There’s a scene in the movie Fargo that just doesn’t work for me.  Now don’t get me wrong — I love the movie.  Its smorgasbord of despair, violence and hopelessness always brings a smile to my face.  To me, it’s a perfect movie — except for one little thing.  Remember when Jerry Lundegaard (the excellent William H. Macy) has to scrape the ice off his car windshield in the middle of a big frozen empty parking lot?  He just grabs the scraper and goes at it.  I always think to myself — hey, everyone knows that in cold weather, when you have to scrape ice, you start the car and blast the heat!  Not only does it warm up the car while you are scraping, it might also help melt the windshield ice!

I grew up near Boston, that’s how I know this.  But why is it important to an environmental discussion website, you might ask?  Because I hope that one of the things I bring to the site is a healthy sense of skepticism.  And because my upbringing in a cold part of the US qualifies me to say: this thing, pictured below, is useless.

I mean, granted, it doesn’t use gasoline like a regular snowplow, so I say: nice try to Kevin Blake of Sun Prairie, Wisconsin.

But come on.  Here’s video of the thing in action:

http://www.c3ktogo.com/news-video/?mgid=14769

Look at the snow he’s happily plowing!  It’s light and fluffy, and only about 4-6 inches deep.  How often does that happen?

More often, if my childhood is any indication, poor Mr. Blake steps out of his house on a cold winter morning to find 3 feet of heavy, wet snow clinging to his driveway.  He dutifully saddles up on the old pedal-plow, heads out into the snow, and thuds to an immediate stop.  No matter how hard he pedals.

Then he calls the local guy with a plow on the front of his truck.  Right?