Word: rain
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With the arrival of February, rain has settled in for its months-long tyranny over Cambridge. In curbside puddles and swaths of viscous mud where grass once grew, it will assert its hegemony over our springtime world, aggravating harried pedestrians and turning landscapers’ jobs Sisyphean. The familiarity of the phenomenon makes it no less intolerable—ineluctable and universal, the spring rains dampen life in both senses of the term...
...Unequipped with wicking feathers or insulating fur, we humans have no choice but to turn to manufactures to keep us dry. But in doing so, we’ve developed a device whose idiocy and clumsiness outstrips any of the chilly miseries of rain: the umbrella. The scientist Robert Oppenheimer, on witnessing the destructive power of the atomic bomb he had a hand in inventing, uttered in shock, “I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.” One wonders whether Samuel Fox, creator of the modern steel-ribbed umbrella, said anything similar...
...average Cambridge sidewalk is infamous for its inability to comfortably accommodate two people walking abreast. Add a four-foot circle around each person and you have an impassable wall of nylon and steel. In the rain, stepping over the curb becomes an impossibility, and phalanxes of overstressed and rushed Harvard students clump up on sidewalks, knotted up by umbrellas. Cambridge’s Puritan planners simply didn’t have umbrellas in mind when they were laying out the cobblestones, but we insist on jamming the streets with them anyhow...
...Fortunately, the same engineering which brought us the umbrella also brought us something far more useful: the raincoat. For those unfamiliar with it, the raincoat wraps snugly around the wearer’s body, poses no threat to fellow pedestrians, and has the added advantage of thermal insulation. Driving rain poses no threat to the raincoat-clad pedestrian, while the umbrella user vainly struggles to position his or her weapon against the onslaught of the wind. And, if one wishes, the raincoat can be augmented by rain-pants and even gaiters to provide an unassailable guard from the weather?...
...Obama wave came to the Texas Capitol in Austin on Friday for a rally on the same spot near the Texas Capitol where George W. Bush followers huddled in a cold rain almost eight years ago for the longest election night on record. Some of Obama's most popular lines of the night bashed President Bush as the crowd - estimated variously at between 15,000 to 30,000 - listened rapturously for almost an hour. A jumbo screen broadcast his image down Congress Avenue, not far from the city's nightclub district, and one homemade sign read: "The Beginning Is Near...