Attribution: Photo by Niklas Hamann on Unsplash
By Bill Stokes
Kickass, the doorstop dog, reports the keeper and Phyllis searching for things to divert thinking away from the cruel absurdity of the government killing off the citizenry.
It was after electric starters had replaced hand cranks in the automobile world and engine design was either V-8 or in-line, and with some of those engines the oil pumps tended to freeze up and if you kept driving, you ended up with a ruined engine.
One common solution was to pour gas in a soup can, light it on fire, and crawl under the car to locate the flaming can under the oil pan and hope to hell it didn’t catch the dirty oil-soaked engine on fire before it thawed out the oil pump.
While there was a certain excitement in this there was also the likelihood that it was not going to end well, and the keeper has a boyhood memory of a neighbor’s Ford with the hood raised and the neighbor throwing snow on a flaming engine.
So, here’s the point: While advances in the transportation area eliminated the need to worry about a car’s frozen oil pump, it left worry space for worrying about why in this horseless carriage day and age there is so much horse s… all over the place?
