Coyote...

... roadkill silhouette in frost and warmth.

"But suddenly, the lawyer became so uncomfortably hot that he leaped up to move."

"He tried to put on his flip-flop sandals but, inexplicably, they were too hot to touch. So he ran barefoot to the shade."

The Las Vegas Death Ray targets a lawyer.

(Via Gizmodo.)

Energy efficient windows...

... versus vinyl siding.

(Warning: 1. Link goes to video that begins with a commercial, 2. Don't have vinyl siding.)

"The annual contest... had been held since 1999."

"It will never be held again...."

"That's why we moan and bitch and bellyache."

"Because by doing so we hope in our next incarnation, life will, in all senses of the term, be cool."

How will Yale close its $150 million budget gap?

"Yale University announced on Wednesday that it planned a number of steps to close a remaining $150 million budget gap, including cutting staff, freezing salaries for deans and officers, reducing the number of graduate students — even turning down all thermostats to 68 degrees."

Even turning down all thermostats to 68 degrees? Even?!

Sorry about your budget gap, but why the hell did you have winter thermostat settings above 68°? Even — even — if you have money to burn, you should want to keep temperatures at least that low for health and comfort. And I do not believe that the people who run Yale think that there's such a thing as anthropogenic global warming worth worrying a damn about. In fact, if you actually thought cutting carbon emissions was important, your thermostats would already be at 62° or lower. If you thought AGW is an emergency — of the sort Al Gore warns us about —you'd set the thermostat at 52° or lower.

Good lord, you're firing people from their jobs! Why are you still roasting the place to 68°?!

***

A literary reading:

Man has invented, not only houses, but clothes and cooked food; and possibly from the accidental discovery of the warmth of fire, and the consequent use of it, at first a luxury, arose the present necessity to sit by it. We observe cats and dogs acquiring the same second nature. By proper Shelter and Clothing we legitimately retain our own internal heat; but with an excess of these, or of Fuel, that is, with an external heat greater than our own internal, may not cookery properly be said to begin? Darwin, the naturalist, says of the inhabitants of Tierra del Fuego, that while his own party, who were well clothed and sitting close to a fire, were far from too warm, these naked savages, who were farther off, were observed, to his great surprise, "to be streaming with perspiration at undergoing such a roasting." So, we are told, the New Hollander goes naked with impunity, while the European shivers in his clothes. Is it impossible to combine the hardiness of these savages with the intellectualness of the civilized man? 

"Since women cannot bear the hot sun, why would they want to get a job when they can stay safely inside their homes?"

A young woman in Yemen.

Why aren't more people going to the beach?

This NYT article attributes the phenomenon to the reverse-global warming we're having. Nah, just kidding. It's a cool summer, and that's the reason given for the low beach attendance, but, of course, there's the predictable denial of the denial of global warming:

William D. Solecki, a geography professor at Hunter College of the City University of New York and co-chairman of a mayoral panel on climate change, warned that this summer’s unusually mild temperatures should not buoy global warming skeptics.

“Ask them to visit Seattle,” he said, where a record temperature of 103 was recorded on Wednesday.

“On average, going back decades, we would only have a few days above 90 in any given summer,” he said, “and while we haven’t hit that mark yet, there’s still a lot of summer left.”

I love that we are "warned" not to feel optimistic. How twisted we've become! It's like people are rooting for disaster. I also love the way we're instructed not to take any cool weather as evidence of what the climate is becoming, but any hot weather will be used to "buoy" our belief that disaster looms ahead. (You're going to need a buoy when those oceans rise up.)

But I want to raise the question whether it's the low temperatures that are keeping so many people away from the beach. There are plenty of other reasons not to go to the beach: it's a hassle, we've got air conditioning, we love indoor activities like movies and computer games, we're concerned about skin cancer, we've gotten fat and don't want to be seen in a bathing suit, etc. etc. It's really quite silly to think that — in the modern world — going to the beach is the natural and automatic response to hot weather. Most of us can get some cool at home, and if we can't, it's much simpler to go to the movies or a restaurant.

As the generation that grew up without air conditioning ages and dies off, maybe beach-going will become an old-fashioned, occasional activity, not the main idea of summertime.