Lileks" The answer is (leaf) blowin' in the wind

There's a movement in many cities across this great land to ban ...

Oh, right, it's the weekend, and someone's probably doing yard work, so I'll have to speak up. THERE'S A MOVEMENT TO BAN LEAF BLOWERS.

Personally, I hate the things, and I think about that every time I use mine. The feeling passes. Perhaps you have one, and know the feeling: You turn it off, because you finished with a particular area, and you hear someone else using one, and think, man, I hate those things.

It's human nature at its most honest. I have a good reason for using it — look at all this detritus on the driveway! Seeds! Leaves! Sticks! Bug husks! But that other guy who's just going on and on, what's he doing? Blow drying the lawn? Inflating a hot-air balloon?

What if it's not a leaf blower, but a flock of birds with a gift of mimicry who've learned to make the sound because they associate it with the appearance of tasty dislodged insects? That's all we need: crows along every electrical line, cawing the sound of a leaf blower.

Why do we hate leaf blowers and not snowblowers? It's the pitch. A snowblower starts with a throaty rumble and modulates to a curmudgeonly mutter. Leaf blowers whine like overgrown adolescent mosquitoes complaining that you won't give them the car keys.

There's also the matter of low-frequency sounds, which apparently cause distress and unease, but to be honest I don't know if I can hear them over the high-frequency sounds.

This would be OK if you could ride your leaf blower like a witch's broomstick. That would be dangerous but also quite awesome; it would mean that men would stop using leaf blowers at home and form leagues for aerial jousting.

I wouldn't be able to join, because mine is corded. This is one of the reasons I hate it. You can have 50 yards of extension cord, and you can be 4 feet from the outlet, and the plug will yank out. How? When you were walking around, the cord snagged on a step, wound around a deck railing and somehow threaded itself through the stepladder. If there was a window open, the cord would snake into the house and get hooked on a doorknob. Point is, it gets yanked out, again.

"Oh, for fiddlesticks' sake!" you shout, because you know you are going to write about this for a family newspaper and want the quote to be accurate, not a paraphrase.

I am not opposed to the bans. Stop me before I blow again. But here's the thing: My leaf blower is also a leaf vacuum. If they ban the blowing, but I make the same sound vacuuming, will that be OK?

And if it's really about the pollution, would it be OK to play recordings of leaf blowers while I use a broom to corral the leaves? Not that I would, unless I was feuding with my neighbors, which I'm not. He has an electric blower, too, but uses it just a bit on weekends.