两极
oMo回到了他的德州，无尽的阳光和燥热的天气，连外出都要考虑日光的指数，待在室内，叫做“避暑”。新英格兰的天气，已经成了陌生人见面可以用来打招呼的话题，坐在那里开始盘算还有多少天我们可以看见天上那个园园黄黄的发光物体。翻开五月的日历，由不得我们不抱怨，只有六天没有落雨，只有四天有真正的日照，剩下的，分别叫做，小小雨，毛毛雨，细毛毛雨，粗毛雨，小雨，中雨，冰棒棍儿雨，珠帘雨，大雨，爆大雨，猛雨，拔书毁车雨……
前几天和实验室的同事开玩笑，说起Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy里面，提到过英国的雨有很多种，可以大致的分为231种[1]，新英格兰人似乎也可以和爱斯基摩人一样，把雪分成好多种，目前看来，雨也不会错过了。
[1]It was just the rain which got him down, always the rain.
It was raining now, just for a change.
It was a particular type of rain he particularly disliked, particularly when he was driving. He had a number for it. It was rain type 17.
He had read somewhere that the Eskimos had over two hundred different words for snow, without which their conversation would probably have got very monotonous. So they would distinguish between thin snow and thick snow, light snow and heavy snow, sludgy snow, brittle snow, snow that came in flurries, snow that came in drifts, snow that came in on the bottom of your neighbour's boots all over your nice clean igloo floor, the snows of winter, the snows of spring, the snows you remember from your childhood that were so much better than any of your modern snow, fine snow, feathery snow, hill snow, valley snow, snow that falls in the morning, snow that falls at night, snow that falls all of a sudden just when you were going out fishing, and snow that despite all your efforts to train them, the huskies have pissed on.
Rob McKeena had two hundred and thirty-one different types of rain entered in his little book, and he didn't like any of them.
...
Since he had left Denmark the previous afternoon, he had been through types 33 (light pricking drizzle which made the roads slippery), 39 ( heavy spotting), 47 to 51 (vertical light drizzle through to sharply slanting light to moderate drizzle freshening), 87 and 88 (two finely distinguished varieties of vertical torrential downpour), 100 (post-downpour squalling, cold), all the seastorm types between 192 and 213 at once, 123, 124, 126, 127 (mild and intermediate cold gusting, regular and syncopated cab-drumming), 11 (breezy droplets), and now his least favourite of all, 17.
Rain type 17 was a dirty blatter battering against his windscreen so hard that it didn't make much odds whether he had his wipers on or off.
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