Keep Your Hand On That Plow

Keep Your Hand On That Plow
Keep Your Hand On That Plow

Sunday, December 26, 2010

Deep South Dispatch #2: Moby-le Home or The Trailer



 Some years back my father called me one day to say that he was not giving me a mobile home and he hoped I wouldn’t be upset. Well that was the gist of the conversation anyway. Instead he gave it to my brother. There are some who call him…Tim. 

This dispatch is about Tim and his trailer. It is not about a tornado and you shouldn’t have even let your mind go there even if it is alliterative.

Now to back up a step: real estate entrepreneur is to my father what sanitation engineer is to janitor.  Dress it up how you will, the facts on the ground are still the same. For Christmas last year we re-worked a Monopoly game with each property re-named according to a street where he owns a mobile home or an old mill house. 

The trailer in question is an especially run-down old single-wide set against some regrown pineland so low that it won’t pass perc.  For liability reasons Dad decided to pass this beauty on to my brother. 

I still laugh when I think of my father asking on the phone that night: “you don’t think Belle will be mad do you?”  I replied that she would think it a great favor if he did not give her a shambles of a mobile home in swamp in South Carolina. So that part of the patrimony passed to my brother who, just starting out at the time, had fewer assets to be seized in a law suit or so the thinking went.
About a year ago the trailer’s long-time renter abandoned it due to an inconvenient jail term and Tim, for the first time in his career as a landlord, had to go inside Moby-ile Home. He and Dad entered it and quite a scene awaited them.  

On the floor in every room of the house lay clothes piled over a foot deep. Moby-le Home came with its own special smell too, but we will leave that to your imagination. As the two generations surveyed the main living space Tim noticed a hole in the kitchen floor big enough for a child to fall through and another in the wall that could allow a squirrel to come and go with ease. I would mention the hole in the ceiling, but I don’t want you to think I’m exaggerating.  Every light fixture had been removed and replaced with naked bulbs on job wiring. 

My father looked around and pronounced: “it’s not as bad I feared.”
Tim, mouth agape, snapped his head around to look at the old progenitor and thought: REALLY?! Because this is the-worst-thing-I-have-ever-seen! Only gas and a spark could fix this!

It took a full day and a half just to clean out the clothes before actual repairs could begin. Once they commenced Tim discovered that the bathroom floor had rotted through.  In fact, the floor had disintegrated to such a degree that the bathtub would have fallen through to the ground except that one third of it rested on one of the two big steel I-beams that run the length of a single-wide mobile home like a great double keel.  The renter had inventively propped up the other end with an old go-cart tire.
While working on the bathroom Tim’s co-worker on the repair project, Kenny, had to go out in the yard to hurl. 

Dad also figured it would be cheaper —and cheaper is always better with him— to clean rather than replace, in Tim’s words,  “the quarter inch layer of grease off the crappy counter that held the kitchen sink.”  Fixing this according to our enterprising landlord meant, “I had to start with a putty knife and a bucket: eight hours later it wasn't too bad.” 

The holes all have been repaired with a bowling-alley laminate. My father buys seconds of this iron-hard faux-wood from a local plant for all his repairs now because it is nearly indestructible and impervious to water damage. The laminate also comes with little arrows which we often cut off. Although, I think the arrows add a bit of charm. 

My only questions was, “how could you let a renter live in a property like this?”
His reply: “Well I didn’t know. Because in the years he rented it and occasionally paid rent he never called to complain or ask to have anything repaired.”

Happy Ending
A renter came along who wanted the place although he found the rent a little high and moved out this fall. The silver lining for everyone is that the original renter, let's call him Ishmael, moved back into the trailer a few months ago! Either he loves the location or he approves of the extreme makeover.

Friday, December 17, 2010

Containing the NFL Blitz on English



 I have to pick a bone with the NFL and its unrelenting abuse of English.  The egregious offense is the use of contain as a noun.

Here is a recent example from one of the most literate NFL commentators Greg Easterbrook of Tuesday Morning Quarterback: “The Broncos had lined up with an "overload" rush to the offensive right -- surely something Arizona saw in film study -- and had no contain on the outside.”  
Now the definition of ‘contain” here is that a defensive player, especially a Defensive End rushes the quarterback or passer from outside the last offensive linemen rather than by trying to move between the last lineman and the next offensive blocker. This approach is meant to keep the quarterback in the pocket and prevents him from escaping either to run or pass outside the pocket (referred to in the NFL as “breaking contain”). 

This usage during NFL broadcasts is as nails on a chalkboard to my ears.  
One can imagine Chris Collinsworth defending this use by saying that  contain is a term of art in football. True, but it’s a circular argument leaning on the logic that in the NFL we can horse collar our language because in the NFL we have agreed to do so. That leaves only laziness, ignorance or indifference to the language as real excuses. It seems to me that laziness, ignorance and indifference are not really tolerated in football (see Haynesworth, Albert). It is a sport of elite athletes and exceptional coaches. Surely a passing familiarity with English among the games sportscasters is expected?
The suffix ment is not as valuable as a timeout in the fourth quarter and given the enormous number of useless syllables that commentators from Aikman to Wilcots expend even at their best, couldn’t they say “he broke containment?”

I know, nothing is so schoolmarm-ish as being picky about things like grammar and in so testosterone loaded a world as the NFL too – I am taking a risk. It probably seems such a tiny little thing, turning contain into containment, and lord knows part of English’s charm is how nimble and changeable the language has been. Still when you survey the enormity of the blogosphere/ twitterscape/ Sportsnews - Industrial complex that reports on every little thing (Exhibit A: Troy Polamalu has scored two touchdowns off of interceptions in his career and both were passes thrown by his college roommate Carson Palmer).  I think if we can care about that we make some attempt with our language too.

Wednesday, December 15, 2010

Dirty Fuel

Perhaps like me, when you buy gasoline or Diesel Fuel or oil for your furnace, you assume that while it is refined fossil fuel, it is a pure product, but your fuel is filthy. I don’t mean in environmental terms, we all understand that, I mean as a consumer you believe you are purchasing fuel that is clean in the way you assume your milk has no detritus in it. The fuel we purchase has a great deal of dirt in it, and I should have realized this, but only now as my basement sludge filled fuel tanks create grief for me have I realized we buy a pretty dirty product.

I grew up in a farm family and so I should have understood that fuel is dirty. Every engine that we owned from our lawnmower up to our biggest John Deere tractor had fuel filters on it. That horse-power rich tractor actually had two in-line filters and sure enough all the filters had to be changed from time to time. Since everything on the farm is covered in dirt and dust anyway I thought the filters cleaned the fuel again after getting dirty on our own place. Recent experiences teach me otherwise.

My father bought a polystyrene fuel tank that sits in the back of his truck. He uses it to buy diesel at the distributor and take it to the tractors on the farm. Previously we always had steel tanks for this kind of work, but like all newer tanks this is translucent so you can readily see how much fuel is inside. My father — a man who has been buying diesel all his life —was surprised to see how his tank turned black inside from the accumulation of sludge.

As a consumer I think the oil industry should provide cleaner fuel if they can. They are passing the costs on to consumers for fuel filters, service work on engines and furnaces and in lost fuel efficiency. At the very least the regulatory bodies that oversee fuel production and distribution should test fuel require a report on the amount of particles floating in out product. We require that information on water systems and while we don’t drink our fuel, our most expensive tools – engines – do.