arm sticks out just a little bit.
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    Flick it with your fingernail and it’ll go sailing out just like an Australian boomerang, and after very little practice, you’ll find out how to make it whirl so that it will come back to you. A good way to do it is to hold the book in one hand, tipped up a little, so that the boomerang goes up in the air at an angle, and slides back at just about the same angle, like a ball going almost to the top of a hill, and then rolling down again.

    The other kind of boomerang is for use outdoors, and all you need for it is two long strips of thin wood, about the size of a regular twelve-inch ruler. Balsa wood, that you can get at a hobby shop, is good for this, but any light, thin wood is good, like the sides of an orange crate, which you can pick up for free at the grocer’s or the supermarket. All you do is make a cross of the two pieces, and fasten them together with a small rubber band. A good way to do this is to put the rubber band on one piece, a little way from the top.

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    Cross the other piece over, between the rubber band and the end of the first piece, then pull the rubber band up over the second piece and around and under the first piece.

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    As always, if the rubber band is too long, double it.
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    Then slide the second piece down until it’s in the center.
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    Take the cross-boomerang outside and throw it so that it spins, and so that it’s heading up at an angle into the air. It’ll whirl, and come back to you. You can round the corners, or paint it, or nail the two pieces together, if you like.

    The next thing on my list is umbrella bows and arrows, but when my own kids saw the list, and I started telling them what it was, I found out something upsetting. An umbrella bow and arrow is something you make out of an old busted umbrella, and I haven’t seen an old busted umbrella for a long time. I got to thinking about it, because when I was a kid, it was a fairly common thing. There was a kind of shopping we used to do when we were kids, which was just walking down our block and seeing what people had thrown away in the trash can, and taking out those things that looked useful. Quite often, in one of the trash cans was a busted umbrella, and whoever saw it first grabbed it. Come to think of it, it must have driven our mothers nuts. Let’s say Mrs. Horn threw away a busted umbrella. Well, if I happened to see it before Charlie Horn, I hooked it, and carried it back to my house, and later on Charlie Horn came by, and I gave him part of the umbrella, and he took it home, and then later my mother put what I left of the umbrella in our trash can and Charlie Horn saw it, and he took what was left home, and then my mother threw away her busted umbrella and then Charlie Horn came along and hooked it, and—well, the way I figure it, nobody ever really got rid of any trash on our block. It just kind of got moved around from house to house.

    I can think of a number of reasons why you don’t see busted umbrellas any more. In the first place, in our town, we don’t put trash cans on the street, so a busted umbrella might be harder to locate. But I don’t think that’s the main reason. In those days, the olden days, umbrellas were made of cotton, or, if you were rich, silk. And people used to walk a lot more then, because there weren’t so many cars, and the umbrellas got used more, and cotton and silk, after a while, rot. Nowadays, umbrellas aren’t used so much, and I imagine they’re made out of nylon, and that doesn’t rot.
    But if, after all this, you do happen to run across a busted umbrella, the first thing to do is to get all that remains of the cloth off the ribs, and then pry the ribs loose from the center part. You can use brute strength, pliers, or intelligence. The thing is to get them