Tuesday, February 25, 2003
Salt Gnomes |8:00 AM| This morning, my car was a solid block of ice. Angry, Texas ice.
A few of my neighbors were desperately trying to scrape the ice off of their various vehicles with anything they could. Credit cards, remote controls, former pets-turned-doorstops.
I, armed with a putty knife and an extra big can of salt managed to de-ice my car in under 10 minutes. The moment I threw that first handfull of salt onto the windshield, the dramatic ice cracking noises began. I find it amusing that while my neighborts were straining and yelling at their cars, they could look up and see me, dancing around throwing magic ice melting pixie dust upon my car.

Now, I have a few theories as to why salt melts ice, but the following one seems most reasonable.

My current, best theory is that salt is actually composed of hundreds of tiny gnome prison cells.


Normally, these gnomes attack your tongue and stomach, giving salted food that sharp bite.


But, when used on ice, these tiny axe wielding gnomes break up the ice, until they drown. That's why you get the white smear on your windows after the roads are salted. Gnomes bleed, and they bleed white.

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We need one created for the years, and then the months. The months are the /////tricky ones, since they need their ID to increase more than the years, but since the functions keep referencing ///// the same name system, we have to be careful not to make the years close up when we click on a month. ///Set some Variables $YearMenuID = 1; /////What ID the preceding year link controls. Needs to be same for all the months under a given year. $MonthMenuID= 1; ////What ID the preceding month link controls. Needs to be the same for all the weeks under a given ////Month but not the same as any year, etc. $LastYearUsed = 0; $LastMonthUsed = 0; echo '

'; /////That should be the "Year" div. All the years should be in this one DIV. ///Start the main loop. foreach ($myDateArray as $key => $value) { ////Pulling the year/date. $month = ExtractMonth($value); $year = ExtractYear($value); $YearMenuID = $year; $MonthMenuID = $month; $PrettyMonth = $MyDateArray[$month]; ////Is this a new year? If ($year != $LastYearUsed) ///Then we need to put the year down. No DIV created quite yet. { ///First off, we need to close the preceding year's DIV. Twice if it ain't 2001 if ($year != 2001) { echo '

'; } echo '

$myDateArray[$key]

_HTML2_; ///That creates a DIV for the year (month based links) then the month (week based links). ////Then the first weekly link. ///That should have made a link to the weekly archive file. ///As well as creating the first month link, which is in its own DIV, } Else { ///Okay, it's not a new year. So, we need to check if it's a new month. If($month != $LastMonthUsed) { //So it's a new month. That means we need to put down a link for the month to control the div //that contains the weekly links. //First, though, we need to close up the previous month echo '

$myDateArray[$key]

_HTML3_; } Else /////////So it's not a new month, then we just need to put down the weekly link. { echo '

' . $myDateArray[$key] . '

'; } } $LastMonthUsed = $month; $LastYearUsed = $year; } ECHO '