The Funniest Invention
I think one of the funniest 20th century inventions is the leaf blower. All of the other "air devices" that come to my mind right now achieve much more useful tasks. For example, a hair dryer dries your hair very quickly. An air compressor inflates your tires in a timely, convenient manner. A vacuum cleaner helps you clean a large area in no time. That dentist air-sucker tool disposes of all the junk that accumulates in your mouth during a teeth cleaning. But a leaf blower? It's purpose is to push things around.

Instead of gathering leaves and other yard debris into a pile for disposal, the blower scatters it indiscriminately across the property. If there were aliens observing leaf blowing from space, they would certainly be confused at the spectacle. "Ah, the atmospheric winds deposited those leaves in Bob's yard. Bob doesn't like it. Now, he's using a wind machine to blow the leaves away from the yard. Now, he's going back in the house...and the wind is blowing the leaves back into the yard. Here comes Bob again..." The process could go on infinitely.

I'm all for keeping a clean yard. I think leaves should be disposed of, sidewalks should be swept off, limbs should be picked up, etc. But there's a guy who lives two doors down from me that tries to take care of all this with his leaf blower. I've watched him from my porch several times. He starts at his house and at the back of his driveway and pushes all the debris he can find down to the street. When he gets to the street, he sometimes seems unsure of how to proceed because he now has a row of debris in an arc formation just on the edge of his property in the street. Well, you've gotta get it farther away than that! If not, it'll blow back up when a car passes. So he pushes it farther into the street. And farther into the street. Until it's about halfway across the street. (The streets in my neighborhood are surprisingly wide. You can park cars along both curbs and still have enough room for two lanes of traffic.) I've always wondered how funny it would look if someone came out of his house at this point and saw my neighbor in the middle of street blowing leaves.

But the dumbest leaf blowing incident I've seen yet happened at work a couple weeks ago. The landscapers who are hired by the office owners were doing their typical summer work. Obviously, they have to come by much more frequently in the summer than during the rest of the year. At one point I heard loud machine noises coming from the parking lot. I looked out the window and saw two of these guys walking around with leaf blowers. I think they were attempting to blow some debris into the wooded area off the backside of our parking lot, but the formation that they were using to corral the debris in that direction seemed ineffective. After about three hours of walking around aimlessly, they managed to clear of the lot pretty well. Thirty minutes later, a summer thunderstorm hit and blew more limbs, pine straw, and pine cones into the parking lot than you could imagine. Did I mention that the landscapers' leaf blowers were the gas powered kind? You know, the kind that strap to your back like the Rocketeer? Or, as Metts suggested, like Ghostbusters. I'm glad in our 21st century world, we've decided on some really responsible ways to use our fossil fuels.

Does anyone else have a suggestion for our funniest modern invention?