Every day, someone on TV, radio, or the Web gives you collated data from thermographs, aneroid barometers, psychrometers, anemometers, radiosondes, and Doppler radar: These weather instruments provide the stuff of forecasts. You might never have a reason to use one of them personally, but you definitely reap the benefit of their use during stormy weather.
There is one weather instrument that everyone knows how to use: The umbrella. Oh! It’s true. You might sit on one, leave it in the corner of a restaurant, or get it caught in a big wind, but those are mistakes and accidents. You know how to use an umbrella. You know to hold its shaft perpendicularly to ground in a drizzle and to hold it at an angle parallel to a driving wind. You know that it protects your head and shoulders, but that it never keeps your shoes dry. You know how to share it to maximize dryness for two. Yes, you are an umbrella specialist. Someone should pay you.
Sharing an umbrella is a noble venture. You know that each of you will have one wet and one dry shoulder. That’s the usual diameter of coverage for most umbrellas. You could, of course, carry a beach or patio umbrella around with you, but that would invite more people to seek partial shelter on the perimeter and make walking difficult. Look at that multi-legged creature moving through the puddles! Aliens from another planet! We’re being attacked!
As an umbrella specialist, you know that the tips of umbrella ribs can poke out an eye of a passerby, so you carry one of moderate size and move it vertically up or down to avoid blinding others on the sidewalk. There seems to be an umbrella protocol. All these strangers passing in deference to one another. No one poking out another’s eye. No one carrying an umbrella at a single height. Umbrella tops form not white caps on the sea, but “black caps” in waves about 6 to 8 feet above the sidewalk.
The random black cap waves are a model for cooperative humanity. The rain pelts all and is beyond our control. Each of us is going to get a little wet beneath our umbrellas, particularly as we move along under the umbrella wave. For some reason, the rain seems to bring out the humanity in us. Is it because it is beyond our control and that as a species we are like schools of fish, forming a mass of individuals that sacrifices to save?
There is one weather instrument that everyone knows how to use: The umbrella. Oh! It’s true. You might sit on one, leave it in the corner of a restaurant, or get it caught in a big wind, but those are mistakes and accidents. You know how to use an umbrella. You know to hold its shaft perpendicularly to ground in a drizzle and to hold it at an angle parallel to a driving wind. You know that it protects your head and shoulders, but that it never keeps your shoes dry. You know how to share it to maximize dryness for two. Yes, you are an umbrella specialist. Someone should pay you.
Sharing an umbrella is a noble venture. You know that each of you will have one wet and one dry shoulder. That’s the usual diameter of coverage for most umbrellas. You could, of course, carry a beach or patio umbrella around with you, but that would invite more people to seek partial shelter on the perimeter and make walking difficult. Look at that multi-legged creature moving through the puddles! Aliens from another planet! We’re being attacked!
As an umbrella specialist, you know that the tips of umbrella ribs can poke out an eye of a passerby, so you carry one of moderate size and move it vertically up or down to avoid blinding others on the sidewalk. There seems to be an umbrella protocol. All these strangers passing in deference to one another. No one poking out another’s eye. No one carrying an umbrella at a single height. Umbrella tops form not white caps on the sea, but “black caps” in waves about 6 to 8 feet above the sidewalk.
The random black cap waves are a model for cooperative humanity. The rain pelts all and is beyond our control. Each of us is going to get a little wet beneath our umbrellas, particularly as we move along under the umbrella wave. For some reason, the rain seems to bring out the humanity in us. Is it because it is beyond our control and that as a species we are like schools of fish, forming a mass of individuals that sacrifices to save?
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