Wisconsin Has So Much Cheese They're Using it to De-Ice the Roads

If you're planning on making a winter trip out to visit to The House on the Rock or just about anything else Wisconsin has to offer, don't be surprised if you catch a faint whiff of cheese on the highway... the roads will be covered in it.

If Wisconsin is known for anything, it's cheese. The residents proudly display their love of the dairy product on license plates, in their laws, and even on their heads.. now, thanks to a pilot program launched this month, the state will start using it on their roads. Turns out, cheese doesn't make a half bad de-icer.

"You want to use provolone or mozzarella," Jeffrey A. Tews, the fleet operations manager for the public works department, told the New York Times. "Those have the best salt content. You have to do practically nothing to it."

The use of cheese brine in keeping the roads safe is actually a few years old. In an effort to cut costs and find better alternatives to traditional road salt, a few small counties in the Midwest have been testing the use of cheese, and so far it's been a hit. One dairy company, F & A Dairy Products, donates most of its excess liquids to the local government. F&A saves over $20,000 in hauling and disposal costs in the deal, and it turns out that Polk County saves over $40,000 in rock salt costs. That's a lot of cheddar.

This isn't the first time that transportation departments have dabbled in strange alternatives to traditional salt. Sugar beet juice proved to be a bit too sticky, and discarded brewery grain just didn't have enough grip. Will cheese have a downside? That's yet to be seen, but officials have their eyes.. and most importantly, their noses, glued to the project.

Thanks to Huffington Post for the above story.

And, of course, that calls for a sign from the gods:

More of a cat guy myself, but ...

Tipped by Sean at Just a Jeep Guy.

What this is all about

Nothing really. I am just a guy who seems to have to use a keyboard to think.

Sad, really.

But neither here nor there.

My job requires me to keep up with trending queerness, which is to say, things that are out there that are ... well, out there. Like one of my heroes, Sheldon Lee Cooper, B.S., M.S., M.A., Ph.D., Sc.D., I find it hard to imagine that people will not be as fascinated as I am by the things that I find fascinating. Must be the Vulcan in us.

So I will post things here that fascinate me. Fair warning: All manner of thing do fascinate the Damien. Everything from cryptids to Log Cabin Republicans, from Discordians to Plymouth Brethren, from hot guys to cool quotes.

Feel free to drop by and dip your toe in the pool of weirdness in Damien's queer world.

Oh, yeah. Philip Peabody Horton Univeristy, the place where I teach? Quite the place, one might say it even exists on another plane from other institutions of higher learning. I will have things to say about PPHU, its staff and students from time to time as well. Should you recognize any of the names, please don't let them know I am blogging about them. My partner's a lawyer, but he doesn't want to be hassled by libel lawsuits ...

'Mkay?

Let me introduce myself ...

I am Damien Malachy, Damien F. Malachy, Professor of Queer Studies at Philip Peabody Horton University in Barona, Illinois, an oddball school in an obscure suburb not too far from the so-called Windy City. More on PPHU later. For now, it is enough for you to know that it was founded with an endowment from a nineteenth-century loner to cater to the academic needs of people like him: young men and women who did not fit in well with their social group. With any social group, for that matter.  The main selling point of PPHU is that all students attend free  of charge, but they gain admission only after being rejected by more usual institutions of higher learning and after convincing the Admission Board with its stringent AntiSocial Certification Process that they belong, if such can be said, at Philip Peabody Horton.

Everything at PPHU, as one would imagine, is odd. That includes my own department of Queer Studies. I realize that the name sounds pretty trendy, yet another of those programs that have proliferated across the American college scene with a focus on some narrowly defined minority and its literature and customs. Queer Studies, sometimes more politically correctly called Sexual Diversity Studies, normally – normally? – deals with issues relating to the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, transsexual, bicurious etc. community, LGBT for short. Or LGBTX for those who want to be as inclusive as possible. I am not opposed to such studies, being GQ myself. And by GQ I mean gay/queer, not Gentlemen’s Quarterly, the men's fashion magazine that has lately been in the news because of an interview with a gentleman who makes duck calls and thinks little of the whole LGBTX crowd. But LGBTX studies are not the purview at PPHU.

Our Queer Studies focus on queer things in the good, old-fashioned sense of queer: unusual, unexpected, eccentric, odd. That may at times overlap things like sexual diversity, but the areas of study are not co-extensive. I suspect some of my LGBTX academic colleagues would insist that they may be queer in the sexual-diversity sense but not in the old-fashioned sense. I confess to being both.

Whatever. Live and let live; may all beings be happy; an it harm none, do what you will, and all that. Certainly the campus culture at PPHU is about as live-and-let-live as it can be.

Daniel Watson, my partner, is a lawyer. He used to work for some powerhouse Chicago firm with its fingers tickling the ivories of justice all over the world. Or maybe just shaking the money out of it’s wealthy clients. Except Daniel mainly tickled real estate transactions. Not simple domestic residences, mind you. More things like entire railroads or mining operations. At any  rate, tiring of the excitement, he retired from that a few years back and now donates his time, expertise and energy to Lambda Legal. We met through mutual friends after he had retired, and we have been together now for nine years. I guess you would say we are engaged, now that marriage equality has come to the Land of Lincoln.

That's seems like enough for now. More about what I hope to do with this blog anon.