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Lemmy Be Wholesome @lemmy.world

The Picard Maneuver @startrek.website

2d ago

What a great local tradition

37 comments

Small town in Minnesota did this with an old rusted up truck. It was attached to a giant cable and they winched it out of the lake after it fell through.

You going to Thawing Man this year?
- Last year's thaw was better.

I've got friends in the north near Kirkland Lake, Ontario and they do a similar annual fundraiser with a Volkswagon Beetle - they've been doing it for years with the same car. I think it's for fundraising for their local fire department.
Kenogami & District Volunteer Fire Brigade - Herbie Car Fundraiser
The car is cleaned up and cleared for environmental pollutants and then fished out every spring and repeated again the next winter. I always thought it was funny seeing that old yellow car on the ice.
- That's amazing! Herbie looks to be in decent shape for what he's been through.
  
  Well, compared to being cut in half with a laser, driving up a skyscraper, fuelled with Irish Coffee, stuffed full of bananas and Mayan treasure...
  
  Hes well away from all the salt on the roads, and gets an annual car wash + soak. Can't hurt.
  
  It was always a sight to see this time of year ... there's only one highway in this part of the province - Highway 11 - when you are driving north past Kenogami Lake (which is near Kirkland Lake) and you go over the bridge there, you can see this little yellow car on the ice.
  It's more or less a tradition for northerners now ... we expect to see Herbie on the ice when we are driving by in the late winter / early spring.

My parents lived in a small town called Yellowknife in Canada many years ago, before there was a highway there. Float planes would land on Great Slave Lake until it froze over, then skid planes. In the spring when the ice got thin, there was a pool collected by the first pilot who landed a float plane. They would come in and gently skim the ice to break it up before settling onto the water. Just occurred to me as I typed this, I never asked what happened if somebody tried it too soon and the ice wouldn't break. Unfortunately it's too late to ask now, my parents are both gone.
- You remember their old phone number?
  
  Not their last one but I remember the phone # we had when I was in high school and an earlier one, why?

Plot device in a Neil Gamen book IIRC Edit: the book was American Gods and it's Gaiman. Interesting read...
- It's a relief that this thought occurred to someone else as well.
  
  Same here. The bodies in the trunk, and the person who was responsible really stuck with me.
- Shame he did all that stuff that came out about him.
  Loved the book as well as the show.
  
  I try to separate the art from the artist. It reminds me a lot of the controversy surrounding Ryan Adams. What a brilliant songwriter.
- I absolutely loved this book.
  The show was not for me
  
  It captures that late 90s Americana vibe so well!! Probably my favorite book period
  
  Same. Couldn't get past the first episode
- I just read that a couple months ago and immediately thought of it too. And yes, like everyone else is saying, the show sucks.

Reminds me of this fun local tradition in Nederland, CO:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frozen_Dead_Guy_Days
https://frozendeadguydays.com/
- They’ve now (since 2023) moved it to Estes Park. Lame. Not sure how you can move a location-based tradition and act like it’s the same. It’s like when they change an actor in a series and expect everyone to pretend it’s the same character who now looks totally different.
  
  Yeah, that was sad :(
- I wasn’t expecting the twist at the end :(

Can I interest you in The Nenana Ice Classic?

Haha, what a dummy!

That's neat! We just have a sign on the river, and people guess when the ice will start moving. More precisely, when the sign will pass under the bridge. A dummy would definitely be more fun, but some teenagers would probably steal or break it... or someone would mistake it for someone drowning in the spring as it travels towards the sea. Maybe it's better to just stick to the sign.
- If I knew about a sign in the river as a teenager, I wouldn’t destroy it, but moving it upriver so it took longer to go under the bridge might have been fun.

I love little local things like this. Punxsatawney's Groundhog Day celebration is probably the most well-known, but anything where local people were just like "heh, that'd be fun, let's try it" is so cool to me.

Wait... If they give half the proceeds to the historical society, then the people who won are only getting their original money back. There are no winnings.
- I'm so sorry for you. ☹️ Your math teachers tried, I'm sure...
- 10 people buy tickets for $1 each. The total is $10. Winner gets $5, and the historical society gets $5.

37 comments