3rd place in Derby #163: Rainy Day, with 719 votes!

Meteorological effects are hard to understand when you’re a kid. How can the average youngster expect to wrap his head around such weird phenomena as atmospheric dynamics, the collision of air masses, and complex systems of changing humidity, pressure, and temperature?

He can’t. It’s far beyond his ken. He’s got an R on his right shoe to differentiate it from his left, for crying out loud. Weather patterns are way over his head, literally.

It’s no wonder, then, that children make up their own fanciful explanations for the weather in terms they can understand. Specifically, terms that are scatological.

For example, we always used to say thunder was the noisy posterior of a flatulent god. And sometimes, during thundershowers, all of us neighborhood kids would try to answer in kind. At least until Mark Whitman’s accident.

In our group of friends, Mark Whitman was the one most fluent in this peristaltic palaver. He could toot on cue, at great length, and on any topic. But one stormy day on the playground, straining to make the loudest possible proclamation in godspeak, Mark crapped his shorts.

Codifying our own primitive theology from our experiences, we interpreted this disgusting humiliation as Mark’s punishment for presuming to speak up to an omnipotent being in its own tongue.

And we were never so arrogant as to fart at the clouds again.

Wear this shirt: while you wonder where in the world hail comes from.

Don’t wear this shirt: as a nightshirt at a slumber party, unless you’re 100% certain you won’t be the first person to fall asleep.

This shirt tells the world: “In case of fire, cootchie-cootchie-coo.”

We call this color: The Royal Blue Wee

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