Thursday, November 27, 2008

The language of the sandbox...

The other day I was laboriously raking leaves in the front yard of Roseholme Cottage. As the tree detritus was scraped into piles and shoveled manually into bags, I kept glancing at my neighbor two doors down with her stylin' mulching leaf vacuum.

I suddenly felt kinship with every kid in the sandbox who wanted another child's toy for her very own: You need to share! It's not fair!

Now that the word "fair" has re-entered our national political discourse, perhaps I can expect our newly-elected Dear Leader to make my neighbor share her neat toy with me come January 21...

5 comments:

staghounds said...

Did she have one of TheOne's signs?

If so, I'll bet that you and she could work up a leaf removal collective.

And, "owning" the leaf mulcher as she does, who's the kulak?

Anonymous said...

Ah, but you miss the subtlety of the strategy of the Kwisatch Haderach.

One of his statist predecessors noted that work makes you free. So, giving you the means to reduce your workload is, in fact, an infringement upon your liberty.

Now, that leaf mulcher is sinful in two ways: it reduces the nobility of work and it also has a nasty carbon footprint. So, the obvious solution is to declare the leaf mulcher an enemy of humanity and have it destroyed.

Problem solved. The leaf mulcher is no longer drowning baby polar bears and your envy is assuaged.

José Giganté said...

The title of the post threw me, I guess today I think of the sandbox as Iraq or at least the Middle East. I don't think they have leaf vacs in Iraq though :)

The Fair thing to do would be for your neighbor to mulch/vac your leaves and for you to provide protection via your fairly extensive arms/weapons collection. I'd bring it up with the neighbor,
TAM: "you know, I have a large number of guns, how about you come and suck up my leaves?"
NEIGHBOR: "EEK! (thud)"

Then again, maybe not...

Karl Keller said...

I was babysitting three boys ages 5, 7, and 9 this Saturday. Partway through the marksmanship fundamentals session, one of them observed that another had gotten to shoot more times than he and pointed out that this wasn't fair. I challenged them to find a single instance of me being fair during the rest of the day.

You have to start early, you know. :)

Unknown said...

On the contrary, the Elitists are paying a couple hundred bucks a month at the Spa to get the kind of exercise that you are enjoying for free.

This translates to an unreported income to La Tam of, uh, $2400 per annum... the new IRS will be notified accordingly.