The only drawback to this method is that the crossed strings go right through where you would usually put the address. It is possible to tie the string so that it doesn’t, but we found this way needed a bit of tape to hold those ends down.
Instead of starting in the middle of the package, start at one end, running the middle point of a long piece of string underneath. For this method, there is nothing more annoying than running out of string halfway through, so we suggest five feet (150 cm).
Wrap the string around, but this time cross at the three-quarter mark rather than at halfway. Run the strings around the other side and do it again and again, crossing at the corners until you can finally tie it off. As you’ll see from the picture, the ends are not held by the string, but this is robust—and it leaves a space for the address.
Star Maps: What You See When You Look Up . . .
Facing south in the northern hemisphere, turn your e-reader so the current month of the year is at the bottom. This will be accurate at around 11 in the evening.
Facing north in the southern hemisphere, turn your e-reader again to put the correct month at the bottom and these are the constellations visible on a good clear night at 11 p.m.
Making a Periscope
* * *
You will need
Saw, hammer, glue, small tacks.
Two mirrors—2 x 2 in (5 x 5 cm).
Plywood—three-ply or five-ply. Cut two pieces of 18 x 2 in (45 x 5 cm), two pieces of 16 x 2 in (40 x 5 cm), two end pieces of 2 x 2 in (5 x 5 cm).
Duct tape.
* * *
THIS IS A QUICK and easy one. It took just over an hour to put together once we had everything in hand. It does, however, involve work with a saw, hammering, and glue, so if you are unsure, ask for help.
First get yourself two small square mirrors. Any glass shop will cut a couple of pieces for you. Ours cost about $2 each, which is a high price, considering what they are. You may well do better. For the actual periscope tube, we used plywood we had lying around. Ours was five-ply, which is more robust than you actually need. Three-ply would be better and is also easier to cut.
A periscope works by reflecting from one mirror to another and finally to the eye. Its simple effect is the ability to look higher than your head. It can be used to peer over fences or check enemy positions without exposing yourself to sniper fire. The classic use is in submarines.
We used small tacks to create the box, leaving a space (at the top of one side and the bottom of the other) for the mirrors. We kept ours simple and fairly rough, though obviously your periscope can be smoothed, painted, or even joined and glued properly if you wanted one that would survive a generation or two. As a woodwork project in mahogany with brass corners, it would be very impressive.
The only difficulty was in securing the mirrors. By far the best way is to glue tiny wood strips in place on the inner surfaces, like runners. The mirrors slide between the strips and lock neatly into place against the end pieces. We used heavy insulation tape, however, and that seemed to do the job almost as well.
Having relied on the tape, it seemed sensible to cut one of the sixteen-inch sides down to fourteen inches, so that the top mirror could actually rest on its edge. Obviously, if it sat in neat little wooden runners, it would be perfectly all right to leave the piece at sixteen inches, a neater look.
The angle of the mirrors should be 45° for the right reflection. This isn’t easy to judge, however, and the easiest way is just to position the first mirror until you can see the other end of the periscope tube in it. Once that is secured, position the second by hand, marking lines so you can find the correct position easily. Then either tape it or glue the wooden runners.
In theory, you could build quite a long periscope. We found eighteen inches was about right for our mirrors, but you could use larger pieces and experiment with a longer box.
Seven Poems Every Boy Should Know
YES, A BOY SHOULD BE able to climb trees, grow crystals and tie a decent bowline knot. However, a boy will grow into a man and no man should be completely ignorant of these poems. They are the ones that spoke to us when we were young. Find a big tree and climb it. Read one of these poems aloud to yourself, high in the branches. All the authors are long dead, but they may still speak to you.
IF
BY RUDYARD KIPLING (1865–1936)
If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too;
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or being lied about, don’t deal in lies,
Or being hated, don’t give way to hating,
And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise:
If you can dream—and not make dreams your master;
If you can think—and not make thoughts your aim;
If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
And treat those two impostors just the same;
If you can bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,
And stoop and build ’em up with worn-out tools:
If you can make one heap of all your winnings
And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings
And never breathe a word about your loss;
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
Except the Will which says to them: “Hold on!”
