1975 06 24 Sense and Nonsense

The extreme heat has boosted the sale of suntan oil, straw hats and all the paraphernalia associated with fun in the sun. It has also boosted the sale of pencils and notebooks for the people who have not yet adjusted to the Celsius system of measuring the temperature.

Everywhere you go you see people wiping the perspiration off their pencils as they listen to the suppertime weather report. We all know it is hot. Our burnt blistered bodies and parched tongues testify to this fact. However we don’t know for sure anymore. The weatherman says it is 35 degrees out and this sounds cool. It we don’t happen to have a handy little conversion table with us, the only thing to do is convert the temperature to Fahrenheit on our own.

Thirty-five degrees is a good temperature to convert as it multiplies easily by s/5. If we know our nine times multiplication table we can come up with the figure of 63 degrees fairly quickly. This still sounds quite cool. However there is one more step involved in discovering the final familiar Fahrenheit.

We must remember to add 32 degrees. Last winter we were told to subtract this figure. However in the summer months it is very important that we add instead. If we forget and subtract we may end up terribly deceived and frustrated. The psychiatric wards are full of people who subtracted instead of added. The answer is 95 degrees and all of us old Fahrenheit people agree that is hot.

It is time to climb out of range of the suns’ rays and retire to a cool place such as the freezing compartment of our favorite refrigerator. Anyone who has not a sufficient supply of ice-cubes in the freezing compartment of their fridge should be considered criminally insane and therefore dangerous. This is not true however if there are children in the house. The Freshie generation are formidable in their pursuit of ice-cubes. They sometimes forget to fill and replace the trays. Often they seem to have the idea that ice-cubes reseed themselves like some plants do. Leaving one ice-cube in each tray is not likely to ensure parental good humour at martini time.

Parents can be dumb too. The other day we decided to picnic and I planned on taking a huge jug of iced tea. Instead of using the instant iced tea mix, I did it the hard way with real tea and real lemons. This of course meant using boiling water to start with. It takes a lot of ice-cubes to convert hot tea to iced tea. I used every ice-cube we had to make it lukewarm. Then we had to borrow the rest.

I found it is easier to borrow sugar even with the sugar shortage, than ice-cubes on a hot summer day. Most of the houses in the neighborhood have Freshie generation people within and their ice-cubes were futilely trying to reseed themselves. We finally managed to borrow some, enough to cool off my iced tea to an almost palpable degree.

Another thing about the hot weather is that it brings out the kooks. Some friends were at the beach the other day when a young couple drove up. They got out of the car and proceeded to disrobe on the beach. When they had divested themselves of every stitch, they calmly waded out for a long leisurely swim together.

Our friend’s husband was busy and missed the whole thing. His wife didn’t want to point out the couple to him for fear of embarrassing them. If they swam in the nude in public a lot I would think they would be embarrass-proof?