Of illegal gas cans and pre-ban toilets.

Try buying a working gas can sometime.



It wasn't a long time ago when you could buy a 5 gallon gas can that you could use to put in the back of your pickup for off-roading adventures. Gassing up out in the Outer Mongolia area was pretty easy. You would pop the lid, pull out the spout, stick the spout into your tank and snap open the vent. In about a minute or so you had 5 gallons of gasoline in your tank and you were off and running again.



I suppose it you were not careful there was minimal spillage.



Enter the crybabies who moaned, wailed and gnashed their teeth to get Uncle to do something about the horrible amount of spillage and of course, Uncle did.



They now make 100% spill proof gas cans that are guarenteed not to spill a drop because you simply can't get the gas out of them. In addition to that, the spouts no longer fit into the average vehicle's gas tank filler.



Of course, when you finally DO get the gas out of the can you spill a whole lot more than you used to because you wind up breaking the safety nozzle that comes with them.



It didn't take long for the public to figure out that these new gas cans were not a very good idea and rather than do what they should have which is take a few cans of gas down to the offices of the elected officials that inflicted this little indignity on us and burn them to the ground, they reverted to an old American trick or two. Or three. Or ten.



Some people simply did what I did and bought a piece of clear hose and syphon the gas into their vehicles. Sometimes if I am in a hurry I just pull the entire cap off the can and dump it into the tank with a funnel I got at an auto parts store. It works pretty good. Other people made various jury-rigged nozzles, many of which leak far, far worse than the old ones did and create a lot more spillage.



Other people have just decided to get the old pre-ban cans from wherever they can find them.



I just went rooting around on eBay and wasn't too surprised that a beat up old pre-ban can runs about twice of what a new, and inproved government approved one does. I really wasn't too surprised.



Of course, the government had made it clear that this kind of conduct is illegal and I suppose there is a penalty for circumventing the safety devices attached to the gas can but I don't think that there are really a whole lot of policemen out there that are going to go too far to enforce it.



You forget that cops have lawns to mow, too and they suffer the same problems as the rest of us. They hate the damned things just as much as the rest of us. In fact last summer I got nailed cold by a local Gendarme who caught me filling my mower with my little hand made syphon.



He got out of the car and watched me carefully and instead of reading me my Constitutional rights and crossing my wrists with stainless steel, he furrowed his brows and said, "That's a good one. I'll have to remember ithat one."



I happened to have a bunch of fittings in my plumber's kit so right then and there I whipped him up one which he gratefully took. Before we get into the corrupt cop conclusion, neither of us looked at this as a police/citizen matter. This was strictly a guy thing.



This entire gas can thing really serves no purpose other than to make us a little more disrespectful of the powers that be, very few of which actually mow their own lawns or ever have to put gas into their own cars. If they did then they would realize that this whole gas can nozzle is nothing but a bad joke anyway.



All stuff like this does is alienate the average guy from the government just a little more with each new ill-thought and ill planned dopey little rule and regulation.



Another example of this is the new and improved one-gallon-per-flush toilet that got jammed down our throats a few years back as an effort to save water. While I guess the plumbing at my house even though it is an older house has kept the required fall in the drainage/vent/waste system, I have had a couple of stoppages over the past few years and good old Roto-Rooter has paid us a visit a time or two. Back when we had the older toilets there was no problem.



A lot of older homes have seemed to have this problem because over time the fall in the system flattens out a bit over time and as the earth shifts around a bit. Many people have been forced to replumb their entire systems to use these wonderful government mandated new and improved toilets.



Now in my home, from time to time I stuff a garden hose into the clean-out of my system and let it run a while to make sure the system stays running, hence using more water over the long run than I would had I not replaced the old toilet with the new and improved one. It is either that or I'll wind up having to call Roto-Rooter again and pay out the nose.



Of course, most of our elected officials do not live in older homes and the ones that do have simply had their entire waste systems replaced which is really no skin off of their nose because they most likely have either voted themselves a raise to pay for it or possibly there is a congressional plumber or something we don't know about. At any rate, there are not a whole lot of congress people that have dug up their waste systems with a shovel and wallowed in the mung and other crap to fix things themselves which is what an awful lot of us do to keep expenses down.



Of course, there was another route and that was one of international intrigue. You could simply smuggle a pre-ban toilet in from Canada where they were (and still may be) legal. If that was too much hassle and you didn't want to go that route, there are still rebuild kits out there that you can use to convert a new toilet into an old style one.



In short, like a lot of Americans, they either circumvent the law or simply break it because they know that the idiots that make these laws are so far out of touch that they don't understand what they are doing to us when they pass these stupid laws.



I get tired of watching Big Brother try and improve our lives only to make things more different, difficult and more expensive. I wish they would just learn to leave things that work alone.



my other blog is: http://officerpiccolo.blogspot.com/ http://piccolosbutler.blogspot.com/