How to Do Nothing with Nobody All Alone by Yourself by Robert Paul Smith Page A

banana-shaped bomb.

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    I’m sure all of you have seen pussy willow one time or another, and I’ll bet a hat that there isn’t one of you, really, who at one time or another hasn’t stroked one of the buds, because they’re so exactly like a kitten’s fur. Here’s one of the things I did when I was a kid that I don’t think I would have liked another kid to watch me doing. It seemed a little childish to me. But I did it, and I had fun doing it, all the same. You can take a knife, and slice right through one pussy willow the long way. Get a little piece of paper, and glue that half down. Then cut the tip of the other half of
the bud, the short way. If you glue that on the paper right next to the first one, can you see what you’ve started to make? Looks sort of like a bee, doesn’t it. Well, with a pencil or a pen, draw in the legs. You can make it as simple or complicated as you like; you can—here we go again—go to the library and see what a bee really looks like, or you can go take a good look at a real bee, if there are any around, and you can make the pussy-willow bee just like the real one.
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    Or, if you like, cut wings out of cellophane or paper, and make up a new kind of bug. Maybe you’ll have an idea how to make a totally different kind of animal. A lady was telling me the other day that when she was a kid, they used to draw a fence on the paper, glue the pussy willows on, draw tails and whiskers—and there you have pussy-willow cats sitting on a fence.

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    I know this sounds goofy, but if you can get a piece of wood and ten pins you can make a piano. Oh, not a big piano like the one you have. You’d need a lot more wood and pins for that. This is a pin-piano, and it’s a musical instrument, and it plays very piano . The word piano means soft. The real name for a piano is pianoforte, and all it means is an instrument that can play loud or soft. Well, this is a pin-piano and it just plays soft. All you do is stick the pins into the piece of wood, each one a little further in than that first one.
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    If you take a nail and hit the pin, you’ll hear a certain note. By pushing the next pin in a little further, you’ll hear a higher note. And so on. Tune as you go, “do re mi fa sol la ti do.” But that’s only eight pins. Why did I say ten? Because you’re going to bend at least two of the pins trying to get them in to the right depth. We always did.
    When we were kids, we read in books about making cigar-box guitars and fiddles, but I must say they were never very successful, and these days, most cigar boxes I run across are made out of heavy cardboard. That’s a shame, because the cedar wood they were made of was just the right size and thickness to make all sorts of things out of wood, and in addition, cedar wood has such a wonderful smell. Coupled with the cigar smell, it was just about the best smell in the world. But some cigars are still packed in cedar boxes, and if you can get ahold of them, you’ll find the wood just the right thing to make many of the things in this book. Also, they’re held together with little tiny nails which are just the right size for cigar-box wood, to go through and not split. The way to get the paper off is to let the wood soak in water until the paste is dissolved, after you’ve carefully taken the box apart and saved the nails. You can hold the wood under water by putting something heavy on top of it. If you do it in the
washbasin in your bathroom, the handiest heavy thing is your tooth-brushing glass filled with water. Once the paper is soaked off, it’s sometimes a good idea to put the wood to dry between paper towels or newspaper, with a heavy book on top, to keep the wood from warping.

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    As I say, the cigar-box fiddles we made never worked very well, but I can tell you an easy way to make a musical instrument that works. I know it