Intolerable heat II

The Big Picture featured photos today of people "beating the heat," including this one from Berlin:
Yes, it's a swimming pool that floats on a river. Overkill?

Possible excuses for this otherwise-affront-to-common-sense:

1. The river is so polluted that giant, mutant river-dwelling predators now pose a serious threat to swimmers, but not so serious a threat that swimmers can't go right up to the edge of the predators' territory, tempting fate and plot-developers to have a huge river shark jump out of the water and catch people. (Or airplanes.)
2. Some people prefer swimming in chlorine.
   

... and honestly, excuse 2 is pretty bad. I swam this morning in a (chlorinated) pool and it was as odorous and desiccating as usual.

Follow the link to The Big Picture now (I even repeated it!) and see if you can find which of the photos is not like the others. One of the photos just doesn't fit in...

I am moving to Switzerland when I grow up. Or maybe I'll do a winter-to-winter migration, wintering in the northern hemisphere and "summering" in the southern.


This post's theme word: heliolatry, "worship of the sun." Heliolaters are my enemies.

Intolerable heat

It is HOT. The air is humid and uncomfortably close to body temperature. In fact, the adjective "close" is quite fitting -- I can feel the heat in the air, the atmosphere is close. I like a little more space between me and my environment; my atoms are hitting the air's atoms with uncomfortable frequency. (Make the air stop hitting me, please!)

In the spirit of cooling off and the long evolutionary tradition of sweating, I have exposed much of my own surface area directly to this malign miasma of summer. This has the expected positive effect of allowing me to exude and evaporate a water-based liquid of my own concoction (conocted right there in my pores and glands!), eliminating excess heat. The surprise, bonus negative effect is that much of my exposed skin is itchy, and, when I am morally weakened to the point of scratching, covered in hives.*

Summer is terrible.

I am hiding in my roommate's air-conditioned bedroom for the evening. Anytime either of us ventures outside the room, we ritually shout an obscenity when hit by the wall of hot air, followed by a quick obeisance: reverent closing of the door to protect the bubble of cool air.


This post's theme word: fug, "stale, humid, and stuffy atmosphere, as in a crowded, poorly ventilated room." As well as describing, it alliterates, scans, and slant-rhymes with a four-letter exclamation uttered about this weather.

*This includes uncommon patches of skin like the backs of my finger segments and the backs of my toe knuckles. My toe knuckles are hive-bearing, summer -- are you satisfied yet?!