Posted on 01/30/2014 11:27:22 AM PST by Kartographer
Clovis city officials say the whopping weeds are covering homes and blocking streets and residents are calling it the tumbleweed invasion of 2014.
“It looked like a herd of cows coming in,” said Clovis resident Lee Cassidy. “The tumbleweeds were just rolling in.”
After those tumbleweeds rolled in, they got stuck.
(Excerpt) Read more at krqe.com ...
***I had no raditor/fan/belt combination in front to get clogged or debris filled,
it would not have been so bad, but a low sportscar***
VW? Karmann Ghia?
Pretty good? A lot more than that I think! Curtis Gates, aka Ken Curtis, aka Festus Hagin was a professional singer before becoming an actor, he was lead singer for the Sons of the Pioneers and replaced Frank Sinatra as the vocalist for the Tommy Dorsey band when Sinatra left the job. Pretty impressive I would say. This https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-RQ-wRfhJT4is his performance of “Breathless” with Shep Fields, he looks nothing like Festus in this video. In fact I would say he was better looking than the average guy without a doubt. He may have been one of the most underrated and overlooked entertainers in history. The “Festus Hagin” character was one you either loved or hated, personally I always liked watching the episodes that put Festus out front but even if you hated the character you would have to say Curtis played the part to perfection.
Oh, the Rawhide theme song of course was done by the one and only Frankie Laine who only stopped performing in 2007 at the age of 93 and Eastwood played “Rowdy” Yates, not Yowdy.
I think goatheads were the reason green Slime for tires was invented. My kids’ bike tires were continually being punctured on the way to school.
Until now, I didn’t know what they were called.
In 1950s southern California, on our street that was a really a long steep hill, we made land-rafts out of wood with bolted on roller skates for wheels, collected dozens of tumbleweeds from the vacant acres above our subdivision, tied them in bunches of a dozen or so and used them as “sails” to catch the Santa Anna winds and drag our land rafts down the street. It was as good as our snow sleds on the hills were in the winter when we lived “back east” in earlier years. Later, more subdivisions and other developments ended nearly all the open land and the tumbleweeds were eventually all gone; like the orange groves that went away almost as fast.
Supposedly, ground zero was Odessa Texas. That was the main camp for the Russian laborers building the railroad, who named the camp Odessa and it became the town/city, just west of Midland, which is called Midland because it is midway between Dallas and El Paso.
VW almost. It was a first year Porsche 914 before they ruined them. They started out 30% Porsche / 70% VW but by ‘73 they were almost all VW. With 4.6” of ground clearance it was like you were sitting 7” above the asphalt, but boy would they corner, track and brake. You could snake through traffic with the most precision of anything I have ever had — not a lot of power but they only weighed about 1990 lbs as I recall.
In the late 50s and early 60s, we would wear those flipflops with the thick rubber soles. At the end of the day, we would have to scrape the goatheads off, as they covered the entire bottoms of the flipflops.
Frequently, some of the broken off ‘needles’ would work their way through the rubber and still stick the bottom of the feet.
Those were the days.
Russian thistle.
Imported on the hoves of cattle.
There might be something in the name
“Clovis.” Clovis California has lots of them too.
Just don’t get the bright idea to set them on fire....
Some of them are eight feet in diameter.
Goatheads can ruin a tire.
That is some weird stuff.
There is an 8' chain link fence around the property where I work, and any time the wind blows the SE corner of the yard fills up with them, about like that yard in the photo.
I like hitting them on the highway at full speed, they sort of explode.
Yeah, but it keeps us on our toes.
I had a ‘75 with dual Weber carbs and a bunch of other stuff. Drove like a go kart. Ate money though.
Today I have a Honda S2000... a lot faster, sticks as well, and will probably go 200K just on oil changes.
My cousin went to NM Tech in the 80’s and her prime source of entertainment was to drive to ABQ on 25 with the cruise control set to 80 and hit as many tumbleweeds as possible on the way.
You should ping the prepper’s list, too. This crap is NM’s equivalent to deep snow.
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