Handing It Down To a New Generation

There are a lot of videos on YouTube about banging on your house, and making furniture, and related topics. Very, very few of them are any good. Many are downright destructive. For the most part, they’re produced by people who are fascinated with making videos, and watched by people who are interested in watching videos, not for doing anything productive in the real world.

Many young people today are hungry for information about practical things like fixing a dwelling. I salute them. Self-reliance is an important character trait, and in short supply recently. Home and Garden teevee shows are useless for this, but people watch them anyway. They showcase people who can’t do much more than host the show, but who exhort people to flip that house just like they (snicker) did. And, you know, an army of immigrants working off camera to do all the scut work. The result of people watching these shows is always highly visible in real estate listings in my neck of the woods, and probably in yours, too. The house is half torn apart, there are piles of oddly selected building materials everywhere, and there’s a foreclosed sign on the door. “All the hard work is already done,” the realtor will tell you with a straight face. Done wrong, I’ll tell you.

The genial fellow in this video is offering training wheels for your Schwinn before exhorting you to buy a Harley. He’s the rarest thing on the internet. Someone who might actually know what they’re talking about, and might actually help a few people hit their thumb with a hammer, and love every minute of it. And he seems to understand, without saying so, that the plastic bucket might be the most useful tool of the lot. After all, you can flip it over and sit on it when lunchtime rolls around.

[Related: Ten of The Eleven of My Top Ten Tools}