Who is the idiot that invented gas-powered leaf blowers? What I wouldn’t give for five minutes alone with the guy who came up with this concept…
Isn’t it odd that Los Angeles, not Orange County, has outlawed these things? They are the scourge of my neighborhood, and I swear they are coming around more and more often (usually starting at around 6:30 am).
First of all, they are LOUD. No one can dispute this fact. And they don’t really “clean up” anything. All they do is move dirt from the ground, where it belongs, to a variety of other places, such as:
- my lungs, should I go outside and have the audacity to actually breathe
- my house, if any of my windows or sliding glass door is open (and they often are since I don’t have air conditioning)
- all over my car, which I have usually just washed and waxed
Keep in mind I am not afflicted with severe allergies, old age, or any of the other things which might make leaf blowers a health hazard. And I know I’m not the only one who feels this way about these machines.
So what’s the solution, you ask? I don’t know. Don’t ask me — I can’t even get myself into graduate school. But I’ve got to believe that in an age where a computer chip the size of your palm can execute a billion calculations per second, we can do better than this.