Word: umbrellas
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...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...
...eccentric inventor was prevailed upon to create a device that pedestrians could carry in order to exact the most possible inconvenience to other people and threaten the most sensitive parts of the human body, it’s likely that the end result would look much like an umbrella. With its deadly metal spikes spreading around at eye-level from an enormously cumbersome circumference, the umbrella is perfectly designed for destruction. Part ninja shuriken, part medieval buckler, and part retiarius’s net, the umbrella is a deadly tool in the hands of the sidewalk bumbler...
...predominance of the umbrella on Harvard sidewalks is surely a sign of the tragedy of the commons. The good of the public realm has been subsumed under the convenience of the individual, and personal expedience has been allowed to trump the interests of the commonwealth. Vision obscured by the opaque nylon, the umbrella user becomes a lumbering cyclone of eye-gouging points. The Journal of the American Medical Association in 1978 published a paper on “orbitofacial wounds” caused by umbrella tips, warning that these injuries often go “unrecognized” and stressing...
...stage to try to justify their best live act win. The artists who did were many things - thrilling, confusing, off-key - but never boring. With help from Klaxons (whose wardrobe could only be described as futuristic Navajo) Rihanna performed a dark, brooding emo-dance version of her hit Umbrella. On the opposite end of the pop spectrum, Kylie's rendition of her latest single Wow was all bright and shiny, totally making up for the unfortunate Joan Rivers-esque hairstyle and a dress so slinky the only dancing she could manage was a side-to-side shoulder shrug. British Breakthrough...
...nary a clue, because young Nick had for a time devised a way to hide his trades from them. More than $1 billion in the hole, and with no hope of digging his way out, he skipped off to a Malaysia beach resort with his wife to sip umbrella drinks for a few days before their world caved in. A week later Britain's oldest merchant bank, which had helped finance the Napoleonic wars and the Louisiana Purchase, was done. Leeson was sentenced to 6 1/2 years - though he served just 4 1/2 - in a Singapore prison for fraud...