Fun winter-time jokes
Here are a couple of jokes for you:
How do you know you’ve been in Minnesota too long?
You’re driving on SOLID ICE and you look down, and you’re doing 35 miles an hour.
How do you know you’re not from Minnesota?
The Minnesotans are flying by you doing 45-50.
Okay, so maybe these aren’t jokes. Note there’s no winning situation here where you get to stay on the freeway and drive slower than 35: you’d get rear-ended by morons.
Note to my southern friends: I know you think that’s impossible and I’m exaggerating but ice at -10 or -20 degrees actually has a little traction. I DON’T RECOMMEND DRIVING ON IT, but sometimes one has no choice.
December 13th, 2009 at 10:33 am
Yeah, I had to stop and think about it, and I realized the difference. Down here, if we get ice, the temperature stays close enough to freezing that with even a tiny bit of friction, you get melt, rendering surfaces undrivable. In the situation you’re describing, it’s harder to get surface melt — so yeah, a teense of traction.
Still, scary. Be safe.
– southern friend.
December 14th, 2009 at 11:45 pm
Yeah, and they throw salt down on it, which, at those temps, does nothing, so it acts like sand. Some municipalities throw down a liquid solution of calcium chloride and water, which melts ice at a lower temperature but still freezes solid when it gets too cold.
What they really need to do is throw down a hell of a lot more sand than they do, but that’s a pain for the freeways because when the ice all melts on a warm day the freeways would be covered in sand, which doesn’t work too well for the traction either. Since the county can’t put sand on the freeways they don’t bother putting a bunch of sand in the trucks for the back roads, since they’d have to have two sets of salt/sand/plow trucks then and that would be more expensive to keep track of.
So they dump salt everywhere, at the slightest provocation, sometimes right on top of a couple inches of snow, which turns to slush, which dilutes the salt, so you wind up with a thin layer of ice underneath a mound of slush. At night it gets below zero again and eventually the whole shebang freezes so it’s like, textured ice.
GOTO 10, etc.