How hot it is it? The question is famous as a vaudevillian setup for the old joke in which you can fill in the punch line as you wish.
With a rimshot of ba-doom-bah.
Whatever humor there has been in the triple-digit, energy-sapping weather of the past week has been worn away. We’re ready to cry “uncle” and throw in our sweat-soaked towels.
We’re content to accept the fact that summer swelter is nature’s way of telling us to slow down. Our human bodies simply don’t operate well in the heat, even if there seem to be many bicyclists out there, whirling away in the sun.
Our instinctive reaction is to do only what is necessary, supporting one social-political science theory that ties the growth of the federal government to the invention of air conditioning. Before the 1930s, bureaucrats and politicians would skedaddle from heat and humidity of low-lying Washington, D.C., in the summertime, and not feel encumbered to do something anything to justify their existence.
Even though the weather has dropped back to near-normal in the last few days, the forecast is for back above 90 degrees and even touching 95 for the next day or two, and staying nearing highs of 90 until next Wednesday.
Worse yet, nighttime temperatures are rarely expected to drop below 70, giving no respite to people who aren’t sleeping as well as normal.
Our best advice: Extend your patience and give those cranky types a little slack. It might be a coincidence, but, as an example of frayed tempers, we can again only point you to Washington, D.C.
Resist the temptation to lay on the horn at any perceived driving slight.triple digits slight breezes at bestWe’ve about written off the green lawn by now, and we have to start worrying about severe seasonal drought for necessary uses.
If you believe in averages, you could see this as payback for those cold days in January and February. For every extreme low, there has to be a balancing high.
Maybe you can feel a little better by knowing that Chicago endured more than six inches of rain in three hours over the weekend, or they have had 25 straight days of 100#-#plus temperatures in Texas.Just where are those climate#-#change skeptics now?
Lots of people have their own little trick that seems to help them deal with the heat. In the 1980s “Hill Street Blues” TV show, a growling detective Mick Belker would phone his ma, tell her to draw some cool water and slip into the bathtub. This weekend, baseball color man Keith Hernandez filled lulls in play with how he loved ammonia-soaked towels as a way to draw perspiration off necks and arms during Midwestern summer games.
Local TV news scrambled for any unique crumb to the story even to one commentator musing that his best tip he had heard was to put your sheets in the freezer before refitting them at nighttime.
Stink bugs will proliferate, but disease#-#bearing ticks will suffer.
We’re suggesting the best answer is simply to take the weather as a good excuse for wearing loose clothing, putting off household chores and finding some shade and a cool drink.
There. Everybody’s talking about it, and there is something you can do about it: Just slow down.
