It appears Scotland has named all it’s road gritters some amusing names and you can track them here.
https://www.arcgis.com/apps/webappviewer/index.html?id=2de764a9303848ffb9a4cac0bd0b1aab
Some friends over there are trying to get selfies with them all, because , well I don’t know really.
I know most of those words, but I have no idea what they mean in this combination.
Googling, apparently a “road gritter” is a truck that spreads sand or salt on icy or snowy roads to improve traction or melt ice. I don’t think there is a similar term used in the US.
Well, your link shows a good number that aren’t named. I am amused by the named ones, like “William Wall-ice” and “Sled Zepplin”.
A salt spreader truck, basically a snow plough without the plough but sprays all the salt/sand /grit out the back end .
Trunk road is a major road in UK parlance
Gritter = salt spreader truck
Tracker, where to find them.
Gritterspotting. From the country that brought us trainspotting. Makes sense. 
Though to be fair, the US has trainspotters too, but we call them “railfans”. And it seems less obsessively connected to recording seeing each engine or wagon number. More about just watching trains coming & going.
And we have gritters, but call them salt trucks. Except in the far north they’re generally not dedicated vehicles but instead are typical dumptrucks the highway departments use year round for road pavement maintenance. To which they can attach plows and/or salt spreaders for use during snow events. Of course areas prone to heavy snow have a lot more specialized equipment than the places that face 3 or 4 snow events per year.
Most of England is snow-free for most of the year. Cash-strapped councils can ill afford to have dedicated snow ploughs standing around for 51 weeks a year, so they look for multi-purpose trucks.
A basic chassis cab that can be a tipper, Grit/salt spreader and general-purpose truck is expensive to buy but more economical in the long term.
James A. Cuthbertson Limited — Vehicle Bodies (jamescuthbertson.co.uk)
A little late on this, but that reminds me: fenugreek (the hard seed, not the leaves) is used as a/the flavoring in some maple syrup substitutes. (It’s hard to tell who uses it and who doesn’t as non-maple syrups just list “natural and artificial flavors” on their labels, but that’s the usual bit of trivia about fenugreek. Oh, the other is that it is used as an herbal supplement to increase breast milk production.)
Wiki suggests that’s ineffective and perhaps dangerous. Not that I have any knowledge either way.
I was researching some old music, and while listening to something called “Reminiscences of Ireland”, i immediately recognized the opening bars as The Music from The Man Who Would be King
My wife immediately recognized the tune as The Minstrel Boy, which I had never heard. It is, indeed, an Irish piece.
But it gets weirder. Apparently the lyrics to the song in The Man Who would be King are not the lyrics of The Minstrel Boy, but from another period song, The Son of God goes Forth to War by Reginald Heber (written in 1812). Kipling quoted the song in his original novella The Man Who Would be KIng (although even he altered the lyrics), so it makes sense that it’s in the film. Why Maurice Jarre changed the tune, though, I don’t know. Maybe he liked The Minstrel Boy better, or found it more stirring and dramatic.
That’s not the end of it. It turns out that The Minstrel Boy, written by Thomas Moore (1779-1852) actually took its melody from a traditional Irish Air The Mereen (AKA The Moreen , and other spellings)
Oh, I make no claims to its efficacy – that’s just what it is traditionally known for, other than the maple substitute thing. NIH has this article, which mentions mixed results:
The galactogogue effect of fenugreek may be primarily psychological in humans;[11] however, animal studies indicate that fenugreek might work primarily by increasing insulin and oxytocin secretion.[12] Evidence for a galactogogue effect is mostly anecdotal. A limited number of published studies of low to moderate quality have found mixed results for a galactogogue effect for fenugreek.[13-16] A meta-analysis of controlled studies found fenugreek to have a mild galactogogue effect and unknown safety profile.[13] Some evidence indicates that fenugreek might be more effective in the first few days pospartum than after 2 weeks postpartum.
As always, consult your doctor.
They do it in england too.
There’s a “Gritter Thunberg” near here as well !
Snow plow? Or do gritters not plow snow? Around here (upstate NY) the snow plows are, like LSLGuy said dump trucks, used year round for dump truck type things, with plows put on the front and salt/sand spreaders on the back in winter.
There’s rarely enough snow in England at least to be worth ploughing (there can be in some parts of Scotland)- ice is more the issue, so their main use is spreading grit. I think the gritters we use can be fitted with a ploughing attachment, but I’ve never actually seen one shifting snow (I’ve barely ever seen snow higher than my ankle), although gritters are a fairly regular sight in winter.
Two minute listen about Scottish gritters from just last December:
Buzz Iceclear, Grittany Spears & Gritty Gritty Bang Bang are hilarious.
Around here, in central Indiana, the salt-spreading part of a snowplow truck is called a salt bomber. In the summer, they’re dump trucks, but in the winter they sprout hydraulic plows and the dump beds are hoisted off and replaced with salt bombers.
The dump beds last a long time, but the salt eats the bombers in a few years.
I was expecting a Sir Gritty Mcgritface of Gritland to be there .
There are single-celled, multinucleate organisms in the Antarctic Ocean that can get to a foot across. They’re also predatory and even small ones can eat multicellular organisms far larger than themselves, and they do it while their prey is still alive.
They’re called foraminiferans, or forams for short. I find them a trifle terrifying.
In a vaguely related note these things
are an unholy alliance of ancient bacteria and sand forming a sorta-rock. Cool looking but very weird.
If you’ve never read about
they’re equally weird binary life forms, some kind of leftover from the Ancient Dayes of solid land, partly oxygenated atmospheres, and no longer-boiling oceans. They’ll probably still be here long after they kill us all.
Wind turbine blades are made of balsa wood. A supply bottleneck in Ecuador is forcing manufacturers to come up with alternatives.