January 21, 2005

  • Ready for the weekend's winterland of wonders...


    There’s chapstick on my lips (I just put it there), although my lips are not chapped.  Doesn’t that make it anti-chapstick?


     


    We say that rock salt melts ice.  Well, the ice melts the rock salt, too.  If rock salt were more of a nuisance than ice, we’d buy ice and throw it on the salt to get rid of it.


     


    I hold the record for making the littlest snowman: three flakes stacked atop one another.


     


    I find it much easier and safer to run on ice than walk on it.  Unless I have to make a sudden turn in direction.


     


    Ice is not just rock-hard.  It IS a rock.  Anything that forms crystals below its melting point is a mineral and if it aggregates into a solid mass, it is a rock in my book.  “On the rocks’ is not just a figure of speech. It is the essence of literality.  Hailstones anybody?  Duh.


     


    Snow crystals are really dirt particles dressed up in ice.  Next time you put on a pretty dress, think of a snow crystal.


     


    There’s an old windchill and a new windchill index.  Yet their use is still mixed and you can’t always be sure which one is being referenced.  If you know your air temperature and the wind speed, you can go here to compare the two.  The old one, used by the National Weather Service until 2001 measured the impact of chilled wind on freezing water, not human bodies.  It was much ‘chillier’ than the current one (Steadman index) which measures effects of chill on the human body.  Hey, things are heating up.  Must be the greenhouse effect.


     


    If  it’s snowing harder than you can dig yourself out of, you’re being anastrophically buried (a term from geobiology that I used as a student while writing a reviewed and published scientific paper*).  So if you look outside and feel overwhelmed by a blizzard, scream “It’s an anastrophe!”


     


    If you go outside in a blizzard, have a death wish, and you see some fool running around a cemetery like he’s Attila the Hun storming Europe, that well could be possibly me. Scream: "You're an anastrophe."   And I will then gladly assist in burying you.


      


    *Sediment mixing by Lampsilis radiata siliquoidea


    (Mollusca) from western Lake Erie. Journal of Great


    Lakes Research, 5, 105-111

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