Making Juggling Batons & Number 10

It is two in the morning and I am cutting out pieces of vinyl to make a juggling baton. At Tuesday practice Apprentice Brimage {There are five Brimages at this point} used a juggling baton for what I think was his first time. He did rather well so I am making him one for him to practice with.

On an interesting note his favorite type was the kind that I use. This is the one that Walt and made three years ago. This has become the most popular stick that we have been making for ourselves. This will be the fourth or fifth one we have made for a member of the Brigade. I have also made a couple for people outside the Brigade.

The particular stick is your basic two foot long flower stick. Apprentice Brimage has requested that it be red and black. I think that it is going to be an attractive stick. The nice thing about making the same kind of stick is that you can be sure of the balance. One of the people in the Brigade wanted a rather special stick that was longer and had head that we had never used on a juggling baton before. The sad thing was that it took me three attempts to get something that had the right balance.

On another subject an interesting question as possed to me. If you could choose a handful of people to make immortal who would they be? I am pondering a list of ten people. For a place to start I think I am going to choose the Emperor Charlemagne.

He was an enlightened leader who believed in education in a time when the average King was a brutal dictator by modern standards. I think we would be living in a more enlightened and interesting world if the Holy Roman Empire had not fallen apart.

Well be safe out there everyone and keep your stick on the ice.

The Anti Christ

frequent reader of this blog, both of them. Will know that occasionally a strange experiment started with an odd idea from one of our clowns. this weeks strange idea came from Walt.

there is a juggling implement called a juggling baton, flower stick or devil stick. As best I can figure most of what our Brigade uses falls into the category of flower sticks if you ignore the fact that it is nor made from recycled materials. It is not that we hate the planet. We simply have not found a good source for recycled materials at this time. It is a shame but that is what it is.

Anyway the juggling batons that we use are a shaft with a flowery head on each end made from vinyl. They are good looking and have proven durable for the most part.

For what we are doing they have been working great. This is when the strangeness comes in. Walt suggested that we make and x shaped juggling baton. At one time I recall someone duct taping two devil sticks together. And by Devil sticks I mean that poplar bare sticks that Dube makes that do not have soft plushy heads on the end. I have head some jugglers call these pain sticks. At you might imagine the reason for this is because when they hit you they hurt. Well this experiment went horribly wrong for the people involved. As I recall the person tried and tried and only managed to get a black eye.

Well we have been using PVC pipe and the nice soft heads that i have been talking about. So despite all the evidence it looked as if it might be worth a try. We built one of these things. Thus far it has proven unwieldy and I have not been able to make much of it. I honestly do not know if I am ever going to be able to do something useful with it.

to be honest when we want to learn a new trick with the juggling baton we simply look it us on line or read a book. We have found no evidence that such a thing has been created before. So there is no one out there with saged advice. I will throw up some picture and maybe a video if I can do anything but hit myself with it.

Be safe out there and keep your stick on the ice.