This reminds me, in a way, of sailing stones [1]. Although they happen in quite different environments (snowy areas for rollers, deserts for stones), they both are an inanimate thing clearly moving around without human or animal help in non-obvious ways.
For convenience, here's the Wikipedia link for snow rollers [2].
And we wonder why people once believed in faeries. If I woke up one morning to see these in my front yard, elf magic would be a pretty reasonable option. If I saw them rolling on their own I might decide to go back inside for fear of crossing paths with an angry leprechaun.
Side note: as a non-American, it's hilarious (and sometimes slightly irritating) to read place names in the <City>,<Country> format usually used by Americans (albeit in <City>,<State>).
Firstly, pretty much everybody I know is aware that Marlborough is a city in the UK. There's even a famous historical figure, the Duke of Marlborough, associated with the place.
Secondly it kind of indicates that at some level the writer believes that US states and foreign countries are similar organisational units, when actually countries have greater independence and sovereignty than do US states.
It's certainly illustrative and useful for a wider audience, but... I dunno... it still feels... a bit wrong.
(And yeah, there's probably a Marlborough somewhere in the US so American citizens might get confused, but that's kind of the point too... like when I say “I'm from Milan” and I get “oh, Milan, Texas?” back as a reply. “No ma’am, Milan, Italy.”)
I'm from the UK. My home address is in Bangor, Northern Ireland. Almost every employer (in the UK) I've interviewed at initially thought I was Welsh.
If I say "I'm from Bangor" to an American and they assume I'm American, which one of these would they think I'm referring to?[0] There are two separate Bangor Townships in Michigan alone.
It makes total sense to refer to the country and city/town when you are addressing an international audience.
Yes, you are correct. I apologise to you too. I was a bit testy this morning and I came off a more ill-tempered and quarrelsome person than I had intended, and it is entirely my fault.
When I see Bangor, I think of Bangor, Maine! Their police department's Facebook page has a huge following for being really funny and wholesome, I follow it even though I've never been there. It's really cute.
Hello there. I am also British (and Italian, but I digress).
You are correct that it was useful, and I did not wish to detract from the utility of denoting where in the world Marlborough is. I merely took the opportunity to air one of my pet peeves about what could be, by some, in some sense, seen as the adoption of an inherently American norm.
I tend to get rankled by things like that first thing on a Monday morning. I really apologise if it came off more cantankerous than I intended.
Fair enough - I get rankled by encroaching Americanisms, too. Particularly when our son says "parking lot" or "sidewalk" after too many hours on YouTube.
> Yukimarimo were named by T. Kameda on JARE-36 in 1995. "Yuki" means snow in Japanese, and "marimo" is a ball-like growth of water algae which the yukimarimo resemble. [1]
> The plant was named marimo by the Japanese botanist Takiya Kawakami[b] in 1898. Mari is a bouncy play ball. Mo is a generic term for plants that grow in water. The native names in Ainu are torasampe (lake goblin) and tokarip (lake roller). [2]
Nice find! I thought I had done a blog post with the reference to "snow down" (the same phenomenon later named yukimarimo) in Paul Siple's account of the first South Pole winter over in 1957, but apparently wrote that up for something else... Perhaps a bit of wikipedia editing is on the menu for this weekend!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=5&v=_GOMYlGZobk
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=thswcC3Mz_8