Iciclectomies
This won’t mean much to our thin sprinkling of readers marooned in the backward South and Southwest who seldom see icicles, but it’s potentially lifesaving scrimshaw for the billions of Northeasterners who check this space ten or eleven times a day.
As for the snowbound denizens of Washington, DC, they haven’t done a lick of work in nine years and there’s no reason to expect they’ll interrupt their hibernation now.
After a big snowstorm, icicles hang daintily from gutters and eaves, then grow to monstrous proportions. Brother Wayne in West Virginia raised the question by e-mail of how to remove icicles without suicidal roof-climbs, and in the wink of an eye, disruptive, game-changing, paradigm-shifting technologies came pouring in.
Mike Geraci sent instructions on how to build an ingenious Dan Quayle Potatoe Gun, which gave Wayne the simplifying insight of shooting three-pointers with a basketball (effective, but you have to trek the snowdrifts to retrieve the ball).
Then Al, always good for a yawn, recommended using a tree-pruner – the kind with a telescoping pole that extends its lopper and saw into high branches. He also recalled a gentleman who hooked a 50-foot extension cord to a hairdryer and raised it on a bamboo pole to melt the icicles in situ.
By far the most patriotic battle plan came from Barb, who suggested that the removal of icicles was likely the founding purpose of the Navy’s Blue Angels precision flying squadron. And when you think about it, the wingtip of an F-18 is the perfect scalpel for shearing off icicles two inches below the eave.
We call this method Hypersonic Subsoffit Wingtip Iciclectomy, just to piss off the stuffed shirts at the Aeronautical Engineering Journal.
It’s an exciting technology. Imagine the thrill of having an F-18 break the sound barrier five feet from your dining room window.
Clearly, Mike the Quayle Hunter has the most practical idea. The potatoe gun squanders less energy than the Blue Angels, and its ammunition is cheap. You can’t go around stalking icicles with a peck of basketballs.