reader participation time

[nibot]

What were your favourite toys when growing up? (Now?) (How did they influence you?)

Which were your favourite books?

Legos? What did you make?

Comments

[nanomonkey.livejournal.com]

I only had one set of legos as a kid. I think I would have been more in to them except my father let me play around with an arc welder and I had much more fun building things with that. I think I must have gradually worked up to that...I remember being allowed to play with a soldering iron at a fairly early age. I built scuptures out of wire and solder. I would also use the soldering iron to burn pictures into wood.

The kitchen was my favorite place to "play" really...knives and fire are two things that a young boy enjoy most and I found out really early that by "helping out" I could play around with those two as much as I liked. We had a stove that wouldn't self light...so I got to play with matches too!

Mostly I was given lots of art supplies and electronics kits (the types with springs that you bend and insert precut lenths of wire to make radio transmitters that work on a nearby radio set to static or lie detectors that measure the conductivity of your skin). I didn't always understand or try to work out why the electronics kits worked...I mostly just followed the diagrams.

I read a lot of science fiction. Madeline L'Engle (A Wrinkle in Time, Arm of the Starfish, Wind in the Door, A Swiftly Tilting planet) and The Hobbit and The Never Ending Story were some of the first books I read. In third grade I read the LOTR trilogy...that changed my life. I tried to read the Narnia series after that and was totally let down, so I stopped after the second book. I had fond memories of it being read to me when I was really young but found the plot totally one dimensional after LOTR. Fourth grade was all about David Edding's Guardians of the West series. I loved that series. I read everything our library system had to offer that was fantasy and had a cool cover...not sure if that was the best policy but it kept me from reading too much 70's pulp fiction as I didn't care for the old school Conan style covers. I did end up reading quite a bit of trashy stuff though...and a lot that was way over my head. Gene Wolfe's The Shadow of the Torturor had the coolest cover I'd ever seen but was a bit much for a grade schooler to take.

My dad helped me make a lot of things. One day he came home with a huge transformer and put together a Jacob's Ladder. That was perhaps the most impressive toy while it lasted...about an hour later he told me that I would probably kill myself if he let me keep it and proceeded to dismantle it. He also made me fix up a couple of mini bikes which I road the hell out of with one of the neighbor kids.

For my first and last science fair project (5th grade) I tried to make a perpetual motion machine. I had a electric motor connected to a generator that I had made out of ceramic magnets glued to the shaft of the motor around which I wound bell wire that I routed back to the terminals of the electric motor. I connected up a switch between the motor and a bank of batteries. Unfortunately I had no idea about diodes so when I turned on the switch the batteries shorted out in the "generator" and of course the minute amount of power produced from the ten or so windings did nothing to help out the situation. To make matters worse I just stuck up a sign that read "Perpetual Motion Machine" and didn't explain anything about efficiencies or why exactly the experiment would never work (even though I was well aware of the impossibility of my situation).

"Friction," I would yell out, "what am I going to do about FRICTION!". In hindsight the whole situation was quite funny if not dramatic, as I really thought that the judges would be more impressed by the grandeur of the project's intentions. Sadly they were not...