These no doubt are a delight on a sunny day, but less so when the rain is sheeting down.
Instead of spending three months erecting scaffolding, netting and sheeting (necessary to protect nearby buildings and the street below when demolishing a building from the top down with excavators), Despe built in just 20 days an exoskeleton "hat" that enclosed the top three floors.
It was sheeting down on the morning of what became known as "The Miracle of Bern", a match that saw the emergence of the greatest nation in the history of the tournament.
Grades of muslin are known by such names as book, mull, swiss, and sheeting.
The aid-workers and diplomats who come to his shop to buy ethnic bedspreads and crockery occasionally part with $48 for a tin trunk containing a crowbar, plastic sheeting, bottled water and medicine, but there have been no extra sales since the Kashmir disaster.
Some 600 fruit-pickers scramble through tunnels of polythene sheeting to pack the strawberries off to the airport.
Partly because nobody knew what condition they would be in until they were handed over (answer: mostly passable, though the settlers had ripped out some of the equipment and plastic sheeting, and Palestinian looters ripped out more).
MicroLink Devices of Niles, Illinois, has developed a solar sheeting based on gallium arsenide, which has greater efficiency than silicon cells.
At any rate, in nine months of almost constant artillery barrage, mostly by the army, which has depopulated much of Sri Lanka's formerly Tiger-held east, the shelling has killed only around 100 civilians.As the refugees speak, crowding together on the blistering sand or under wilting plastic sheeting, a periodic ground-muffled boom resounds.
They include PermaNet mosquito nets, ZeroFly insecticide-treated plastic sheeting and the LifeStraw, a portable water-purification device.
Then this month regulators discovered that thousands of gallons of radioactive water had seeped into the ground; the plant's operator had installed a jerry-rigged system of plastic sheeting, which sprang leaks.
