A Boomerang Comes Back

CANBERRA (Reuters) - "Proving boomerangs really do come back, an Australian town was on Thursday celebrating the return of a boomerang stolen from an outback museum by an American tourist 25 years ago."

Boomerangs are a technological marvel going way back beyond recorded history. How could anyone ever imagined such a piece of wonder, a tool designed to catch dinner and return when it failed to do so. I imagine that its first creator played at throwing various sticks, spears, and anything else that stood out in the brush. By serendipity and slowly working their way up the first such learn curve, the first boomerang creator discovered the unimaginable.

Or, is the boomerang's design was imagined out of necessity by a hunter-gatherer because chasing and losing spears is such a tax on time and energy? My idealist friends will enjoy this notion: Perhaps the first boomerang creator imagined that a curved object would return simply because it has a curve. Perhaps this pre-historic physicist intuited the boomerang's design. Perhaps some sort of sympathetic magic was at work in the creator's mind as he (I'm not sure that this creator was male.) molded theory into practice.

Getting back to the theft above, a spoiled American visitor perpetrated a crime against an Australian museum and technological history. He stole from one of the very first creators of a truly revolutionary design, a design used to this very day on swept wing aircraft as well as the "flying wing." I wonder how many visitors to that museum missed out on seeing this boomerang and were somehow less excited about technological innovations as a result? Well, at least the thief grew up and returned the boomerang, an object created for its return value, an irony for certain. Besides, the museum must have had other boomerangs to display.

Most of us do dumb things when we are young and many thieves are young. I figure that thieves that continue to steal in their senior years are still immature, at least in the industrialized countries. Overall, it is a good thing for cleaning up crime that none of us stay young for long.

I recall the thieves in Iraq looting and destroying museums when the US invited itself into that ancient part of the World, and they did not look so young. The artifacts stolen were not like the prehistory boomerang stolen as we read in the article from Reuters. No, the artifacts stolen from the people of Iraq and the future's memory were not designed to return; They will not return because in most cases they have been destroyed or lost. In those few cases that priceless stones and such make their way to the market, individuals will pass them down their family line, well beyond the reach of the public view.

That's the way it goes in the ironies of thievery, history, and technology.

Eddie Evans
Crime Scene Cleaners