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David Tudor and I took a taxi down town.
He was going to Macy’s; I was going on
to West Broadway and Prince where I get my hair
cut. After David Tudor got out, I
began talking with the driver about the weather.
The relative merits of the Old Farmers’
Almanac and the newspapers came up. The
driver said they were developing rockets that
would raise the weather man’s predictions from
50 to 55 per cent accuracy. I said I
thought the Almanac starting from a
consideration of planets and their movements,
rather than from winds and theirs, got
a better start since the X-quantities involved
were not so physically close to the results
being predicted. The driver said he’d
had an operation some years before and that
while his flesh was dead and numb, before
the wound healed, he was able to predict
weather changes by the pain he felt in the scar,
that when the flesh lost its numbness and
was, so to speak, back to
normal, he could no longer know in
advance anything about changes in weather.
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