PSA - your fancy umbrella

The stormy season is obviously upon us, and greets us with the open arms that are rain and wind. Fortunately us humans are a handy bunch, and we came up with these brilliant little tarps on a stick to keep the rain off of us. Then we way overthought the problem and figured out how to make our tarps break regularly.

I'm not here to judge how your umbrella looks. I'm not saying that a giant watermelon looking thing above your head won't get you hit, maybe by me, maybe by a total stranger, who's to say. But more than that, I'm saying nobody will need to hit you when your rig collapses and pokes you in the eye.

Take your basic umbrella. It's a 3 foot long stick with folding rods, and nylon stretched between them. A little collar on the umbrella neck slides toward the point and pushes the main vanes out using smaller little connecting arms. It took three lines to describe that, and they get more complicated from there. You have the ones that telescope, you have the ones that telescope and are spring-loaded (mostly awesome for poking your friends with minimal effort. Otherwise not that novel), you have the compact folding ones that bend in three places per vane, and then you have the super compact ones that either bend 21 times or are so small when open that you get to pick which shoulder you'd like to be dry.

Basically my gripe is this: unnecessarily complicated things are way more prone to breakage. We could probably even go back a step - things with lots of moving parts made of stamped and folded metal to questionable tolerances and of unknown material and origin are prone to breakage. The more parts, the greater the chance that you're umbrella is going to be doing its best imitation of a drawer of forks after an earthquake (and we all know what that looks like, sure...). I mean, the umbrella-frame antenna in Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure didn't even last, and they had the knowledge and budget of the entire future world backing them.

The strongest thing I could dream up is basically a rigid, permanently open umbrella with maybe a rigid outer ring and some tension cables leading from the vanes to the stem to keep it from flipping inside out. Practicality, however, rears its ugly head. For those of you who actually want to carry an umbrella around, get the biggest thing you'll actually carry. Generally bigger = fewer folding parts. If you don't want the rigid-pole old-school kind, see if you'd haul a one foot long semi-compact. If you get caught with a busted umbrella that folds down to 4 inches, somebody might telescope it out and club you with it. Maybe me, maybe a total stranger, who's to say?