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Spring makes me more than usually silly, stimulating my obsessions with toys.

Pocketknives are fun, but I'm too old for mumblety-peg, and most folks think it's weird and dangerous to sit around admiring and sharpening pointy little tools. If the Almanack ever has a page on weapons, it will be confined to

respectable, pocketable instruments, and it will come with a parental warning. Yo-yos occupy a special niche: they're eccentric maybe, but non-threatening,

and everyone enjoys watching the tricks. They had a short-lived burst of popularity in the late 90's, and the Duncan company was reborn, but even in their heyday (when I was 10) they weren't classified as cool. This is a toy for

the dedicated few, demanding lonely hours of practice and self-inflicted bruises and blisters. The materials and construction run from wood-block simple to truly esoteric, with commensurate pricing, but a yo-yo is low-tech even in its

most exotic incarnations. Hence, it is a worthy feature of the Almanack. My collection is very modest, by yo-ing standards, driven not so much by the

need to accumulate all, or more, or the latest, but by a languid quest for the perfect yo. In 1960, the ultimate yo-yo was a Duncan Imperial, a standard profile made of plastic, with a fixed steel axle. I seem to remember saving for

several weeks to accumulate the exorbitant $1.00+tax to pay for it. The steel axle conferred several advantages over the wooden one on my Butterfly: it didn't generate as much friction, so strings lasted longer and 'sleeping'

tricks were easier. The downside included much higher skill demands, which made us practice longer, additional weight, which was hard on the fingers after several continuous hours, and it still got string tangles, since you couldn't

take it apart. (Strings being 3 for a nickel, you just had to carry a pocketknife so you could cut off a knotted string.)

Ten-year-olds became 40-somethings (well ok, 50-somethings), and we wanted BETTER YO-YOS. Yomega made a couple of really nice models, the Fireball and the SaberWing, which had a nylon axle-sleeve that made for low friction, and a

starburst on the inner faces to provide excellent response. They also made a dumbed-down 'YoYo with a Brain' which had spring-loaded clutch levers that would release the axle with sufficient rpms, making for a hard, heavy, exceedingly

treacherous weapon of self-abuse. Some of the newer Yomega models in the toy stores seem a little cheesy, but I need to try the Crossfire. For 8 bucks, you can't beat the play of a SaberWing Fireball.

In the upscale toy stores of 1998, you could find BC yo-yos. They were wooden and fixed-axle, but definitely not low-tech. The wood was laminated in sub-

millimeter layers, dyed in rainbow hues and coated with high-gloss polyurethane. They're gorgeous, and perfectly balanced. The very best playing wooden yo-yo ever, a great present, and at 10 bucks, not a bargain, a steal. You can order

them online from What's Next, but I haven't seen one in a store in several years.

Very upscale joints sold Tom Kuhn's SB-2. This little marvel is machined aluminum, high-polish or anodized in nifty colors. It's too heavy to play very well, but you can coax a 2-minute sleep out of it and still recover, thanks to a

tiny ball bearing around the axle. The axle screws into set-screws in each face of the yo-yo so that you can adjust the string gap. Way technical; it can take all day to clean, polish, lube and adjust an SB-2, and after a couple of hours

of play, you can start all over again. Give it to someone who loves string-landing tricks, with a warning to be reeeeeal careful of loops.

Tom has been popping out lots of little brothers of the SB-2. My briefcase buddy is RD-1 (Recreational Device #1). It has a ball bearing axle, a butterfly configuration, and it comes in tooled maple or laminated colors. The maple is

hollowed-out, and a bit on the light side, so they offer weight rings you can add 'to taste'. But the laminated wood is just about right, precisely balanced, and very pretty. Not cheap, at $20 for the maple and $30 for laminate, but very

playable. If all you want is a simple device that solves the string-tangle problem, the

NoJive yo-yo comes apart. Bonus, you can reverse either or both of the faces to make it a butterfly or standard profile. The wooden axle sleeve is replaceable, for the fanatic who actually burns through an axle. (I replace

strings, but axles?!) NoJive is $15, or $25 for the laser-patterned models. So the question is whether RD-1 is the perfect yo-yo. Or is it still out there,

the Crossfire, maybe? Do you need a NoJive as a backup? Is perfect yo recovering from an atom-smasher, or is it maybe a double skin-the-cat with an outside loop? When I get 3 months to spend riding my bike around town and

hanging out in the woods like I did when I was 10, I'll let you know.

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