Wednesday, September 3, 2008

Beware the Rhombus of Ambivalence


My favorite hurricane term by far: The Cone of Uncertainty. It just sounds so ... so ... calamitously chaotic. Say it in that deep, portentous, "thunder throat" Don LaFontaine voice: "In a world where everything is certain, one cone will change the face of predictability ... forever."

CUT TO Hilton Head Island, exterior, day:

Civilian 1: "Watch out! A gigantic geometric embodiment of precariousness is headed this way!"
Civilian 2: "If only we knew where it was going!"

This is not to be confused with the Cone of Silence, or the Fortress of Solitude or the Sea of Tranquility, the Rhombus of Ambivalence, the Quadrilateral Conundrum or (a rare, yet unspeakably terrible weather event) Schrödinger's Dodecahedron.

The Cone of Uncertainty is also the most accurate geometric-related term to define my life right now. I'm, like, 100 miles deep into the cone, being constantly rapped on the skull by the shifting black lines of the edges. Just like the storm, there's all the exogenous (VOCAB WHAT) factors at work. But at least I'm not on Hispanola. They never get the Cone of Uncertainty. All they ever see is the Cube of Unspeakable Devastation and Mud Slides.

2 comments:

P said...

Another miss for Hilton Head. This blog has sunken to a new low (to use an oft-repeated phrase of thousands of letters to the editor and newspaper blog posts each year).

Anonymous said...

That's the truth about Hispanola. And Wilmington, which gets plugged by every storm initially bound for the Head. Just watch.