...there's no hollering for help......

My kids can't fathom the time before video games, the time when the only available electronic entertainment was three channels on the black and white TV set or the vibrating tabletop electronic football game.

But, there was such a time.  A time I participated in.  One summer, after telling Mom "I'm bored" once too many times, Dad arrived home with a copy of How To Do Nothing With Nobody All Alone By Yourself.  It is still on my shelves.  Maybe one day, way in the future, it will come in handy again.  It starts out:

     If things were as they should be, another kid would be telling you how to do the these things, or you'd be telling another kid.  But since I'm the only kid left around who knows how to do these things - I'm forty-two years old, but about these things I'm still a kid - I guess it's up to me.
     These are things you can do you yourself.  There are no kits to build these things.  There are no classed to learn these things, not teachers to teach them, you don't need any help from your mother or your father or anybody.  The rule about this book is there's no hollering for help.  If you follow the instructions, these things will work, if you don't, they won't.  Once you have built them my way, you may find a better way to build them, but first time, do them the way it says.

This is my 1958 edition of Robert Paul Smith's
How to Do  Nothing with Nobody All  Alone by Yourself