YouTube star’s spinning is out of control

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Warning: Do not try this at home.

Of course, that’s exactly where Peter Bragiel learned how to do it.

Bragiel grew up outside Chicago. At the age of 15, he had a tumor removed from his leg. He healed, but a few months later, while he was playing basketball, a bone in his leg snapped.

On crutches for months, Bragiel couldn’t play Frisbee with his friends. But he could spin a Frisbee on his finger. Soon he was spinning all kinds of things.

‘I was the kid on the sidelines,’ he said. ‘It was my way of engaging with my classmates.’

Bragiel’s brother Paul, a San Francisco Internet entrepreneur, told him about YouTube, the video-sharing site that friend Jawed Karim helped create. It turned out to be the perfect platform for an aimless young entertainer who graduated in 2003 with a degree in marketing from Hawaii Pacific University in Honolulu.

Peter Bragiel soon developed a small following for his goofy skits and music videos. He also developed his own spin on a long-distance travel series. He documented walking from Los Angeles to San Diego in a stunt called the Walkstars. Then he and a friend rode red scooters that couldn’t go faster than 29 mph cross-country all summer long -- he called that stunt the Scootstars. He met his girlfriend, Patty Doria, at the end of the ride in New York City.

He calls this mode of transportation inTransit, by which he means he focuses on the journey, not the destination. Bragiel is a free thinker and a free traveler. His vagabond existence comes courtesy of his parents, who used to pack up him and his brothers and travel for months. He has lived in seven cities and visited 30 countries. Next he plans to film his travels to the southern tip of South America all while taking buses, trains and other forms of public transportation and hitchhiking.

In his SpinStar video, which has gotten more than 135,000 views on YouTube, Bragiel spins more than a nightclub DJ: He spins a white board, a Scrabble game, a mirror, a suitcase, a basketball, even a MacBook Air. The idea, he says, was to get as many ‘obscure, expensive, dangerous items and items with flair.’

A former roommate, Josh Hallman, protests when a possessed Bragiel barges into the room and unplugs the Nintendo Wii while he’s playing. ‘Not the Wii!’ he calls out.

The most challenging feat? A tossup between spinning a saw blade and a flat, thin piece of wood lighted on fire. For the latter, out of view of the camera was a strategically placed swimming pool ready for dunking should Bragiel catch fire.

‘I enjoy performing for people,’ he said. ‘I like to see the outcome of what I can create and get people’s feedback. When someone recognizes you on the street, it’s a really good feeling that your work paid off. I really enjoy it. It’s a lot of fun. I can just speak my voice through video, and some of the crazy things that come into my mind.’

In the meantime, all is well at brother Paul’s new start-up Lefora (where brother Dan also works). The company offers free hosted forums (its motto is ‘Forums made easy’). Lefora just hit a big milestone: 10,000 communities created 3 1/2 months after its public launch.

-- Jessica Guynn