Newsgroup: it.arti.cinema
Titolo: Tumbleweed

Su richiesta di un'amica che deve preparare l'esame di semiotica, vi giro il
"dilemma":
Tumbleweed (le palle di rovi che rotolano...)
1) in che cosa consiste il loro richiamo al western? cioč, qual č l'elemento
che li rende figure tipiche di quel genere, che rimanda immediatamente ad
esso?
2)a suo tempo, mi avevano detto che sono una specie di pianta che quando č
messa in movimento dal vento, sparge i suoi semi, e che quindi senza
l'azione del vento non si riprodurrebbe. si riesce a sapere se č una
cazzata?
grazie in anticipo
Per i soldi ci accordiamo poi...
ciao
Valerio

 cazzata?
questo e' il riassuntino piu' esaustivo che ho trovato:  (conferma la storia
del vento, dice che sono native della Russia)
  Tumblin' tumbleweed
  By Susan Tweit
  Last updated on Wednesday, January 01, 2003
  The spring winds blew the other afternoon, hurling great clouds of soil
from newly-plowed fields into the air. Tumbleweeds bounced across roads and
open spaces like giant soccer balls. When my step-daughter, Molly, and I
rode our bikes across town the next morning, drifts of prickly tumbleweed
skeletons turned the sidewalks into a slalom course.
  A symbol of the West in movies and popular songs, tumbleweed is actually
not native here at all. As Russian-thistle, its other common name, suggests,
tumbleweed comes from Russia's arid shrub steppes, half a world away. After
hitching a ride to America in the 1870s with flax seed brought by Ukrainian
farmers, tumbleweed spread like wildfire across disturbed places in the
West, colonizing plowed prairies, overgrazed rangelands, road edges,
corrals, and the bare earth of abandoned farms. No wonder that one Hopi name
for tumbleweed is "white man's plant." By the time the Sons of the Pioneers
recorded "Tumbling Tumbleweeds" in 1934, this invader had come to symbolize
the rootless, restless Western culture.
  Tumbleweed is now ubiquitous throughout the West. When young, bright
green, and succulent, tumbleweed, a relative of spinach, attracts browsers
and grazers. Desert cottontails and small rodents nibble on its high-calorie
shoots, as do pronghorn antelope, bighorn sheep, domestic sheep, and cattle.
But this fast-growing annual quickly becomes inedible, forming a globular
mass of tough and prickly stems, as it grows up to six feet high, and
fifteen feet across.
  One way that botanists classify plants is to label them by the conditions
they prefer: for instance, plants adapted to saline soils are "salt-lovers";
others requiring the damp soils along streams are "water-lovers." Tumbleweed
is a "wind-lover." Tumbleweed's minute flowers, containing no nectar to
attract bees, wasps, hummingbirds, or other nectar-sipping pollinators,
depend on the wind, releasing clouds of tiny pollen grains to float on the
river of air. Because of its windborne pollen and its abundance, tumbleweed
is a major irritant to hay fever sufferers in the Southwest.
  Wind assists tumbleweed again when the seeds are ready to disseminate.
Tumbleweed's large, dry, ball-shaped skeleton sways with the tug of the
wind, until eventually the single stem snaps, freeing the plant to bound
across the arid soil. With each bounce, tumbleweed drops some of its
prodigious number of seeds - a single plant can produce up to 200,000
seeds - spreading its genes far and wide before piling up in the lee of a
building or snagging on a fence.
  Like them or not, tumbleweeds are a part of the modern West, a reminder of
our heedless tinkering with the balance of arid environments. As spring
winds propel tumbleweeds into the air to leap across the landscape and
scatter their progeny, I dream of the day when their seeds will have a hard
time sprouting in healthy deserts and grasslands.

 from newly-plowed fields into the air.
...
Grazie davvero.
Naturalmente la girerň cosě com'č alla mia amica (sperando non mi chieda
anche di tradurla...) ^____^
ciao
Valerio