Do they know when its winter and when its summer ?
Three pounds of flax.
Well, at least 20 of them do.
Yes.
Also, my cat’s breath smells like cat food.
I used to live in Chicago, and I seem to recall things were much worse there nearly every summer. Lots of old folks passed away due to the extreme heat. It was especially hard when we went from freezing our asses off in the snow and wind to massive heat waves with all the air cons burning out.
In the southern part of Australia right now - Victoria (where Melbourne is) and South Australia (where Adelaide is) - the heat is unbelievable. Not normal.
See here: Power outages cause chaos across Vic
And here: Vic heat stretches emergency services
There’s an Australian I’d love to fuck, but she has a boyfriend.
I was there for that, and it was frickin hot. This is similar. Temperatures are reaching 44 degrees Celsius, which is over 111 degrees Fahrenheit.
I’ve fucked my share of Ozzies, and I recommend it highly. A very talented people. (Despite not knowing that 44 degrees is actually quite crisp.)
Damn, that’s as bad as the holocaust. Maybe you should include some pictures so we can compare…
Damnit! I want Kerr… Yummy
And I have to point out that it hit 47C in parts last week. That’s 116.6F and the usual temp would be 80 odd. Some poor old fart goes outside without having anyone to look after them, with no fluids and it doesn’t take long.
I lived in England in the late 70s and I remember the Poms worrying about the death toll because they sometimes had consecutive days in the 90s. They thought they were having a drought.
Oi! Oi! Oi!
These two Australians are so cute!
(Keith and Nicole)
(ETA: fuck fuckity fuck fuck)
It hit 131F in leechbabe’s back garden the other day.
:eek:
Thankfully, the cool change has come in and things are much more bearable now. Temps all the way down in the 80’s F.
Hate to get all logical in a pit thread too, but we’ve had rolling blackouts in both Adelaide and Melbourne.
Some old dottie is in her home, sitting in the aircon like the doctors recommend, when the power goes out. Well old Dottie, she thinks “It’s better to be in than out” and sits in the dark, in her shut up house, waiting it out.
Unfortunately, some of these power outages are several hours in duration, and by the time it’s over old Dottie’s got herself a bad case of heat exhaustion. So she dies.
Or the other reason is that someone’s trying to be thrifty. I fear what my electricity bill will be this quarter. I’ve had to have an aircon and 2 fans running non-stop for the last four days, just to keep comfortable (and still I’ve had to end up nude most of the time). But hubby and I are DINKS, both with salaries in excess of $45k. We can suck up the occasional $400 electricity bill. Old Dottie or Disabled Dan can’t, not on the pensions they’re given. So they try to economise only by using the aircon when absolutely necessary. Unfortunately one of the symptoms of heat exhaustion is diminished mental clarity, so it’s not hard to see where someone could be sat, convincing themself it’s not so bad until the point where they collapse from heat.
Also, I’ve been on more than one train that’s shut down the aircon due to the engine overheating. Our trains are sealed (not airtight, but still), you can’t open ANY windows. On Wednesday, someone was taken from the train station in Adelaide in an Ambulance, most likely because they’ve collapsed after a train has spent half the ride with the aircon off and no ventilation.
So yeah, I’m not surprised that 20 people are dead.
This has always confused me a bit–I grew up in Sacramento CA, where summer temps are very, very hot. All the time. I’ve personally weathered temps of 125F and all the while I was growing up we never had air conditioning, and I’d say about half the houses I lived in as an adult there didn’t have it either. I lived in a single wide trailer with no A/C during a heat wave where the highs were 105-110F every day for two weeks, getting down to maybe 90F at night. Add in the fact that in Sacto it doesn’t rain between May and October. Seriously, it’s not uncommon for not a single drop of rain to fall, and if it does rain it’s just from a thunderstorm.
I appear to still be alive. My kids are alive. My parents and grandparents managed to survive. People live in Blythe and in the Mojave and have done so since long before A/C was invented and it’s even hotter there than Sacto. Is it just that people no longer know how to cope without A/C? I can imagine that in a big city it can be worse due to a lot of heat trappers–asphalt, no way for breezes to make their way through the maze of buildings and the humidity can’t help but still, people in Chicago drop dead in what Californians consider to be normal summer temps.
The thing I really don’t comprehend is that I’ve never heard anybody counsel the old folks to do the simplest possible thing to cope with heat–and it works a treat. Fill the damned bathtub up with cold water and bloody sit in it! It’s amazing, but even in 100+ temps you can still end up shivering after a half hour in a cold tub.
That being said, I have all the sympathy in the world because I fled the heat (the day I left CA for good it was 113F and the pollution standard index was 175) and if I never have to experience temps over 90 again I’ll be just fine as paint…
ETA: I forgot to mention that I also used to do SCA events in the Central Valley in summer–wearing full Elizabethans. Yeah, that was insane…
SmartAleq, Californians can handle the heat because we’re used to it, and ready for it. Do you think there’s any bus or train in Sacramento that has No openable windows? Our houses are built to take temps of 110F every damn summer. The Australians are not ready for heat, it’s seriously abnormal for them, and that’s why they’re dying. They are not accustomed to chugging the amount of Gatorade and water you did to stay alive in full elizabethians in the central valley. When you deal with heat every summer, you develop the habits to deal with it.
Imagine if we got a foot of snow in Sacramento or LA. The whole city would shut down, and people would die of hypothermia at night or get killed trying to drive. We’d have no way to cope with it. Cut the aussies a little slack, ok?
eta: I’m sorry SmartAleq, I see on re-reading you do have all the sympathy in the world for our upside-down cousins. I shouldn’t have yelled at you.
