What an asshole.

  • Shirasho@lemmings.world
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    2 days ago

    “The grass just, it doesn’t work,” he told Fox News during a White House tour in March. “We use it for press conferences and it doesn’t work because the people fall into the wet grass.”

    He’s still a massive asshole, but this is probably the strongest argument he has ever made.

    Or you can, you know, make the podium elsewhere on the yard. Why specifically dig up the rose garden? (Don’t answer that, we all know why)

      • tal
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        2 days ago

        https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_House_Rose_Garden

        I think that’s gravel, looking closely at the image.

        That being said, I don’t know whether concrete walkways were much of a thing in 1908. Gravel might have been the closest common option to what we’d more-commonly use concrete for today.

    • tal
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      2 days ago

      Not as big a deal in DC’s climate, but here in often-arid California, it’s generally considered responsible to phase out water-hungry lawns in favor of landscaping that doesn’t require as much water. Drought-tolerant plants, gravel, rock gardens, concrete, whatever.

      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xeriscaping

      The lawn was an English custom, and trying to reproduce a little piece of wet England by pouring enough water on arid or semi-arid land day in and day out is kind of wasteful.

      If you need the cushiony and rapidly-self-healing properties of lawn because people are running around on it, that’s one thing, but people spend more time indoors than they did historically, and as just a thing to look at, it’s not a great default. Plus, kind of high maintenance.

      A factor for a number of Western states.

      That being said, this wasn’t the rationale, and frankly, it’s probably basically irrelevant for somewhere like the White House relative to the functional impact.