If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
Or walk with Kings—nor lose the common touch,
If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you,
If all men count with you, but none too much;
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run,
Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,
And—which is more—you’ll be a Man, my son!
We recommend Puck of Pook’s Hill as an example of Kipling’s prose. Tragically, his only son, John, was killed in the First World War, in 1915.
OZYMANDIAS
BY PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY (1792–1822)
I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert . . . Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed:
And on the pedestal these words appear:
“My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!”
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.
This poem was written as a commentary on human arrogance. It is based on a broken statue near Luxor, Egypt. The actual inscription (translated) reads “King of Kings am I, Osymandias. If anyone would know how great I am and where I lie, let him surpass one of my works.”
SONG OF MYSELF
BY WALT WHITMAN (1819–1892)
From 1
I celebrate myself, and sing myself,
And what I assume you shall assume,
For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.
I loafe and invite my soul,
I lean and loafe at my ease observing a spear of summer grass.
From 2
Have you reckon’d a thousand acres much? have you reckon’d the earth much?
> Have you practis’d so long to learn to read?
Have you felt so proud to get at the meaning of poems?
Stop this day and night with me and you shall possess the origin of all poems,
You shall possess the good of the earth and sun, (there are millions of suns left,)
You shall no longer take things at second or third hand, nor look through
the eyes of the dead, nor feed on the spectres in books,
You shall not look through my eyes either, nor take things from me,
You shall listen to all sides and filter them from your self.
From 47
I am the teacher of athletes,
He that by me spreads a wider breast than my own proves the width of my own,
He most honors my style who learns under it to destroy the teacher.
The boy I love, the same becomes a man not through derived power,
but in his own right,
Wicked rather than virtuous out of conformity or fear,
Fond of his sweetheart, relishing well his steak,
Unrequited love or a slight cutting him worse than sharp steel cuts,
First-rate to ride, to fight, to hit the bull’s eye, to sail a
skiff, to sing a song or play on the banjo,
Preferring scars and the beard and faces pitted with small-pox over all latherers,
And those well-tann’d to those that keep out of the sun.
From 50
There is that in me—I do not know what it is—but I know it is in me.
From 52
The spotted hawk swoops by and accuses me, he complains of my gab and my loitering.
I too am not a bit tamed, I too am untranslatable,
I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world.
Walt Whitman’s Song of Myself has fifty-two stanzas, and we have reproduced only a small bit of it here. If you would like to read more, and if you’re at all like us, you will, you can easily find it in your local library.
INVICTUS
BY WILLIAM ERNEST HENLEY (1849–1903)
Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.
In the fell clutch of circumstance
I have not winced nor cried aloud.
Under the bludgeonings of chance
My head is bloody, but unbowed.
Beyond this place of wrath and tears
Looms but the Horror of the shade,
And yet the menace of the years
Finds, and shall find, me unafraid.
It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll,
I am the master of my fate:
I am the captain of my soul.
“Invictus” is Latin for “unconquerable.” As a child, Henley suffered the amputation of a foot. He was ill for much of his life and wrote this during a two-year spell in an infirmary. He was a great friend of Robert Louis Stevenson and the character of Long John Silver may even be based on him.
VITAE LAMPADA
BY SIR HENRY NEWBOLT (1862–1938)
There’s a breathless hush in the Close tonight—
Ten to make and the match to win—
A bumping pitch and a blinding light,
An hour to play and the last man in.
And it’s not for the sake of a ribboned coat,
Or the selfish hope of a season’s fame,
But his Captain’s hand on his shoulder smote—
“Play up! play up! and play the game!”
The sand of the desert is sodden red,—
Red with the wreck of a square that broke;—
The Gatling’s jammed and the Colonel dead,
And the regiment blind with dust and smoke.
