Thanks as always to our resurrected pals at The Daley Gator, (and welcome back!) as well as The Other McCain, Pirate’s Cove, Flappr, and Bacon Time for the Rule Five links!
Sometimes you run across a news piece that just makes you have to grin.
A Seaside, Calif., man ordered by the city to to hide his boat behind a fence has gone viral with his hilarious and creative response to the washed-up request.
Etienne Constable was surprised to receive a sternly-worded letter from his local code enforcement office, informing him that large vehicles parked in driveways must be hidden from view.
So he built a fence — and had a local artist turn the barrier into a mural of his prized possession.
“I’m not a rule-breaker but I like to make a political statement as necessary as well as a humorous statement and a creative statement,” Constable told local TV station KSBW.
“I thought, ‘This is ridiculous,’ and my first reaction was to leave a nasty, nasty message at the city hall,” he told the Washington Post.
“And then I thought, well, I might as well build a screen … I’ll do what they want, but I’m not going to do it their way.”
After running his grand idea by his neighbors, Constable hired muralist Hanif Panni to paint a photorealistic image of the ship, named Might As Well, on his new, 6-foot tall fence in the driveway.
That’s priceless.
We’re lucky now to live in an area where, while there are such things as building codes, other than the basic requirements for safety, there are little or no zoning or property use restrictions. Rural 
Alaskans are accustomed to doing as we damn well please on our own property, and that’s as it should be. Granted homeowner’s associations can be a pain (although I would point out that Mr. Constable’s issue was with a city code, not an HOA) but those are voluntary; you agree to abide when you buy a house in a neighborhood with an HOA. We lived in one such for 23 years in Colorado, and the restrictions were minimal, but I have heard more than a few horror stories of HOAs taken over by little tin gods.
In this case, though, Mr. Constable has shown us how to deal with petty bureaucrats by following their instructions to the letter – with a little humor added.
