“Frequency of the bass strings and high shutter speed of the camera led to this surprising string-wobble footage. There is no slowmo applied to the take. Sound is original.”

Via Very Short List.

Some time in the 80s, my dad and I attended an event at the Museum of Flight (he worked for Boeing, who set up the museum). As part of the event, they were demonstrating the principle of the wing by throwing boomerangs around. We bought one—a plastic one, that I think cost $8. I remember thinking “Woah, that’s a lotta money…” since I was in grade school at the time.)

We got kind of obsessed, and started making our own boomerangs: buying “marine grade” plywood (thin plies of nice wood with special glue) and using that first boomerang as a template. We traced that boomerang on the wood as many times as it’d fit and my dad would cut them out with a hand jigsaw. Then we’d sand down the opposite edges on top of the “arms” (as shown above) and also sand out small pockets on the back of each arm.

And they worked! They cover a huge area when you throw them. At the original Museum of Flight event, the guys showed us how to catch them: you let them come back to you, where they kinda hover in front of you, and you sandwich them outta the air: smacking down on them with one hand on top and one hand underneath. I never succeeded in actually catching one, I don’t think, for fear of losing some fingers.

We probably made about 50 of these. We had one other shape, traced from another store-bought model, I think. A more acute angle and squarer edges. We’d spraypaint them in different colors—I remember some cool airbrushy gradients—and add stripes according to our limited knowledge of Aboriginal aesthetics. Our boomerang-mania even made its way into one of my grade school science fair projects about how flight works. My display also included a gyroscope, which demonstrates a principle explaining why the boomerang comes back.

I found the one above when my mom finally forced me to get all my crap out of her garage. Sadly, I think it’s the only one that’s survived. Finn and I gotta find a big park somewhere to give it a throw.

shocksongs.com

Her original track (listen to it here) is an upbeat late-era-Michael-Jackson-ish pop tune that I thought would be fun to turn into a kinda dubby slow jam. It’s a contest, so please “Like” it here →