Cumulus Cloud...
(1) Literally a pile of cloud, a mound, a heap, a dump, like a huge white dropping hanging in the sky over your head, suspended as if by magic.
Only they don't wander alone, these clouds. They always occur in herds.
Think herds of turds.
Big giant white ones, just itching to break open and dump everything they have right on your noggin.
So always wear a hat.
(2) A dense, white, fluffy, flat-bottomed cloud with a cauliflower-like rounded top and a well-defined outline, caused by a thermally unstable air mass ascending into the deep infinite blue sky to an altitude averaging 2 miles (3.2 km), but sometimes overshooting the target altitude and continuing to rise ever more rapidly until they explode into lightning, thunder, hail, tornadoes, cats, dogs, mice, wolves, and rain that falls hard enough to remove both the paint and the primer from that 1947 Ford pickup truck you are hiding under out in the pasture, which works well enough until the Lightning Targeting Subsystem finishes calibrating itself, and like the Death Star frying planet X, it strikes out at the simple minded hubris that inspired you to go trespassing in the outdoors.
Hah! Fool! ZZZZZap!
(3) A large white puffy cloud that develops through convection.
On a hot, humid day this pushes moisture-heavy air upward until the temperature of the air drops, resulting in condensation and towers of cloud which can then develop into cumulonimbus clouds, the ones with the really heavy artillery.
In this case it might help if you have along a member of your party that you don't really need. An expendable. Like on every Star Trek episode. You know a few, the people you've never seen before who fill up the back of the shuttle when all the bigshots go down to the surface of a strange and spooky planet to poke around.
Those people in the back are the ones that disappear into big cracks that suddenly form in the ground or who get eaten by odd life forms with a hitherto unknown and perversely unpredictable taste for low-ranking humans in uniform, or some itinerant mechanical gizmo that wobbles by and, apparently solely for the purposes of idle amusement, crushes a few.
Offer up one of those to the sky gods and see what happens.
But it probably won't work because cumulus clouds are actually among the most intelligent of clouds and are not easily fooled, especially by people of your caliber.
Nor are they immensely amused by those who try to fool them, so keep your wits about you.
Keep in mind too that ultimately you are in a game you will lose no matter how many times you seem to escape death.
So perhaps you should give up now, while you still have all your fingers and toes and enough of your brain cells left to make rational decisions possible, and go elsewhere, out of sight of cumulus clouds.
Have anything worth adding? Then try sosayseff@gmail.com
Me? Finishing my 17th year of staying indoors, under the bed.
Etc...
so says eff: sporadic spurts of grade eff distraction
definitions: outdoor terms
fiyh: dave's little guide to ultralight backpacking stoves
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