Stray Hawkeye

Web Urbanist has a round up of some pretty cool (pun intended) large scale snow sculptures.  The Calvin and Hobbes ones are particularly good.

Starts a little slow, but really good, lovely really:

Bottle from Kirsten Lepore on Vimeo.

Even more impressive if you notice that it was made almost all by one person.

Via Swiss Miss.

This time of year, as the mounds, piles, and banks of snow start to melt, I’m always amazed by what they reveal.  Not the grass and bushes and pavement and such, as much as all the various trash that’s gotten frozen into the snow banks and buried over the winter, all to be revealed in a few days as the snow melts away.

This is particularly interesting because I’ve found the one major weather difference between Iowa and Minnesota is how much the snow pack melts during the winter.  In Iowa (at least the parts I lived in) it melts several times throughout the winter.  Maybe not completely, but enough to get down to just a few inches of snow on the ground, and melt everything off the side walks.  In Minneapolis, it’s just those 5 or 10 degrees colder that it takes to keep it almost completely frozen all winter.  Snow we got at the start of December is just melting for the first time now.  The side walks are visible for the first time since Christmas.  The snow and ice here just piles, and piles, and piles up all winter, and then melts all at once over the course of a week or two.

In doing so, it reveals everything that’s been tossed along the side of the roads and side walks all winter too.  So far this year, just in the past few days, I’ve seen the following melting their way out of the snow banks:

• More beer cans and bottles than I could count
• A baby stroller
• A variety of clothes
• A plastic banana
• A complete toilet, intact
• Several feet of rope
• A complete car bumper
• A couch
• A diaper (used)
• A large headboard
• Rear view mirrors
• A tire, with rim, still fully inflated- not a spare tire, but a normal full sized tire
• Shoes, both men’s and women’s
• Various parts of bikes
• A large (carnival sized) stuffed dog
• A broken cell phone
• A dog collar
• And much, much more generic garbage

Note that each and every one of these was not just something that was on top of a snow bank, or tossed on top lately, but every single one of them was buried in the snow to the point that you couldn’t see them at all a few days ago, and still had some snow of it covering part of it when I saw it.  Yes, even the couch, car bumper, tire – all of it.  I’ve walked past many of these over the past several weeks and months and had no idea they were there.

A lot of these are a little fascinating just for how they got there.  Who tossed a used diaper in a snow bank?  How has a whole couch been hiding under a snow bank all winter.  Who lost a shoe when there was already snow on the ground, but apparently continued without it?  Where did the clothes (underwear included, though never a whole outfit in one pile or in a trail, usually just one piece in a place) come from?

Each of these is interesting, and the randomness is sort of amazing, and I’m sure I’ll see more in the coming days are we get rid of the last of snow we have now (I’m sure we’ll still get more – I don’t trust we’re done with snow here until it hits 90 the first time).

So, my idea for this one is I think someone should gather up all of the stuff that has melted out of the snow along one street, or in more dense neighborhoods even a single block, and make sculptures out of it.

It would be interesting to see what you could structurally assemble out of all of it, and to see what different types of stuff you find in each neighborhood.  It seems like there’s lots of modern art that is made out of found objects and discarded items, but I think this would have a sort of cool local flair to it.  Especially if you played up the hidden vs seen, and clean and pure snow vs what it’s hiding aspects.

You could also just gather up everything from one block, and instead of making a structure or sculpture out of it, just lay it out in a compulsively neat grid of items, to contrast with the random, strewn about nature of where you found it.

Of course, you would definitely want to wear some thick gloves for this one.  And you might pass up the diaper.

With the snow on Monday, I would say our winter total is already getting pretty close to:

Two feet of snow

Via Make

From what I can tell, the sculpture was made by G. Augustine Lynas, who has a bunch of other really cool sculptures, though unfortunately most of the pictures of them are really small and you can’t click them for bigger versions.

Maybe when the feet above grow up, they can warm up in a giant Red Wing Boots – though Red Wing will have to start working on making one for the other foot too.

You may have heard we had a bit of snow here in Minneapolis.  Enough, in fact, to collapse the Metrodome (pretty cool video there).  So, what does any sane person do when there’s 16 or 17 inches of snow on the ground, 20-30 mile an hour winds, and bitter cold?  Go for a walk and take some pictures of course!

Pretty average car in a parking lot

If nothing else, it's sort of a cool shape for a hatch back. Unfortunately the car underneath was a sedan.

Street parking wasn't much better.

This is on Hennepin, and was about as good as any road looked.

You can see the plume of snow blowing straight sideways off of this roof - it was pretty much constant like that. If you look at the edge of the roof, there's an overhang of snow that's built up from the wind.

This is someone cross country skiing on Hennepin - on the road. There were a few people doing this, and a few bikes as well. Also note the complete lack of moving cars. There was one stuck about every two blocks on just about every street though.

