It didn’t snow much in northern Alabama where I grew up, so,
when I went to college further north, I was at a serious disadvantage when the
first blizzard came through and everyone streamed out of the dorms to engage in
an all night snowball fight. After my first rounds of fusillades ended up
splintering to little wispy bits in midair I quickly got the hang of
compaction, looking for wetter snow, and doing what I could to increase the
density of the snowballs. I broke a window, confessed, and escaped punishment
with the lame but true excuse that I had no idea snowballs could break windows.
Friends with more snowball experience and more delinquent childhoods told me
about burying a stone or two inside of the snowball to increase its destructive
power.
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| These look too fluffy to me. I don't think they'd survive flight. |
I don’t get much snow in southern California, but I do spend
a lot of my time thinking about those early snowball experiences and about the
snowball fights that have made the objects of the outer solar system.
