Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2019/11/24/drain-it.html
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So satisfying! Brings back pleasant memories from Rob’s earlier post: Video collection: drains unblocked | Boing Boing.
This topic could be an entire web site 
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This is one of those things that very quickly goes from:
Why would anyone watch half an hour of a guy clearing storm drains?
to:
Well, are there more videos of this guy clearing storm drains?
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Not so anarcho, locally.
https://www.seattle.gov/utilities/environment-and-conservation/get-involved/adopt-a-drain
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There is a drain behind my home in the alley. It regularly gets over 1’ deep if debris isn’t promptly cleared away. The March after we moved in the drain was blocked up by ice and there was nearly 2’ of water in it which nearly flooded my garage. I now keep a close eye on the drain. It makes a very satisfying sucking sound and a large whirlpool when the water is deep. Sometimes I’m tempted just to leave it plugged so I can hear that sound.
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This activity is exactly why my walks home always take an extra half hour when it rains, particularly in the autumn. I stop and do this at each drain. I thought that was pretty standard.
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Here’s what I believe to be the most famous “drain scene” (as if there are others) in any film ever. Impatient? Then jump to 5:10, when our heroine Cluny Brown – charmingly odd and a freak for unclogging drains – makes her first appearance. Otherwise, watch the whole clip and revel in the weirdly wonderfulness of it all :
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I got the weirdest sense of deja vu while watching these…I seem to recall watching them a year or two ago…I remember him showing where the water goes, everything. But these videos are only a few weeks old.
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Why am I up with three hours left to go to even sleep before work watching a man drain a street?
Why do I feel like he is undoing the stupidity of the world and washing it down the drain?
This was worth my time. I can’t believe Im saying that right now
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It’s timeless video.
I could watch a guy doing this from last century as well.
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“No one would have believed in the first years of the twenty-first century that this world was being watched keenly and closely by people on their computers and phones… that, as a man busied himself about his past time of unclogging drains, that he would be scrutinised and studied, perhaps almost as narrowly as a man with an internet connection might scrutinise the transient kittens that swarm and multiply on an adoption home’s webcam.”
The future is a stranger place than I imagined it would be when I was a kid.
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Truly satisfying. Well done, sir!
Thats another sub i’m gonna have trouble explaining to my NT friends 
(they are really incurious). Really scratches that NUMTOTs / Do Not Eat itch. Cheers Cory
If it was standard you wouldn’t encounter so many blocked drains. I do it too around the block, but I’ve never seen anyone else do it.
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That was … delightful. Weird … but delightful.
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I live in Lubbock, a place so flat that you can see the back of your own head on a clear day. We get beautiful thunderstorms that can drop several inches of water in a matter of minutes. There is no place for the water to go, so we have some pretty gnarly street flooding. The civic powers have done a fairly valiant job of directing storm water, but there is only so much that can be done with a flash flood. I ma have to emulate this fellow’s good example and go clear some drains in my neighborhood next flood.
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It must be a Jungian thing. Draining water is central to our collective psyche.
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Remember how, as a kid, you would go out into storms to find streams to dam up? There are 9 year olds watching these videos yelling ‘NOOOOO!!!’
Uh, no. I remember how, as a kid, I would spend a few afternoons a week at a little creek a few blocks from my house, using a staff-sized stick to undam places where leaves had wedged themselves into natural dams, clogging up the creek. Getting the pooled water to finally race away downstream always gave me a feeling of accomplishment. Nine-year-old me is yelling “YES!”
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The entire flick is like that. The entire version of CB is on YT.
Check out the ‘Persian cat’ scene. Meow. Meow.
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