Diabolo update

The manufacturer of the 'Diabolo' (Jaques of London) replied to my email and filled in a lot of blanks about the wooden toy. How exciting! The wood is a hard, tropical wood native to Central and South America called Lignum Vitae. I checked it out on Wikipedia and it's pretty interesting(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lignum_vitae), the name is Latin for 'wood of life' and it has tons of interesting applications and even some literary links. One of the characters in Garcia Marquez's Love in the Time of Cholera has a bathtub made of Lignum Vitae. Also, my suspicions were confirmed - the toy does whistle when played with! I wonder what it sounds like? Dude also offered to purchase the toy from me (sorry pal, not my department) because the company doesn't even have one of these babies. A rare and collectible item indeed.