The river of death has brimmed his banks,
And England’s far, and Honour a name,
But the voice of a schoolboy rallies the ranks:
“Play up! play up! and play the game!”
This is the word that year by year,
While in her place the School is set,
Every one of her sons must hear,
And none that hears it dare forget.
This they all with a joyful mind
Bear through life like a torch in flame,
And falling fling to the host behind—
“Play up! play up! and play the game!”
Though the poem makes reference to a British square of soldiers being broken in the Sudan, it is actually about the importance of passing on values to the generations after us. In the poem, the young soldier remembers his old Captain’s words to rally his men. “Vitaē Lampada” came out in 1898. It means “the torch of life.”
THE ROAD NOT TAKEN
BY ROBERT FROST (1874–1963)
Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;
Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,
And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.
I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.
The famous American poet Robert Frost wrote one stanza of this poem on a sofa in the middle of England. He found it four years later, and he felt he just had to finish it. “I wasn’t thinking about myself there,” he told a group of writers in 1953, “but about a friend who had gone off to war, a person who, whichever road he went, would be sorry he didn’t go the other. He was hard on himself that way.”
SEA-FEVER
BY JOHN MASEFIELD (1878–1967)
I must down to the seas again, to the lonely sea and the sky,
And all I ask is a tall ship and a star to steer her by,
And the wheel’s kick and the wind’s song and the white sails shaking,
And a grey mist on the sea’s face and a grey dawn breaking.
I must down to the seas again, for the call of the running tide
Is a wild call and a clear call that may not be denied;
And all I ask is a windy day with the white clouds flying,
And the flung spray and the blown spume, and the sea-gulls crying.
I must down to the seas again, to the vagrant gypsy life,
To the gull’s way and the whale’s way where the wind’s like a whetted knife;
And all I ask is a merry yarn from a laughing fellow-rover,
And quiet sleep and a sweet dream when the long trick’s over.
Masefield, who later became Poet Laureate of England, wrote “Sea-Fever” when he was only twenty-two. It contains some fantastic examples of onomatopoeia—words that sound like their meaning. You can hear the wind in “wind like a whetted knife,” for example.
There are hundreds more poems that have stayed with us as we grow older. That is the magic perhaps, that a single line can bring comfort in grief, or express the joy of a birth. These are not small things.
Coin Tricks
COIN TRICKS ARE EASY to do and very effective. Here we will show you some simple sleight-of-hand “vanishes.”
Any coin will do, the bigger the better, though I would suggest nothing smaller than a quarter.
Most tricks are over quite quickly, but a little “patter” (spoken introduction) is still require
d. The speed of the trick is not important. It’s all about the smoothness of movement, and that takes practice. Misdirection and the final flourish will make you seem like a seasoned magician. When performing, let your hands move smoothly and confidently.
One of the oldest coin sleights is called “the French Drop,” a simple, effective “vanish.” The reappearance is also important and we will suggest some examples such as taking it from behind a spectator’s ear, but with a little ingenuity and practice you will come up with some ideas of your own to keep the spectators captivated.
THE FRENCH DROP
If you are right-handed, hold the coin by the edge in your left hand between your first two fingers and your thumb, make sure the hand is turned palm up and the fingers are curled in.
With the right hand palm down, go to grab the coin, with the thumb of the right hand going underneath the coin and the fingers above it. Close the right hand into a fist to take the coin.
At this point, release the coin, letting it fall into the cupped fingers of the left hand. The right hand now moves forward, supposedly holding the coin. The left hand drops to your side with the real coin.
This sleight is quite elegant and needs to be performed smoothly and naturally. A good way to practice is to alternate between the French Drop and actually taking the coin, so when you perform the sleight you precisely duplicate the action of taking the coin.
Check occasionally in the mirror to see if it looks natural. Do not try to hide the coin in your left hand, just let the hand drop to your side. You could point at the right hand with a left finger, to misdirect the attention of the spectators. Always keep your eyes on the right hand, and then drop the left hand to your side.
The Dangerous Book for Boys Page 21