The other day the governor of California, who the little white dust mop dog detests just as much as a grizzly bear fishing, announced that the state was in the middle of a drought. Since Los Angeles is located within the confines of California, one can then logically infer that LA is in the middle of a drought.

A few days after the governor’s announcement the TV news presented a story about the ‘Water Police’ who would now be traveling LA neighborhoods leaving friendly ‘fix it’ tickets if home owners were watering their lawns in the middle of the day, or spilling water onto the sidewalk.

OK, so now water is serious business… Again. So one tends to pay more attention to subjects that are H2O related when they appear on the TV, or even the radio.

Last week when I got into the car there was a human-interest story on NPR all about the new, exciting, and more realistic model of artificial lawns now available ‘in the state.’ I came in on the middle of the story, so I’m not quite sure which state this was. This became important later in the story.

So there was lots of human-interest stuff about how the husband wanted a putting green, but they couldn’t afford it, and the wife wanted a permanently verdant lawn, but they couldn’t afford that either. Then the story’s hero, a salesman with an exotic name that was something like Lazlo DeMille, appeared on their front porch and offered them brochures for the new, state-of-the-art artificial lawn. Eventually they decided to replace not only the front, but also the back garden with ‘Ultimo Grass 9,000′ or whatever the stuff is really named.

This was then followed by a rather long, and rather dull discussion of the wonders inherent to ‘Ultimo Grass 9,000 during which Lazlo blithely quoted the average price for an installation at “somewhere between $30,000 and $35,000.??? OK, let’s just suppose that the average price is really $32,000. (Trust me, it will make the arithmetic easier later on.) So then the narrator points out that this is pretty pricey for just a lawn, especially when water is RELATIVELY CHEAP in the home owner’s state. So then there’s some more discussion about how envious the neighbors are over the homeowner’s permanently verdant garden. And then Lazlo mentions that the lawn makes financial sense, because “It pays for itself in just 4 years.???

OK, let’s do the math. We decided to pick a cost of $32,000 because it really is in between $30,000 and $35,000 and because it’s easily divisible by 4. Lazlo says that the artificial lawn pays for itself in just 4 years. So $32,000 divided by 4 equals $8,000. So the homeowners are paying $8,000 a year to irrigate their lawn? And this is deemed, by the narrator, to be “Relatively Inexpensive???? Well… Maybe if they’re trying to grow ground cover on the planet Mercury, but not in Los Angeles.

And there the story ended, without any indication if the home owner’s neighborhood really was orbiting too close to the sun, or maybe was a suburb of Las Vegas.

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