Unfortunately, no, that wasn't a joke.
You wrote...
I thought that you were implying rainbows at latitudes closer to the polar circles have different characteristics that people in latitudes closer to the equator aren't used to seeing, which is news to me if that is so.
No, sorry for any misunderstanding...wasn't my intent. I chalk it up to the very commonplace lack of clarity that can (sometimes) persist in a written forum, as compared to a face-to-face conversation.
This has been on my mind of late...when I was reminded that YouTube (for example) had only recently celebrated its (nearly) ten-year anniversary...wow, even when fact-checking, I realized I had lost the plot...YouTube only started up in
2005! And here, I was about to congratulate them on their "ten-year" anniversary! (Before I double-checked...here on a post dated 8 March, 2014).
I guess the fact of the Internet has, in a way, "steamrolled" into our consciousness. I hate to steer off the target here, but...perhaps we all could take a moment and ponder the implications. The "implications" of how the Internet, something that so many of us now take for granted, wasn't even much of a
factor in most of our lives, just over a decade ago!!!
EDIT: Oh, yes....I remember AOL, in the late 1990s. Even before that, with my first PC...the "Online Service" that seemed to be "the one"!! "Prodigy". LOL.
But, really...it was the early 21st century when the Internet really "took off"!