This artifact from 1928 appeared in my Twitter feed (and in a most annoying feature of Twitter disappeared so I could not find it again). I thought it would be fun to actually assemble it, so I printed it off on card stock, cut all the pieces out carefully, inserted thumbtacks in all the appropriate places, and secured them with bluetack. Here's the result:
As you can see, no amount of tugging on the scythe handle can get Father Time to open the box so Baby New Year pops out. Looking at it, it seems that the geometry is all wrong - that there's no way to make the angles work out - but I can't shake the feeling that I did something incorrectly. It's hard to imagine what, since there are only four joints and they are all clearly labeled, but the end result is that the little device doesn't perform as advertised.
And you know what? That doesn't matter.
Because it was fun to cut out the pieces. It had been a long time since I had cut anything out, and I could almost feel my tongue wanting to slip out the corner of my mouth the way it would do when I was a little kid concentrating on a task. It was fun to build the model, digging out thumbtacks to use instead of the specified pins, and finding blue tack - still good from my ESL teaching days in the 1990s! - to hold the joints secure. It was even fun to try to puzzle out why it didn't work, and to make the video documenting the failure.
And that's the feeling I am going to try to keep during 2018: it doesn't really matter if my drawings live up to my expectations, or what kinds of sounds I can coax from my ukulele, or if any thing I create succeeds or fails according to some external standard. All that matters is engagement with the creative process, a little satisfaction of completion, and having some fun. If I do that enough, eventually there'll be hits among the misses.
But seriously, I don't think this little New Year's geegaw will ever work.
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