Deadspin is nominally a sports blogsite. There are no major sports in action right now unless you want to count baseball, which is a bad and weak sport. So we at Deadspin started talking about comic books, because at least 100 grim, gritty trailers for superhero movies came out over the weekend. Eventually, we happened upon this dude:
Said dude, Captain Boomerang, is a real and bullshit character. His boomerang-patterned hat is trash, and his boomerang-patterned shirt is trash, and his orange afro is trash. But he is bullshit for two reasons:
1) If I were to throw hands with Captain Boomerang, I would immediately grab him by his scarf and choke him to death, or pivot and throw him over my shoulder.
2) His weapon of choice is a boomerang.
None of us here at this blogsite knew a lot about boomerangs, but many of us suspected that they were bullshit. So we YouTubed good boomeranging, and found the above video.
This video is of a man trying to catch Asian carp with a boomerang. Asian carp jump out of the water, and so if you’re in a boat on a river that contains Asian carp—which you should not want to catch (because they taste like butt)—you can, in theory, catch them with a net, or your hands, or a spear, or almost anything, really. My man in the video, however, uses a boomerang. It doesn’t work well.
It gets good around the 43rd second, when he brandishes and uses the boomerang as one would a machete, in order to disorient and/or kill the carp. He connects solidly, with the boomerang still in hand; the carp is knocked back into the river; the carp either dies there, or swims away. The man does not retrieve the carp.
In the very next frame, my man brandishes and uses the boomerang as one would a dodgeball, and throws the weapon at an Asian carp. The boomerang connects solidly; the carp is knocked back into the river; the carp either dies there, or swims away; the boomerang ends up in the water, away from the boat. The man does not retrieve the carp, but must retrieve his weapon.
We did a little more research, and found at that boomerangs are generally used to hunt small game. Many hunting boomerangs, unlike Nerf boomerangs, do not turn 180 degrees in the air and return to the owner. You throw the boomerang, the boomerang possibly hits your target, and then you must either retrieve the weapon, or go home.
When we scoured the internet for footage of anyone who is exceptionally accurate and/or deadly with a boomerang, we came up empty. Nary a boomerang master was found, and the absence of boomerang master videos strongly suggests that there are none. Here is an Aborigine brother ostensibly using a boomerang correctly on bats:
But even in this selectively edited video, it is apparent that even at their best, boomerangs are not particularly accurate or deadly. They are terrible weapons. In fact, I am hard pressed to think of a more bullshit weapon than a boomerang. If you hunt fish, you should not use boomerangs. If you hunt bats, you should not use boomerangs. If you fight crime, you should not use boomerangs.
You should not use boomerangs.