My Uncle Sir Cedric Dumby-Phyfe tried his hand at inventing once in a while (when he wasn't being the jolly bon vivant at the race tracks and the cricket matches!) Among his more eccentric and actually quite entertaining creations was this one... You see, Uncle Cee-Cee (only I was allowed to call him that!) had an extraordinary collection of automobiles that he adored driving, or being driven about in! And his biggest pet peeve was the constant barrage of dead insects squishing themselves on the windshields! From Duesenbergs, Cords, and Isotta Fraschinis to Talbot-Lagos, Bugatti Royales, and Delahayes, one and all were peppered with bug corpses splattered over their timeless and limited edition lines. After only a mile, their iconic beauty was completely defaced in my Uncle's eyes, and he would turn back around from an evening drive and insist that his garage staff wash the entire vehicle down and rewax it before returning it to its particular berth in his "stable".
After one particularly frustrating evening, he determined to fight back, at least around his own estate which happened to have over seventy-five miles of cobblestone roads and avenues threading through it. He figured that if insects were always landing on windshields, he would use that against them by sucking them into a huge whirling blade. Cee-Cee spent a fortune on designers, engineers, electricians, and aerodynamicists to build his fleet. And once they were constructed, he hire his gardeners to drive round and round the estate, hour after hour, clearing the air of every mosquito, fly, grasshopper, moth, and stink bug that blundered into the blades.
Of course, the Bug-Begone Buggies (as he called them) required heavy hosing after every half-hour or so because the drivers couldn't see out of their own windshields. But they did seem to work... as long as Uncle Cedric was driving one of his treasured antique automobiles right behind two or three of them. It DID sort of spoil the beauty of an evening jaunt in a Bugatti or Delahaye; the clunky, clanking roar of the Bug Begone whirring up ahead, rattling, twitching, and dropping the odd bolt or loose screw here and there as it chewed a semi-bugless path for the great beauty gliding behind it. But Cee-Cee insisted on the Bug Begones remaining absolutely homely in their design, even comical, so as to "not distract from the timeless aesthetic of the great and iconic automobiles they were intended to protect" as he put it.
Of course, it wasn't perfect, but of all of Uncle Cedric's whimsical notions and foolhardy projects, I think this one gave him the greatest pleasure... well... this and his African Violet Hotel... but that’s a story for another time.
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