Heat Day

According to the weather forecast, we are now entering the annual week where the intensity of the heat and humid swirl together like a melted morass of soft-serve, indiscriminately killing urban old people and providing everyone else a guilt-free reason to stay indoors in front of the computer. Since I regularly spend all of my time there anyhow, this week won't be much different than any other week, although the leather seats in my Accord increase the likelihood of "sweat-back" on any given commute.

Incidentally, the Weather Channel website is 550% less annoying if you visit the mobile version (m.weather.com) rather than the regular version (www.weather.com). The parts of the forecast that one might actually care about are highlighted, while the autoplaying videos and social media entreaties to "see what your friends think about the weather" are eliminated like married people with children in San Francisco.

In the history of BU, I can only recall two times where I was ever vanquished by Virginia heat -- normally I go willingly into the darkness without a fight, watching DVDs with the sound turned up high enough to hear over the A/C:

• In the late 80s, I was enrolled in a Summer Day Camp at Patrick Henry Elementary School, for kids whose parents didn't trust them to stay home alone without burning the house down. On one particularly hot afternoon, the highly skilled camp workers decided to trek the entire gaggle of kids on a mile-long walk up a steep hill to the Burke Library to watch films. I do not recall what films were put into the projector, because I (and several other kids) spent the entire library visit pressed against the cool, unsanitary floor of the library, recovering from heat exhaustion while the camp workers discussed amongst themselves whether they would get fired.


• During a homecoming football performance at Virginia Tech, sometime around 1997, the halftime show consisted of multiple scatter drills and run-ons in a marching band uniform made from leftover canvas from the flag of Qatar. This was followed by a twenty minute "stand at attention" phase while they honored a bunch of old athletes that no one cared about. I succumbed to the heat and keeled over onto one knee for about ten minutes, but managed to recover and stumble dizzily off of the field at the end. This was ironic, because the rest of the band was also stumbling dizzily off of the field, but I was probably the only one that hadn't been drinking.