How to Do Nothing with Nobody All Alone by Yourself by Robert Paul Smith Page B

a piece of another matchstick and put it through the rubber-band loop at the other end of the spool.

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    Wind it up, and then put it down. It will run across the floor, it will climb a considerable slope, and if it runs ahead of itself so the stick is in front instead of in back, just wait. The stick will come slowly up and over and when it touches the ground, you’re in business again.
    If you’ve wound it and it doesn’t go because the washer won’t turn, without taking the tank apart rub the washer against the spool just where it is. If the little matchstick at the other end skitters around, jam pieces of matchstick in the hole like this or use a thumbtack.

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    If you’re interested in making a real climber out of it, cut little notches all the way around the rims of the spool and that will give it a good grip.
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    Of course, once you know how to do it, now that I’ve told you, you can teach another kid, and then you can have races or hill-climbing contests, or just plain fights between your tank and his.
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    Another thing we used to do was make what we called a button buzz saw. This is something you can make in about five minutes any time you’ve got nothing special to do. First you have to find a button, the bigger the better. It’s got to be the kind that doesn’t have a shank, but two or four holes like this.

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    Get some dental floss or fishline or any kind of thin strong string, and put a loop through like this.

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    The dotted lines are because there isn’t room on the page, but the loop should be about a foot long.
    Now put your two index fingers—those are the ones you use for pointing—through the loop like in the picture and twirl the button until you’ve got the string twisted on both sides of the button. Then pull. The string will unwind and seem to get longer. Just before there’s no more slack
in the string, loosen it by bringing your hands together. The button will wind up the other way, and you just keep on doing this. It will feel as if the string is a rubber band. This is because it’s twisting and getting shorter, untwisting and getting longer, and of course when it twists one way the button goes around in one direction, and when it twists the other way, the button reverses. If you hold the button, while it’s going around, up against a piece of stiff paper, say the cover of a magazine that’s sticking out over the end of a table, it’ll make a kind of siren noise. I can’t tell you exactly how to do this, it’s kind of a matter of feel, but after a while you’ll find you can make the button not only go around, but it will travel, while going around, first towards one hand and then the other. You probably know how to use a yo-yo, and this is the same general idea, but we didn’t know about yo-yos, because there weren’t any yo-yos to know about then.
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    By the way, as long as we’re talking about spools and buttons: it’s entirely possible that you won’t find either a spool or a button of the right size around your house; when I was a kid, all mothers sewed and eventually there was an empty spool, and when clothes wore out, mothers used to cut the buttons off before they threw the clothes away,
and save them in a big box. But as I say, that doesn’t always happen any more, and if you can’t find a button or a spool at home, take a walk and go to the tailor shop, or cleaning store, or whatever they call it in your town or neighborhood. As I said this book is things you do yourself; so don’t ask your mother to do this. That’s against the rules. Go yourself and ask the man in the store. And if you’re really lucky—I never was—there’s a kind of spool that’s used on great big factory sewing machines, about the size of a can of peaches. If you get one of these, get a really big rubber band