In my travels, though limited, I’ve seen places up and down the Eastern Seaboard – Maine, New York, New Jersey, North Carolina, etc. During that time, I’ve encountered what I consider to be a pretty broad range of environments.

I’ve been living in the city of Boston for about five years now, and aside from the construction (another rant altogether), the one major thing that separates this city from almost any other is the WEATHER. Nowhere else have I, nor anyone I know, ever seen anything quite like it.

I was talking to my friend on the night of Nov. 7, which was the first time this year that (for me) the temperature was noticeably below freezing. She said to me jokingly, “Don’t like the weather? Wait five minutes!”

This comment is what really got me thinking about it again.

A long time ago, I think it was my freshman year during one of my infrequent yet brief periods of sobriety, I had derived a theory about Boston and its obscure weatherly anti-patterns that defy all of mankind’s natural and physical laws. It’s really quite simple: my theory states that the city of Boston is enclosed in a giant, crystal clear dome. It reaches from the Charles River, just outside of Cambridge, and goes all the way to the border of West Roxbury and Jamaica Plain. This is the only feasible explanation that I have never been able to disprove. Sure people talk about variations in the jet stream, about the population density, about the pollution and the buildings creating insulation and whatnot, but I really think there is no way around it. Boston is enclosed in a dome.

Think about it – why do you think that the air is so smoggy and polluted? The exhaust from all the vehicles can’t migrate to other locations, and all of the carbon monoxide can’t escape into the atmosphere to the ozone layer (which would also account for all that funky colored snow when we get it). And the heat – why does it get unseasonably warm in the middle of November? The dome of course! The heat from the sun gets intensified upon entering, so that while the surrounding areas are quite accurate in temperature for the time of year, we get brief periods of extra-seasonal weather, and that cannot escape until enough of it builds up, which accounts for the dramatic and sudden fluctuations in temperature. Even with air traffic, notice that planes only enter and exit the city from one part of the sky, it is because this area is the location of the port in the dome. While we’re on the topic, everyone knows that Boston is pretty notorious for its traffic, especially entering and exiting the city (eh-hem – Storrow Drive, right on the Charles – cough-cough). Did it ever occur to anyone, that just maybe there is a limit on the amount of traffic entering and exiting through the shell of the dome?

Nowhere around here, even in the suburbs, does the weather vary so widely over such a condensed period of time. I have never seen or heard that it was snowing or below freezing in Revere or Malden in the morning, and by 3 p.m., it’s 50 degrees outside! In Worcester, or even Newton (a mere 20 minutes away), they don’t get five minute long torrential downpours, where everything is dried up within the hour.

Boston is surrounded in all directions, including up, by a dome. Enough said. So I bid you farewell with words from the great neo-political analyst Dennis Miller, “That’s just my opinion, I could be wrong.”

– Jeremy S. Newman is a senior

psychology major.