My commercially-branded yo-yos are the 2.3 year old Duncan® Wheels, the 2.2 year old Duncan® Imperial, the 2.2 year old Duncan® Butterfly, the 2.1 year old Duncan® Butterfly XT, the 2.1 year old Duncan® Metal Racer, the 2.1 year old Duncan® Freehand, the 2.1 year old YoyoFactory® Loop 720, the 0.9 year old YoyoFactory® Stainless Steel Whistler, the 1.0 year old C3yoyodesign® speedaholic and the 1.0 year old ThrowRevolution® Neo. ☺️
Hello World! Two years after I became totally BLIND, while vacationing in Singapore with my family, I came up with the idea of YOYOING, after not touching a yoyo in four decades or 40 years! My family originally thought I was joking because I’m BLIND! When my family & I returned to The Philippines, I had my wife purchase me a cheap, generic yo-yo, she was surprised that I was able to throw & catch it within 30 minutes! — That became the beginning of my post-blindness SKILL of yo-yoing! ☺️
In 1977, my now-late Filipino father taught me how to yo-yo, or at least, he tried to. I was living in the Magnolia district of downtown Seattle, along 34th Avenue West at that time. My father apparently mastered yo-yoing while aboard military ships during his employment with the United States Navy, but he learned to yo-yo from his father in The Philippines, as a very young boy. His preferred brand of yo-yo was the Duncan® brandname, and had instructed me to play only that brand. Because I would not learn to yo-yo “the normal way”, he always had to make my yo-yo as “auto-return” for me to play. Whenever he brought me to K-Mart department store (now defunct) in North Seattle, he always “showed off” his yo-yo “tricks”, playing up to three Duncan® yo-yos at the SAME TIME, which drew attention from the local Duncan® representative. At home, in the backyard, my father enjoyed performing “target practice” with his yo-yo by surgically-striking individual empty soda pop cans without hitting anything else; my Filipino uncle told me, my father used to KILL chickens and other small animals with a yo-yo (in The Philippines). My father tried, too many times, to teach me how to wind a yo-yo by flicking the thumb, but I could never learn that skill. My childhood yo-yoing came to an end in 1979 when I broke the family TV while my mother was watching it. (My mother forced me to promise to never yo-yo again!) — That is the brief history of my short-lived yo-yoing skill as a preteen child.
For 40 years, I had avoided touching a yo-yo because I was severely-beaten by my mother. Though Child Abuse laws happened within 20 years of that beating, which includes the discarding of my comic books, too, I just walked past the yo-yo displays in the retail stores I visited. As a scientist into young adulthood, other scientists attempted to get me interested in yo-yoing, but I always turned them down. Then, once I began living in The Philippines, far from my (evil) mother in the USA, whenever I saw a yo-yo selling in a retail store, I have been “tempted” to buy it, but was always distracted by other interests. My Filipino father died in 2016 in Seattle while I was, and still living in The Philippines. (I began having eyesight problems shortly after my father died!)
When I began yo-yoing without my eyesight, I literally-SEE my father in front of me, coaching me how to yo-yo! It’s probably a recalled memory in the form of a hallucination, yet I am ABLE to yo-yo TODAY, despite blindness & osteoarthritis! ☺️ The yo-yoing SKILLS I have “self-learned”, are the basic throw with one-handed or two-handed catches, manually rewinding when necessary. For my own personal safety, and avoid damaging items, I will not perform any other “yo-yo tricks”! My half-sighted wife’s fully-sighted nephew, Josh, maintains my yo-yos, including yo-yo strings when necessary. ☺️
My Duncan® Wheels and Duncan® Imperial yo-yos are my “training” yo-yos, for whenever I wish to “reskill” myself. ☺️ The ThrowRevolution® Neo is the Philippine National Yoyo Contest edition yo-yo. The Duncan® Metal Racer is my “favorite” yo-yo, yet is often difficult to play due to its heaviness. I enjoy playing the YoyoFactory® Stainless Steel Whistler yo-yo because it makes a relaxing tone. ☺️ — Using “touch”, I have memorized each of my yo-yos from how it “feels”! ☺️
In terms of SCIENCE, or should I say, PHYSICS, each of my yo-yos are unique scientific instruments, in which traditional yo-yoing varies with each yo-yo. With the additional handicap of osteoarthritis, I have successfully self-taught myself how to throw & catch each of my 10 commercially-branded yo-yos! Those are the post-blindness SKILLS I am talking about! ☺️
The first paragraph of this blog post, is the textual output of my C programming language compiler. (As a “standard”, I write C source code to audit my inventory. ☺️)
Thanks for reading my latest blog post! Have a Great Day!
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Marcos Miranda's SCIENCE Blog 