lawnmower

The second most famous alcoholic beverage invented by Homer Simpson (the most famous, of course, was the Flaming Homer), the lawnmower is part vodka and part wheatgrass juice (exact amounts unknown). Homer invented it while working for Alec Baldwin and Kim Basinger.

Ron Howard was the first to try one.

A motorized machine which basically whips a blade around in a circluar motion really fast. The operator simply engages the lawn mower and either walks behind as it propels itself, or pushes it along. A push lawn mower is generally started by pulling a cord which rotates the engine. Riding lawn mowers are started by pushing the brake/clutch down and turning the ignition key.

Lawn mower stable

Lets ponder lawn mowers; mowers of all kinds. Big ones and the little ones that cut grass or are supposed to. I have five of them. Three of them can be sat on and are supposed to go without pushing. I push them often. You have most likely seen the advertisements with the semi-dork suburbanite looking over the horizon for more grass to cut before the sun goes down.

I have one of those really nice pushing mower with a pull rope that has the big wheels in the back. The minimum wage salesman at Walmart said that it would make mowing a breeze. The salesman disappeared quickly when I asked him two questions. I said "define breeze" and "what expertise do you have with mowing lots of grass." He was only eighteen years of age at best with a tuft of I think hair on his chin indicating to me that he knew almost nothing about cutting hair not to mention cutting grass.

The fifth one is one of those push rotary reaper manual kind of mowers. My wife thought it would be cute to have one. She pushed it about two rows around the yard and the spinning blade hit a stick and stopped the whole rig like she hit a wall. Now I use it to chase the grandkids around the yard. They think it is Frank from the movie Cars. This rotary one cost twice as much as the pull start one. Something I mention to her every time I move it in the garage and my unprotected toe gets caught in the reaper.

Currently, none of the riding mowers are working up to par. Between the batteries and the belts, I cannot keep any one of them running properly. All of them have adjustments that were designed by NASA rocket scientist and you need an alignment tool from the Czech Republic to keep the deck level. If you happen to get one mowing and running at the same time, you still have to get it in gear and adjust the blade angle so that you do not throw palm frond chips through the screen on the porch. The only enjoyable part is watching the cats, dogs and horses run like hell from the machine commonly known as "piece of shit".


The pull start mower with the big wheels is a true gem. It was easy to start and it did mow well. After I used it the third time it started surging. I got out the owners manual and I could not find anything about surging. In the Korean section, I gleaned something about an air filter so I decided to check that. Three screws and seven different screw driver hex bits later, I pulled out a perfectly clean air filter and dropped a screw down into the guts of this fine machine. It would not start any longer and I pulled on the pull rope so many times it broke, smashing my knuckles into the rotary push mower.

In fact all of my riding lawn mowers surge the same way. When the engine is on a surge at the high revolution end, the grass cuts too low and when the engine almost quits running and sputters it does not cut at all. The yard looks like a checkerboard. And grass catchers? There is not enough time to go into grass catchers only I will say that I dismantle them as soon as I get them out of the box. I get out the hack saw and cut that silly bar off the bottom of the deck. What the hell is that for anyway?. All it does is keep the grass from going into the catcher. They all surge. Why? I concluded after much cussing and praying that it was Satan's doing. God may not give you more than you can handle but I question that dogma when it comes to lawn mowers. I can barely lift an eighty pound bail of fresh alfalfa but I can discus a sixty pound mower about thirty yards with no foot fault.


Lawn mower memories

When I was a kid, I used to cut grass for money. Dad let me use the old lawn mower that had been holding up the Jon Boat in the back yard since before I was born. The deck was rusted, one wheel was missing, two wheels were wobbling like a penguin. the blade was eleven inches long on one side and on the other side it was bent down like a golf club giving me about eight inches total. Even though I could read on the deck that it was a twenty two inch cut mower, I could not use that in my advertising because this one only had nineteen inches at best. On the plus side, if I ran through the yard at a high rate of speed, it left a really cool spirograph pattern in the grass. I mowed sand, grass, nails and construction sites and this mower never sputtered or surged. NEVER.

The piston shaft tried to explode out of the side of this trouper. I patched the big hole on the engine block with some Fiberglas insulation I stole from the back of the dryer, a piece of bathroom tile, some duck tape and a guitar string that I found on a guitar in the living room. It was almost a year before mom asked about that one. I should have been working on a story all that time because "I don't know" did not fly. Anyway, I got eight more lawns out of that mower after that repair. It never sputtered or SURGED once. Though like in the great song, "Smoke on the Water", "it died with an awful sound".

When I got home, dad asked me about the mower and I said I was unemployed thinking that would squelch his interest. I do not know why it would have, thinking back to that day. "Bud, where is your mower?" "At the bottom of the canal" I said enthusiastically thinking once again that might lead him off the track. "Nancy, you need to come listen to this one". Nancy was my mom. Her name was McGill, she called herself Lil, but my dad always called her Nancy. "Go ahead Bud", he said. Bud was what he called me when he was curious about my doings and goings on.

"Well, the mower finally bit the big one", I said. "While I was dragging it home, I ran into Bobby and he said him and Larry could fix anything. So I went out on his back porch to cool off and I heard him and Larry banging and laughing and I heard the ole girl try to come to life one last time. There was a final bang and what apparently was a small explosion and the next thing I see, Larry is pulling the mower behind his bike now completely engulfed in flames. Bobby is running after him laughing. They came around the side by Mr. Delmon's eight million dollar plastic fence lighting it on fire as they went. Larry had a crazed look on his face as he headed straight off the dock into the canal. Bike, mower and all. Bobby went right in after him. It was a sight." "Why do you ask?" My dad said he had found a wheel down the street by the post office and he thought it might help if my mower had four wheels.

This point is worth repeating, it never surged. NEVER.

 

thanks to Dimview for editing help and support

In the world of beer, a lawnmower is generally an unchallenging beer, refreshing enough to be imbibed while doing manual labor. It's named, naturally, after the task of mowing the lawn.

This is not in any way a formal classification, and tends to be very subjective. It's most commonly applied to beers with a low malt profile, such as lagers, pils, wheats, pales, etc. Generally, the sorts of beers people like to drink in the hot sun. An optional criterion is that a person can have several without being in too great of a risk of accidentally losing a foot to the lawnmower.

Some people use the term pejoratively and others more positively. I've heard people say "I've just tried (insert beer here) recently. Uhg, that one's such a lawnmower" about as frequently as "Have you tried (insert beer here)? It's a really solid lawnmower." The most consistent usage, in my experience is amongst home brewers talking about their own beer. When they taste a new batch and refer to it as a lawnmower, they tend to mean something very specific: It didn't come out well enough for gifts, bragging about, or impressing people with, but didn't come out so horribly that they couldn't drink it or share it. When a friend brewed up a batch of the White House Honey Ale, I asked him how it was. He replied that it "wasn't even a lawnmower, at best it was a...I don't know...toilet scrubber."

Lawnmowers are a related, but distinct, informal classification from session beers. In the case of session beers, the primary criteria is alcohol content. Lawnmowers are also generally low ABV, but are additionally pleasant to drink while you're hot and sweaty. For example,Guinness Draught clocks in at a reasonable 4.2% ABV, which makes it perfectly acceptable as a session beer. However, I don't know many people that would consider it an ideal beer in stifling heat and direct sunlight.