Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2020/07/24/portlanders-excellent-use-of.html
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Good luck my American friends.
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My house is next to some flats with a managed garden, and opposite a churchyard. I am used to the sound of someone with a leaf-blower chasing one damp leaf around a bench, while someone else with a rake fills a wheelbarrow with the others. To me, a leaf-blower is up there with the car-alarm as a thing that only exists to annoy. Now, at last, someone has found a practical use for it. Okay, so this ‘practical use’ seems to involve focussing annoyance back at tear-gas chucking paramilitaries, but at least this leaf-blower is trying to rehabilitate itself.
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Turns out tear gas isn’t all that effective in dispursing protesters. Especially motivated, seasoned protesters who are there for an unaddressed political reason. We learned this at the WTO protests, we can learn it again.
Tear gas should join lie detectors as fascist tools with an undeserved reputation for effectiveness.
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I have used leaf blowers a lot in archaeology. They are great for cleaning large trowelled squares of loose dirt before photography and, in combination with a watering can or hose pointed into the airstream, for wetting them down in a wide arc. So they’re not a completely useless tool, just one whose original purpose is maybe not the one it is best at.
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True…
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Tear gas and OC have a long history of not working against goal-oriented people. On top of that the protestors who are there late at night playing cat-and-mouse with Trump’s Gestapo have learned how to take protective measures. They adapt much more quickly and creatively than the goons.
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Looks like the Portlanders have been studying the tactics of their HK comrades.
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I use mine exclusively for blowing sawdust out of my workshop. It comes in extra-handy for chasing dust out of crevices too deep for the vacuum to reach into.
Mine is just a little electric jobbie, though.
Not super-powered, but it still makes a decent breeze, and would be very convenient to carry in a protest.
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A chapter of one of P.J. O’Rourke’s travelogues (possibly Holidays in Hell) made it abundantly clear that South Korean students do not fuck about when it comes to protests.
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In Bong Joon-Ho’s The Host, one of the character’s back stories is that he was a political activist in college.
He spends most of the movie hurling molotov cocktails at things.
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Good to see one individual using an environmentally friendly, battery powered leaf blower
A little less C02 in the world…
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I said the other day that if Portland was in Hong Kong, more people would be on the side of the people- not the government.
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Arm-mounted cordless industrial fans wielded like Captain America’s shield - Go!
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“The street finds its own uses for things.”
– William Gibson
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I’ve been contemplating how a handful of these might be useful in Portland, with a suitable payload. Haven’t worked out exactly what that would be yet, though:
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Oh. Oh! Maybe… my electric duster… hmmm.
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When I was in high school there was a civil war between skate boarders and roller blade boys, it was fierce! Anyhow the other side used one of these and a bunch of balloons with spicy peppers mixed into the water… Mercy that hurt!
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The payload should be a dye, so that we can shame these Americans who attack their fellow citizens on their off days.
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