Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: THURSDAY, April 22, 1993 TAG: 9304210268
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Joel Achenbach
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
A: No meteorological phenomenon is so loved and hated as rain. Sometimes you have a Gene Kelly reaction - you're swinging from lamp posts, splashing in puddles, shouting "I'm happy again!" But other times the rain is oppressive, shrouding your soul in a dark cloud, a cloud that follows you indoors and continues to drizzle.
You may find this hard to believe, but there's a scientific equation that measures how much the rain annoys you. So we're told by Michael Persinger, a professor of neuroscience at Laurentian University in Ontario. When we asked him if he had any thoughts on how rain affects us, he said, "I have more than thoughts, I also have data."
His research shows that, as you'd expect, the duration of a given bout of inclement weather (rain, heat, snow, whatever) and the frequency of such events are the two main factors in determining our annoyance level. But it's not a linear progression. Rather, he takes the square of the frequency and divides it by the duration and comes up with a number that reveals the point at which we become totally annoyed.
For example, let's say it rains every day, for half a day (12 hours). Persinger calculates that as 1 squared (1) divided by .5, which equals 2. So he says we can handle 2 days of such weather before we get really ticked off. But if it rains every other day for half a day, that's 2 squared (4) divided by .5, which is 8. So we can stand that for 8 days before bitterness prevails.
Let's interject right here that this stuff seems a bit digitalized for a world that's still operating in analog.
Biometeorologists don't just talk about simple things like "rain." Rather, they look at the entire "air mass." That includes humidity, barometric pressure, temperature and so forth. Persinger notes that when air pressure falls and humidity rises, people tend to retain more water, and this causes a more sluggish personality, what the 'sperts call a "flat affect" and what the rest of us know as "the blahs."
What about the times when rain is romantic?
The kind of rain that people really love is associated with thunderstorms. The lightning puts ozone in the air, and ozone, in modest (sub-Los Angeles) quantities, has been shown to be a euphoriant. Negative ions in the air alter your brain chemistry, exciting neurons. Your brain feels sharp, focused, you do well on tests.
But forget science. Chances are, our reaction to rain mostly reflects our previous mood. Rain is an all-purpose metaphor; we may see ourselves as cleansed by the rain, nourished, quenched, or we may feel ourselves splattered, submerged, drowned.
Rain is rain; we invent the rest.
The Mailbag:
Most of our letters are MIRVed. You know, with multiple questions. No one can ask just one! For example, a certain Timmy F. of Frederick, Md., sent us a passel of good questions, including:
"In Blondie, why do the mailman and Herb Woodley look like twins? What's the difference between ketchup and catsup? What does YKK stand for on a zipper? Other than Pearl Harbor, why didn't Japan or Germany directly attack American cities in World War II?"
Dear Timmy: We heard a nasty rumor that Herb Woodley is the mailman. This is a lie. The mailman's name is Mr. Beasley. (In fact his name is Beasley Beasley, he once admitted. His father was lazy.) Beasley and Woodley do look astonishly alike. Dean Young, who took over the strip when his father, Chic Young, died in 1973, readily admits that the two characters are deep into "Separated at Birth?" territory. Same mustache. Same eyes. Same build. But Young notes that Herb has a slightly more pronounced jaw line and a cleft chin. Keep in mind that many cartoonists have characters that look alike - all the men in Doonesbury have pencil-like noses, for example.
Ketchup and catsup are the same thing. Another variant is catchup. These are just alternative spellings and pronunciations of the same word, a noun that in precise speech should usually carry an adjective - tomato ketchup, mushroom ketchup, etc. The Chinese first concocted something called ke-tsiap in the 11th century. It was a mixture of pickled fish, shellfish and spices. (How it would taste on a corn dog is anyone's guess.)
The YKK stands for Yoshida Kogyo Kabushikigaisha. The company is named after the Japanese founders. The Why staff has discreetly checked its own zippers - people don't always believe you when you say you're engaged in a scientific investigation - and has discovered that they say Talon.
Further checking reveals that Talon is a brand name that replaced Hookless Fastener in the 1930s when the Hookless Co. realized that a term like "hookless fastener" sounded hopelessly old-fashioned, particularly since B.F. Goodrich introduced the catchier (no pun intended) name "Zipper" in the 1920s. "Zipper" was so catchy, in fact, it quickly became the generic name for a slide fastener. "Slide fastener" is still what the folks at YKK call their product, by the way.
Now a delicate transition to this Pearl Harbor business. Pearl Harbor was a stretch for the Japanese. Planes in that era couldn't easily fly long distances, and you certainly wouldn't send a fleet of ships on a suicide mission across the vast ocean. The Japanese did bomb Dutch Harbor, in the Aleutian Islands, and later they sent incendiary balloons across the ocean, which started some forest fires out West. German submarines sank a lot of boats off the East Coast.
But basically the U.S. mainland wasn't attacked because you couldn't get here from there. Washington Post Writers Group
Joel Achenbach writes for the Style section of The Washington Post.\
by CNB