Yo-yo

Up and down
Up and down we go-go
Spinning round
On the ground we roll-o 
He wondered what it's like to be a toy-o
Smacked his head and ruined all the joy-o
I'm in trouble
So much trouble
Uh-oh 
I suppose it should be a big no-no
To use my little brother as a yo-yo

-B.C. Byron
It was HIS idea, Mom. How was I supposed to know he would get hurt?
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I’m actually the little brother in my family. This poem presents a good opportunity to list some of my worst ideas from childhood. I’ll share my bad ideas with the hopes that you will avoid them, or at least execute them with an adult’s permission, better planning, and safety equipment. My older brother and I came up with many of these ideas, but my cousins seemed to really get our brains turning in the wrong direction. Oh, the fun and injuries we shared together. Glad that my brother and I survived those days and that we still have all of our fingers and toes.

  • A home made zipline with a rusty pulley and some very old rope
  • A home made bow that shot flaming arrows covered in burlap dipped in gasoline
  • Jumping from a 2 story high haystack with a thin padding of straw to break my fall
  • Peeing on an electric fence
  • Riding on top of a car at 40 miles per hour on a bumpy dirt road
  • Keeping a pet rattlesnake in a lunchbox for 2 weeks
  • Rolling my sister down a hill while tucked inside a metal barrel
  • Mixing chemicals that we found in the old barn
  • Making weapons out of nearly every item we could salvage (Wolverine claws made from old plow parts, spears from pointy sticks, surgical tubing slingshots, clubs with rusty nails poking out, and anything long and straight was a sword)
  • Modifying and combining store-bought fireworks to make them louder
  • Throwing fireworks at each other
  • Making “stew” out of earthworms, mud, grass, and other gross finds then convincing my sister to drink some for a dollar
  • Keeping a captured frog in a tank in our room and losing 2 days of sleep because it croaked all night
  • Adding a “friend” into the frog’s tank. Turns out that garter snakes and frogs don’t really get along.
  • Boxing without boxing gloves, helmets, or rules
  • Eating loads of beans and then lighting our nether gasses on fire (pants are also quite flammable it seems)
  • Snorting pixy sticks and ground pepper into our nostrils

Again, DO NOT try any of these. The yo-yo thing is also a bad idea, but I’m curious about how it could actually be done. Hmmm….

My Genetic Garden

In my bio-engineered genetic garden,
I grow lots of things you've surely never seen.
There are rows of buttermelons and strawmatoes
And radioactive, light-emitting beans. 
The cucumbers and carrots grow pre-pickled.
The apples are all zebra striped and speckled.
There are peanuts that have fifty nuts per shell.
There's a giant grape the size of a hotel. 
I have some blue bananas that lay eggs,
And all my jumping pumpkins have 2 legs.
My pineapples are always singing songs
To help the peppers grow to 10 feet long.
Our visitors will get more than they bargained.
Come taste the fruits of my genetic garden.

-B.C. Byron
The apples taste fine, I promise. The singing pineapples get a bit grumpy when you bite them, though.
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A poem about genetically modified plants? Of course! Besides being an obvious subject for poetry, bioengineering is one of the coolest technologies of our modern world. We’re still leagues away from growing grapes the size of a hotel, but some genetically modified crops do produce a ton more food per plant than unmodified plants. Look up a superhero named Norman Borlaug if you want to know more about the good modern food engineering can do. This guy won a Nobel Prize for making special wheat that could grow bigger and better around the world. His genetic garden saved millions of people from starvation. That’s a heck of a lot better than my striped apples (they taste like zebra sweat), or pre-pickled cucumbers.

Like all technology, we have to be careful how genetic engineering is used. I don’t know about you, but I wouldn’t feel right about carving jack-o-lanterns out of jumping pumpkins (okay, these are not a real thing). There have been varieties of corn that aren’t safe for humans to eat and some cases where the vitamins get taken out of fruits to get them to grow bigger. But think about it. Is everything on the internet good for people? Are cell phones really good for our social skills? There is good and bad with every world-changing invention, but if we think ahead about these things we can design them to do more good than harm.

Thanks for reading. I need to headout to the yard to gather banana eggs and churn the buttermelons.