It's been damn hot, which reminds me of something;

I haven't ranted on the enviroweenies lately. Let's take care of that, shall we?

When I say 'hot', I mean daytime highs in Oklahoma ranging from 100 to, further west, 115. Which means nighttime lows of(if you're lucky) upper 70's to(mostly) 80's. If you live up north, you may never have experienced days like this; think of walking outside like opening the oven door when it's been on, oh, 250 for a while. Except the only way to get out of it is to get in a car with a/c or back into a building; if you stay outside, it keeps feeling like that. You don't have to do anything to start sweating, just stand there; you start actually working, and you literally drip.

Now, this is a bit hot for this area, but not unknown. Right now there's a big high-pressure system parked over western OK, and this time of year that means heat. Add to that days when the humidity goes up due to those south winds and it's not just damn hot and uncomfortable, it's dangerous; it can kill you.

The orange is 'Heat Advisory', the purple is 'Excessive Heat Warning', and they're not kidding.

Which brings me to the point:
Every once in a while we are treated to some moron, usually one who lives way up north or northeast, declaring "We use too much air conditioning" and, as one clown put it "I actually prefer doing without the 'conveniences' of modern life."* To which I say, come on down. Come down here to Oklahoma or Texas or Arizona or Louisiana where it gets hot and humid to these levels, and live a while without the 'convenience' of air conditioning. It sucks. Right now I'm going to borrow some words from Rachel Lucas:
This not being my first blog post, I anticipate Wave B of potential comments. These will be the ones saying: But Rachel! Humans survived tens of thousands of years without electricity and thus without A/C or fans! But Rachel! I personally right now do not have fans or A/C! But Rachel! When we grew up in the 1970s and 80s, we didn’t have A/C either and it got hot and we survived!

Yes and it sucked. I remember spending entire days at age 9 or 10 laying on the floor in a stupor in front of the one fan in our house in Missouri. It was an “attic fan” that was positioned in a doorway to the outside, blowing in. That’s what people did then, we got by, we didn’t die, but it sucked. It was hot and shitty and uncomfortable.

And all those millenia during which humanity survived much worse heat without any powered cooling apparatuses? I bet you your own nuts that if you traveled back in time and asked them, they’d say that it totally sucked.

And if you personally right now don’t have A/C or fans, and the temperature where you are is above the lower 80s, then you have mental or medical problems, or possibly you’re in prison or somewhere else you definitely do not want to be. Or you might be a soldier, in which case, thank you; but the heat sucks, doesn’t it?***
Yes, it does. And it kills people who don't have a/c or fans or can't get to a place that does.

Remember the mess in France a couple of years ago? THOUSANDS of people died in a heat wave**. About a decade ago up in the Detroit area they had some severely(for them) hot days, and again, people died, because they're in the same position as the people in Britain: they rarely need a/c in homes, which means when serious heat moves in...

Well, down here, lots of homes don't have central heat & air but most of them damn sure have window units to put up when it gets hot, because without them summer is, at best, miserable. And I'll add that rain doesn't always help; it can be raining nicely and in the 80's, with enough wind that you can't leave windows open.

I'm still firmly convinced that the people who want to get rid of a/c 'to save Mother Gaia' and such bullshit either
A: Have never had to live without it in places where normal highs get above 80,
B: Are too friggin' stupid to understand what it MEANS to be without it in these conditions, or
C: Want people to die, thus reducing the carbon load on Mother Gaia.
The proper answers to the above are
A: Get your ass down here and find out,
B: Read the friggin' news or come down here and find out,
C: Fuck you, you first.

They're currently saying only 102 today here, and 99 tomorrow so some relief is on the way. And if you don't think those few degrees make a difference, I sort of envy you; may you never have to learn.

*It should be noted that the fool writing that was on a computer connected to the internet, which means he either doesn't consider that a 'convenience', or is flat stupid.
**There were contributing factors of stupidity and callousness; but the basic factor was 'no way to cool off'.
***I can honestly say I didn't laugh at people over there, having learned a long time ago that "When the weather doesn't get this way but rarely, you don't have the stuff to deal with it." In the late 80's Britain had a heat wave, people dying, being hospitalized with heat exhaustion, and I remember pictures in the paper of people- mostly young women- standing in the fountain in Trafalgar Square to cool off. Told the kids that all this was due to highs in the 80's and they looked puzzled and said "What's wrong with them?" Which led to the "Normal highs there in summer are 70's at most", which got the point across.

I'll add, when son went through Basic at Fort Sill in August, they had guys in the battery from Maine and Wisconsin. For two weeks, everywhere the unit went, a truck pulling a water trailer followed them: the water for drinking and cooling off, the truck to carry those who collapsed or were near it. After two weeks, most of them had acclimated fairly well; by three weeks everyone who couldn't take it was out.