14 DAY TRIAL // It might be that a snowflake's chances of surviving a trip to hell are slim to none, but odds are a whole lot of snowflakes, carefully arranged to form one wicked and seriously oversized snowball, can go on a trip to the other side and live to tell the tale.
If not, they can at least cause serious damage of whatever buildings they chance to cross paths with, as it recently happened in the state of Oregon in the US.
Media reports say that, just last week, a campus residence hall that is part of the Reed College in Portland suffered damage amounting to somewhere between $2,000 and $3,000 (roughly €1,460 - €€2,191) as a result of its having one very close encounter with an out-of-control snowball.
The snowball in question was the artwork of two math majors, who built it merely as a way to have some fun and make an otherwise ordinary Saturday night a tad more entertaining.
According to The Oregonian, the math majors took their self-assigned job of building an impressive snowball so seriously that, by 8 p.m. on said day, their block of snow already measured about 40 inches (almost 102 centimeters) in diameter.
What's more, the freakishly big snowball weighed some 800 to 900 pounds (roughly 363 to 408 kilograms), the same source details.
At this point, several other students started urging the two math majors to make the snowball even bigger by rolling it down a hill.
The latter were quick to oblige, but, unfortunately, failed to figure out that the snowball would grow a will of its own and start moving on an entirely different trajectory than the one its creators had chosen for it.
Long story short, the block of snow went haywire and ended up smashing into a dorm room. Luckily, nobody was injured.
Nobody except the wall that the snowball crashed into, that is. Thus, as already mentioned, the dorm room is said to have sustained damage amounting to thousands of dollars.
Besides, it appears that it took maintenance workers about three quarters of an hour to have the snowball removed.
Contrary to rumors that circulated across the campus while the snowball was still intact, the Doyle Owl, i.e. a totemic statue measuring about 3 feet (about 0.9 meters) in height, was not found inside the snow block's guts.