Impress your friends with a gee-haw whimmy diddle

Most guys just flex their Equinox-sculpted abs to impress onlookers. But on the new UPN reality show “Amish in the City,” you bring out your Beano stick.

In the premiere episode, 24-year-old Mose, a goofily gregarious Amish farmer and inventor, demonstrated a toy he made: Rubbing a propeller-topped, notched stick with a smaller stick, he said the word “Beano” to change the propeller’s direction.

The Beano stick, it turns out, is an age-old folk toy known as a gee-haw whimmy diddle. (It’s also called a hooey stick, whammy doodle or voodoo stick.) The “whimmy” is the notched stick with the propeller, the “diddle” is the rubbing stick, and “gee” and “haw” are commands for “right” and “left,” used to guide plow-pulling horses.

“People don’t order just one. We had a historical re-enactment group buy 30 of them, and a physics professor buy another 30,” says Karen Weppner of Family Tree Toys in Coeur d’Alene, which sold out of the $4.95 gizmos last Christmas.

Technically, the toy operates on a combination of simultaneous orthogonal oscillations. But Weppner’s explanation is a little more user-friendly: “The trick is not in how it’s made, it’s how you hold it. Increasing and decreasing the pressure on the rubbing stick changes the direction of the spin.”

It can take “a good while” to get the hang of it, she says. But if you get really good, there’s the 24th Annual World Gee Haw Whimmy Diddle Competition on Sept. 18 near Asheville, N.C.