I just thought this was really pretty.

And if you happened to be watching the Weather Channel at about 6pm Saturday, while they were talking to their correspondent in Minneapolis, you can see me walking in the background.  That settles it, I’m famous.

Also, while I was walking home, I was helping push a car that had gotten stuck in an intersection, the third one in five blocks.  As it got some traction and started moving my feet went out from under me and I slammed down on my knee.  I got up, brushed myself off, and kept going.  Then I heard someone from behind me yelling in a very Nelson from the Simpsons manner, “Haha, wipeout!  Hey Wipeout!  Hey WIPEOUT!! hahaha”.  Ah, Minnesota, always someone there to kick you while you’re down.

So, once I got back to my place and finally warmed up, my knee started hurting, a lot.  And it had one big spot where I had hit it on the pavement that was starting to bruise and swell a lot.  So, as a final indignity, I had to pack it in ice for a while.

While I was laying there, I heard a plow going through the alley to make a first pass at clearing it out.  When I looked out, it was actually one of those giant end loaders – the kind where the cab is about five or six feet in the air and has three foot tall tires and you sort of wonder how it fits under the phone and power lines.  In the course of trying to plow through our alley, or the part of it I could see, it got stuck and had to back up and make a running start to keep going.  Six times.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to go limp out into the sub-zero wind chills and start digging my car out of the piles of snow the end loader and the wind left, so I can hope to actually have it out by time I have to go to work on Monday.  My car, unfortunately, does not have three foot tall tires.

Could someone remind me why I live here?

Anyone?

Anyone at all?

In case you were planning to go to Tuba Christmas this year in the Twin Cities, it has been postponed due to the snow.  It will be held next Sunday – December 19th, with the concert at 5pm in the same place.  Full details from the organizer are below:

Due to the 17+ inches of snow from which we are all digging out, the TUBACHRISTMAS concert is postponed to Next Sunday, Dec. 19. with registration at 3:00, rehearsal at 3:30 and concert at 5:00. Note time changes are an hour later then previous. Location, the same is, Central Presbyterian Church.
See below for details.

TUBACHRISTMAS 2010

The 23rd Annual MINNESOTA TUBACHRISTMAS Concert will be Sunday,

December 19, 5:00 p.m. at Central Presbyterian Church, 500 Cedar St., St. Paul.

This year’s concert will be a memorial for TubaChristmas founder Harvey Phillips who died Oct. 20.

Audience Admission Free.

Free parking (see directions)

For directions and parking info see:

www.cpcstpaul.org/directions.html

To Play the Concert:

If you play Tuba, Sousaphone, Euphonium or Baritone you are invited to play.

All ages welcome. There will be over 100 players. (Players age range from 10 to 80+)

Registration:   3:00

Rehearsal:   3:30

Concert:   5:00

Registration fee is $5

Music book $18

Hats & Scarves available $15 each.

Head bands $10 each

Decorate your instruments.

Bring a music stand if needed.

Kind of cool old-school snowmobile / tractor thingy:

Via Make

If you get bored, since it is a little slow paced, at least skip ahead to abut 7:25 to see the corkscrew things mounted under a car.  Somehow I imagine modern cars are a little less hacker friendly.  Also, at 9:20 or so, it shows it can run on dirt as well.

After watching that, I started to wonder why I’ve never seen anything like before.  It seems like it would be perfect for military use.  So, I looked around a bit and, low and behold, the Russians tried it out:

And, at least one modern company, Tyco, has picked up the technology (their version also goes on water):

Three pretty distinct takes on the same technology.

I eventually found a wikipedia article on the concept, and it sounds like the concept has been toyed with for a long time, but it’s not very good/fast on plain old dry land, so it doesn’t get used a lot.

What happens when you take the general creepy scariness of quicksand and freeze it to add the threat of hypothermia in with drowning?  Frazil Ice.  The video below shows more about it, but basically it’s a giant natural Slurpee that you can fall into, which forms in Yosemite National Park in the spring.  Sort of fascinating in its own right, but mostly I think the giant 1,430 foot tall natural snow cone machine at 4:20 is awesome, especially with the rainbow at 5:16.  The time lapse at 6:20 really makes the point of how volatile the stuff is too.

(Via Boing Boing)

There’s 8 other videos so far on Yosemite’s youtube channel.  I watched a couple of the others, and though not quite as weird and fascinating, they all definitely qualify as gorgeous and at least somewhat informative.  Unfortunately, I haven’t been able to find channels for any of the rest of the national parks.  If you look around on the National Park Service website, there’s some more videos out there, but they’re a little hard to find and really spread out from what I can tell.

In other news, did you know there’s a National Recreation Area in California called Whiskeytown?  There is.

That settles it, I need to go visit more of the National Parks.