Hot tub time machine
Finally, after almost 25 years of talking about it, I put a hot tub in my back yard. Turned out it was far easier than I ever expected: All I needed to do was stick a giant tub of water out there. Voila, instant hot tub.
Okay, I didn’t do that. But I could have. The temperatures in Los Angeles County this weekend — and, yes, I know, it’s been widely reported — have been in the 110s. That’s 100 degrees, plus between 11 and 19 more degrees. And higher. A sub-headline in the LA Times read (and I sure wish I had screen-grabbed this): “Temperatures in the triple-digits could go even higher.” If or when the temperature goes higher than triple digits — like, to quadruple-digits, which could be any day now — none of us will need to worry about it. So there’s some good news.
Pretty much every day, I hop into my mental time machine so as to instruct younger people in how things used to be. Usually it takes this sort of format:
- “We didn’t used to have all these homeless people on the street.”
- “You used to be able to work your way through college without all that debt.”
- “You won’t believe it, but it used to be called Kentucky Fried Chicken, and you could actually eat it.”
Now I’m adding, “It didn’t used to be this hot.”
As in, it hasn’t been this hot in at least 125,000 years. (But who’s counting?)
Y’know, not to be Mr. Naive Polyanna here, but the temperature situation (and that’s my new name for it, as I remain ensconced inside: The Temperature Situation) wouldn’t be hard to improve. Here’s what we’d need to do:
- Stop burning coal
- Phase out other fossil fuels
- Plant lots and lots of trees
I know, it can’t be that easy, right? But it is, once you get past the first two steps, which seem somehow harder: Put people who actually believe in science in charge around the world, and then get those people to actually cooperate globally.
Maybe the hottest weekend in 125,000 years will help move that along.
September 6th, 2020 at 9:35 pm
My sophomore year biology teacher in 1971 used to say, ‘I am not sure that Earth’s atmosphere can handle what we’ve done to it, and what we’re going to keep doing to it. You people aren’t going to have an easy time of cleaning up all the destruction. Worst of all is the jets flying around, the Carbon Monoxide levels will raise temperatures, melt the polar ice and this will all be underwater.” There’d be giggles in class. He sorta had the quality of The Lorax about him.
September 7th, 2020 at 12:34 am
I saw the same LA Times headline and thought the same thing. Also intended to screen-grab and post it, but something (ennui?) interfered. The degradation of life in these here United States (and on this here planet Earth) is truly frightening. Like a number of others, I keep trying to figure out the maga people (lots of interesting stuff that relates to it in Sartre’s book on Anti-semitism) though I think that may just be a distraction. My latest thought on the matter is that an awful lot of people in the USA have seen a lot of superhero and horror and conspiracy themed movies and they think it’s real. Thus, it isn’t very rich people who are anxious to discard democracy and become oligarchs (i.e. the people who bought gopee, oh no, it’s liberal/elitist/Jewish politicians who want to have sex with children and inject DNA into the population to control them, because that’s so much more believable…actually, because that takes less thought to comprehend. Instead of becoming active in political matters, the maga-ists only need to brandish all the weapons they bought instead of saving any money for a rainy day, and shout and yell (& spit). Sadly, a lot of anti-drumpy folk aren’t much better.
September 7th, 2020 at 8:18 am
I tend to agree with Mark. There’s a culture out there with the hots for superheroes and teenage dystopia. Chump comes along with “We’re under attack” and the Conspiracy of the week and they say, “Hey, Cool!”
September 7th, 2020 at 8:20 am
Lee, I thouight I had a deal on a Hot Tub till I got it installed & found out you had to operate it by blowing through a straw.