Almost, I still say 'insta moon' a lot of the time, because you can take the 'insta' part and apply it to other similar tricks. Consider a trick like insta spacewalk 1.5 airplane. How would you name it in a similar way? Goon walk 1.5 airplane? Goon drop 1.5 airplane? Goonikazee 1.5 airplane? lol Its kinda weird to apply the 'goon' naming convention, but I think goon circle is a great name nonetheless.
Oh, nice! I didn't know that, I wasn't really sure of the origin, I would have guessed aesthetics. HA, I've had people argue with me about 'nightingale' being the more direct translation, in comparison to 'little bird'. I think this is good info to back up my side of the argument hehe
When the tama is on the spike and you do a gunslinger while keeping the ball on the spike, I would call that loaded revolver. Not sure what others would call that, though!
I think we need a Japanese section lol! I'm probs not the best person to ask, and katakana usage (other than for foreign words) is pretty confusing to me. Like u said It can have a mocking tone in some instances*, but it others it seems to just add a bit of a spoken flavor to what you're writing. I asked a bunch of Japanese people about this, specifically yabai, and no one could give me a black and white rule. Basically the consensus was that they're both totally ok, and that ヤバイ(katakana) might be more of a spoken delivery (like if you were to write "playin with em" instead of "playing with them" maybe? Obv it's hard to find a good English example.) If you go for ヤバッ(yaba) or ヤベ(yabe) or something like that, everyone says you would definitely use katakana. Also, my girlfriend says she doesn't really like katakana and pretty much only ever writes in hiragana, including やばい. So it seems that you can't go wrong! I've also seen regular phrases like "oyasumi" in katakana, in a Japanese manga. I assume this is to give it a kind of sing-songy feel, since it's one of those things you say everyday. Kind of like saying "goodniiiiiight!" Or something. The Japanese people I mentioned this too think that's probably right. *i was interviewed for a newspaper a while back, and the interviewer asked if she could put some of my quotes in katakana, to give them a sort of foreigner/non native speaker feel. I asked them not to.
Someone mentioned Okada in this thread so I thought I would post this link to the late master here. It's a seriously awesome display. http://kendama.co.uk/forum/index.php?topic=733.0
I asked our guys at the office and it looks like Katakana is also used when referring to "live organisms" when you aren't using their their kanji.