Sling blade?

For some reason the guy who mows our yard hasn't showed up recently, and, as Mary has slaved assiduously in the yard digging holes and planting plants in accordance with the garden plan we had drawn up by some master landscaper lady, the grass and weeds up there have grown up a lot.  Now, as regular readers of this blog may recall, I am not the enthusiastic of suburbanites about on the topic of mowing (check out some earlier posts).  However, our little plot just looked shitty, and after pouring N-thousand dollars into our renovation somehow I didn't like how crappy it looked.

I don't even own a lawnmower, but down in the basement I found this old tool which is clearly used to swing and cut grass or plants or somesuch.  Not a scythe (though I love scythes, used one at somebody's dacha outside Moscow back in '98 to cut nettles), not a sling blade ("some people call it a kaiser blade, I call it a sling blade.."), but something one swings and it cuts grass.  Even though its old and rusty.

So I took this thing out on our little patch out front and cut down the most egregiously offending tufts of grass and weeds, even as Mary rolled her eyes at me, surely thinking I should be helping her with some project in her garden.  And it looks considerably less bad now.