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Sometimes, the best solutions lie in older technologies. Jalopnik has a video by Joel Appleman of a tractor trailer stuck in a snow drift in central Pennsylvania. A friendly Amish man hauled the truck out with his team of horses.
Remember the post about the rollerblading Amish? Well, this is what they do for winter sports: Horse-and-buggy skiing.
Viral Footage has the video clip: Link
What? The Amish are into rollerblading? It’s news to me, but here’s a 1996 New York Times article attesting to this cultural quirk:
”It’s faster than a horse, and it’s fun,” said Mr. Herschberger, 20, who skates the 25 miles in two hours, almost twice as fast as an Amish buggy. ”You just feel free.”
Mr. Herschberger has abundant company on the roads of southeastern Pennsylvania. In the last few years, hundreds of Amish, most of them young, have taken up in-line skating to run errands, play hockey or just zigzag for pleasure.
Among the 150,000 or so Old Order Amish, who live in 230 settlements in 22 states and Canada, in-line skating is justified as an efficient, sensible means of locomotion, another example of how the modern can square with the traditional.
Article Link and Pictures via Ace of Spades HQ | Photo: Visboo
In this short daily blotter post, CBS News’ Crimesider posted about an Amish teen who led police on a mile-long horse and buggy chase:
Deputies said they spotted Detweiler ignoring the stop sign last week. According to police, the teen then led them on a chase that ended when he lost control on a sharp turn into a driveway and overturned the buggy into a ditch. He then fled on foot.
Two other Amish men later helped the deputies free the horse and pull the buggy from the ditch.
No word on whether the horse was a white Bronco.
I learned three interesting nuggets of knowledge:
1) Running a stop sign when on a horse and buggy is a crime
2) Crime blotter bloggers have quite a bit of fun writing their posts
3) You can be charged with "overdriving" and animal
Link (Photo: unrelated, Amish horse and buggy via Wikipedia)
Thanks to high birth rates and few people exiting the sect, the Amish population in the United States is surging:
The Amish population — a religious group that limits its member’s access to conveniences like telephones and electric lights — is growing at an estimated 5% a year and now stands at 249,500.
A new Amish settlement is being created at a rate of once every three weeks, the study found. Sixteen were established over the past year alone.
Researchers estimate that 85% of people who are raised Amish stay in the group as adults.
Link via Marginal Revolution | Photo by Flickr user Alotor used under Creative Commons license
The Amish are often portrayed as anti-technology Luddites, but in fact they often accept non-electrical forms of technology, as long as they can remain "off the grid" and independent.
The photo shows a home-crafted gas-powered ice cutter used to harvest lake ice for non-electric iceboxes.
The diesel engine burns fuel to drive the compressor that fills the reservoir with pressure. From the tank a series of high-pressure pipes snake off toward every corner of the factory. A hard rubber flexible hose connects each tool to a pipe. The entire shop runs on compressed air. Every piece of machine is running on pneumatic power. Amos even shows me a pneumatic switch, which you can flick like a light switch, to turn on some paint-drying fans.
The Amish call this pneumatic system “Amish electricity.”
From the Upcoming 
ueue, submitted by Minnesotastan.
