That was a very well done column on the yo-yo . . . but I expect no less from the Straight Dope. Dr. Lucky Meisenheimer is without question the absolute authority, you went to the right guy. And by the way that is his real name, and he’s actually a dermitoligist.
I’ve been a fan of Cecil’s since the early 80’s! I don’t believe anything until I read it in the Straight Dope!
And, as my nick implies, I’m actually really a professional yo-yo player . . . well, to be honest, currently I’m semi-pro, but I do compete at National and International contests and I’ve worked for the big yo-yo companies, including Yomega and Duncan.
I’ll tell you something about the yo-yo scene these days if you’re interested. First of all, Duncan yo-yos are the pits. They haven’t upgraded the molds they use since Flambeau bought the company in the sixties. You see their yo-yos for sale everywhere, and there is that nostalgic market for them, but in terms of playability - they are the worst. The molds have warped after decades of use. Don’t buy Duncan.
Yomega is what all the kids want these days, they ruled the most recent yo-yo boom, and they have taken the market away from Duncan. There are other good quality brands out there, but in my opinion, you should skip Duncan, that era is over.
Okay, in terms of the zero-gee experiments by NASA that minty green mentioned, he is right, those astronaughts couldn’t get it to sleep in outer-space, but those astronauts were only given about a two-hour crash course in yo-yo use by Dr. Tom Kuhn (a well known yo-yo designer and dentist). I’m willing to bet that someone with better yo-yo skills could have done better with them on a space shuttle, we’ll have to wait and see, but there is no question that it behaves differently in space than it does here on the ground.
and Hey - - get this, the fundamentalist kooks at the American Family Association (www.afa.net) , about a year ago, launched an attack on the Duncan yo-yo company while I was working there in the marketing department. In case you don’t know, the AFA are the fundy nuts who make big stinks about anything they thing shouldn’t be on TV or radio, they go after stuff like Howard Stern, and Disney, and Harry Potter, etc, etc. It was actually mentioned in the forum back when it was happening.
I put up a webpage telling the whole story here, it’s nutty if you want to check it out:
http://communities.msn.com/PlumbingOccurrences&naventryid=109
If you’d like to know about a website where yo-yo players post messages for each other about all the stuff that’s going in the yo-yo scene, look at this:
http://www.yoyoing.com/news
Hey, once again Straight Dope staff - excellent job!
-Charlie