Skip to main content

The Original Fidgit

Unless you've been living on an island in the far Pacific with Amelia Earhart for the past six months, you've probably happened across something called a fidget spinner. The first time I saw one was in a convenience store I frequent near the homestead. I made note of the trilobed plastic gadgets stacked at the register, but didn't really think too much about them, since that particular store has been known to sell everything from hair extensions to Carolina Panthers tiki dolls. A few days later, I saw something on the local news about therapeutic devices for dealing with anxiety and ADD. I didn't really make the connection until I saw a YouTube video touting the "healing powers" of what amounts to a rather boring toy. I'll say this for kids today, they know how to position a product. Back in my day, we never thought to promote our fad toys - knockers, whizzers, mood rings and spinners - as some sort of medical breakthrough.

In fairness though, we did have stress relief gadgets which teachers gladly let us carry into class and fidget with to our hearts content. They were called "pens." The complex ones like the Paper Mate Power Point and the Bic 4-Color were the best. They could be disassembled then reassembled in various ways over and over again; great for both relieving tension and building manual dexterity. But even the simple Bic Cristal made an adequate fidget. Michael Perry recently posted an essay on one very specific way of fidgeting with a Cristal, but that was a little too "hoodlum"for my taste. I preferred to simply remove the nub and ink tube and the little plug from the top and see if I could reassmble the pen backwards. (You can, but it's not very satisfying) When I tired of that, I would take the plastic cap and bend the pocket clip back and forth in an attempt to get it to break. And that, my friends, is where the Bic Cristal excels as a fidget device. I'm not sure what kind of plastic that cap was made of, or whether the caps today are even made from the same stuff, but let me tell you this; separating that clip from the rest of the cap was a task back in the day. It took hours and hours of bending back and forth to even thin out the plastic, and a good week of intermittent bending to actually break one loose. I carried those clipless pens like a badge of honor. Alas, only I knew the time and effort that went into them. Pretty much everybody else just thought I picked them out of the trash.


Comments

Popular posts from this blog

FRIDAY MATINEE: Midnight Mass (🍺🍺🍺🍺)

I held off writing this review until I had seen all seven episodes of the new Netflix limited series “Midnight Mass.” I’ve been burned in the past by shows that start out well and then devolve into silliness as they progress. While “Mass" doesn’t completely stick the landing, I think even the East German judge would give it a solid 9. Taken as a whole, I think it is as effective a piece of horror as the combined “It” movies from a few years ago, and right on par with “Hereditary” and “Midsommar.”  The story revolves around a man returning to his childhood island home after a prison stay for a drunk driving accident that killed a teen girl. Coincidentally, it is the same day the island’s beloved elderly priest, Monsignor Pruitt is supposed to return from a trip to the Holy Land. Unfortunately, the priest has taken ill and is being treated on the mainland. A temporary priest arrives to take his place.  The story takes a little while to get going, and anyone who’s familiar with t...

You Label Me, I'll Label You

Sometime around 1970, my parents acquired a "high tech" device known as a Label-It. Manufactured by the DYMO Corporation, the Label-It was an embossing tape printing system that produced a sticky-backed plastic strip onto which the user could custom-print words or short phrases; or for that matter I suppose all the great works of literature, given enough patience and an unlimited supply of tape. The Label-It was gun-shaped with a horizontal alpha-numeric wheel on top. You loaded a spool of plastic tape into the back and fed it through the embossing head. By arranging the wheel so that the desired number or letter was over the tape and pulling the "trigger," the head forced the tape against the raised character and, due the physical properties of the plastic, a white image of the character was transferred to the tape. When the entire word was finished, you hit the "cut" button and removed the label. It was fairly primitive by modern standards, but it was ...

FIELD NOTES: All corn is Indian corn

There's a good chance that when your family gathers (or gathered, depending on when you read this) around the table this Thanksgiving, one of the dishes set in front of you will be corn. Corn is arguably the most traditional Thanksgiving food, as it is one that we are sure was served at the original Thanksgiving in Plymouth in 1621. But the corn that the Wampanoag shared with the Pilgrims that day was very different from what you will put on your table.  Corn was cultivated by the indigenous peoples of North America for more than a thousand years by the time the Pilgrims arrived.  Originally a type of tall grass called teosinte with a dozen kernels no larger than the ball of a ballpoint pen, it was selectively bred over hundreds of generations until a handful of varieties resembling what we today call "Indian corn" were created. Technically, all corn is Indian corn since all of the varieties we grow today trace their roots back to those developed by Native Americans.  The...