Everyone loves to see the ice cream truck coming down the street! And in their heyday they were designed to be pleasant -even if they are only pleasant memories. Dark Roasted Blend has a collection of spiffy ice cream trucks (and ice cream bicycles) for your perusal. Link

(Image credit: Mr. Whippy)

Yep, that’s a long truck! According to commenters, this kind of transport is used to haul sugar cane in Brazil. Normally they only travel from farm to farm, and it is unusual to see one on a highway. -via the Presurfer

A truck full of commercial ink crashed on an I-95 ramp in the Boston area yesterday, spilling the very expensive ink all over the highway. No one was injured in the wreck.

The ink reached two storm drains, but it is not considered a hazardous material. An environmental cleanup company has been summoned to the scene and a “careful cleanup” will be conducted under the supervision of state environmental officials, State Police spokesman David Procopio said in a statement.

Several hundred gallons of ink splattered onto the highway, said Joe Ferson, a spokesman for the Massachusetts Department of Environmental Protection.

Approximately 16,000 pounds of ink cartridges from the Flint Group, an Indianapolis-based company selling printing and packaging products, was bound for a newspaper company in Portland, Maine. Red, blue, and yellow ink cartridges were inside the truck, but Ferson said there is no evidence the yellow ink was released.

Although the spilled ink is not considered hazardous, the ramp was closed for hours for cleanup. Link -via reddit

While some cities are buried under snow, a road in Cambridgeshire only looked that way as it was covered in duck feathers. A truck carrying the feathers caught fire and spilled its load on the A14.

A ruptured diesel tank caused the fire in the lorry, which was carrying the duck feathers on the A14 near Hemingford Grey.

The westbound carriageway of the road was shut after being covered in the white feathers and a rolling roadblock was in place eastbound.

Diversions are in place but motorists are advised to avoid the area.

The truck was destroyed, and the feathers went everywhere. Link (with video) -via Arbroath

James. J. Johnson said the dogs make him lose control of his vehicle. But Webster police officers determined there were no dogs, police said.

Officers also determined Johnson had been drinking, police said. Johnson was charged with operating under the influence of alcohol, marked lanes violation, negligent operation of a motor vehicle and destruction of property.

One has to wonder what exactly made the police think that Johnson may have been drinking. Link -via Arbroath

This video is from the scene of a highway accident in Chile three weeks ago. A recovery crew managed to flip the overturned tractor trailer back upright, but didn’t think about what would happen to the truck afterward.

via reddit

In the 1990s, Seikh Hamad bin Hamdan Al Nahyan of the United Arab Emirates decided to build a giant pickup truck. The result was a truck modeled on the 1950s era Dodge Power Wagon (apparently an iconic vehicle in his country) precisely 64 times larger than the original. It contains a full suite of rooms and can actually drive. The video clip above is from Jeremy Clarkson’s BBC documentary series Motorworld.

Link via Ace of Spades HQ

Twenty-five years ago, Kris Marshall of Iowa draped a strand of Christmas lights across his pickup truck. Now, eight incarnations later, the Christmas Truck has 3,000 lights. Matt Hardigree writes for Jalopnik:

It’s amazingly nontechnical, it’s literally just lights taped to a truck. According to Marshall “It’s not very scientific, it’s a hideous site in the daylight, there’s black tape and wires in the daytime.” But at night it’s amazing. Marshall has used eight trucks and added dozens of strand since, though it’s always a 2WD Chevy/GMC with a regular cab and eight-foot truck bed “the way a truck ought to look.”

By his own estimate there are 50-to-70 strings with a mixture of 50 and 100 lights each, making a conservative estimate of 3,000 lights. There are no LEDs, just the cheap $0.89 strings, though he’d like to add some to take pressure off the taxed generator

Link via Instapundit | Photo: Jalopnik

Photo: John Masterson

The Frictionator is a Ford F650 pickup truck equipped with a 7,000 hp GE J85 jet engine. Joe Arnold’s monster truck is capable of reaching speeds up to 200 mph and is street legal (so as long as you don’t use the jet engine).

Official Website via GearFuse | Video

Mark Muller, owner of Max Motors, is upgrading an earlier sales gimmick in which he offered new truck buyers to choose between a $250 gas voucher or a gun voucher. The website says the dealer is giving away guns again "due to popular demand."

"Muller calls the initial deal an overwhelming success," Business Insider reports. "He also says it generates a lot of publicity and really angers ‘liberals.’"

Link | Max Motors’ website

Witness Lu Wi said: ‘We heard an amazing bang and went out to see what was happening.

‘We saw a lorry hanging over the bridge, and a man in his 40s struggling to climb out.

‘When he got out the driver said he was lucky he had his seat belt on or he’d have fallen straight out of his open window.’

Link -via Digg

Amazing CCTV footage of a Turkish man who narrowly escapes a collision with a truck and a train.

File under "Lucky".

From the Upcoming ueue, submitted by stinkyplum.

Link – via bannedinhollywood

From the Upcoming ueue, submitted by dcapps.

Joe and Frank chat often on the road. Joe complains about the traffic; Frank quacks. And driver and duck go about their business delivering construction materials throughout the Twin Cities for Elite Transportation Systems.

“Pretty good looking site we helped build there,” Joe says proudly to Frank as they descend into the Mississippi River valley with a load of steel for the new I-35W bridge. “We did a good job Frankie.”

To many of the construction workers he encounters in his deliveries, Joe is now known as the “duck man.”

The title suits him just fine.

“I go to these construction sites and you always see everybody smile when they see him,” Joe says.

Link to story. Link to video.

Japan may have some strange pimped out semis (blogged on Neatorama here), but they certainly don’t have the monopoly on vehicle art. Behold the creative truck art of Pakistan:

Even though truck art isn’t unique to Pakistan anymore, nowhere else in the world is the practice so pervasive. In a country where the per capita income is barely north of $2,000, it is surprising to see fleet owners (the trucks aren’t owner-operated) spend $3,000-$5,000 per truck for structural modifications that convert these gas-guzzling, smoke-spewing, road-dominating monstrosities into beautiful moving canvases covered in poetry, folk tales, and ‘…religious, sentimental and emotional worldviews of the individuals employed in the truck industry,’ making it one of the biggest forms of representational art in the country.

Link