When we moved to the county in 2k3 – our corded electric mower of course moved with us.
Now – playing the enviro-schmuck card and using an electric mower on a city lot is pretty darn easy…. Not so for tiered, generously sized suburban lots.
Nonetheless – we, Kevin, dealt with it…. Quietly for the most part except for little hints…. Like a big information pack that arrived from a nice little company in Vermont promoting their Neuton Cordless Electric Mower .
In what had to be a fit of complete suburban consumerism, we all gathered around the TV, popcorn bowl in-hand, and watched the infomercial tape which accompanied the brochures and incentive coupons.
I’ve always made fun of corporate video productions, (and the professionals that make them). Maybe unfairly… But the plasticized saccharin performances, up-with-white-people jazz-licks, flat lighting and rigid editing always give me the creeps.
The tape, like others of it’s kind – was silly and over-sold…. You can only talk so much about a product in a dedicated program… so you wind up selling absurd rhetorical things.. like… “Buy this and you can mow your lawn!!! Mowing is good… Here’s a lady giving a testimony about how much her life has changed since SHE started mowing HER lawn!”
*We just watched another one of these for a retractable awning we were thinking about putting on the house…. A fair portion of the video was selling “shade” – not even the product.
/digress.
Nonetheless – the features were impressive enough for us to put it on the “talk about getting one later list”.
A month later we passed a woman using one on her lawn in our neighborhood and stopped and asked her if she liked it.. (She raved)…
A month later we had struck a deal with my dad to exchange some chores for ordering one for us.
A week later the box showed up.
Two weekends into ownership I’m quite convinced that the Neuton is the Dyson of lawnmowers… Smart / Thoughtful design… Extremely quiet… it looks like a lawnmower should in the year “two-thousand-and-five”…… and it’s from crunchy-butt, hippy-friendly, blue-state, civil-union allowin’ Vermont! (*right-on!).
A day later I’d be singing the praises of the device and not blogging about it.
Note – this is not a blog – this is merely the first test shots of the new iPodish / Cameraish / Organizer / Phoneish thing. Aside from an arbitrary point of focus – it seems fine… for a snapshot shooter….