In case you didn’t know, Long Beach is cooler than Texas
Remember how spring wouldn’t leave last month and while there were a few warm-ish days, it was actually chilly most of the time, with the highs rarely nosing into the 70s?
People were griping about it. Thomas R. Cordova had to keep wearing long pants well past the day when he usually started wearing shorts every day like a UPS delivery person, and Assistant Editor Kat Schuster, who shares a suite with me, also grew weary of the cool days. And my daughter Hannah complained about the (relative) cold weather on our daily evening walk with the dogs.
However, I enjoyed each brisk morning and cool evening, knowing full well of the potential horrors that await us as summer begins flexing its muscles and shouting, “So, this is what you were wishing for? Your Speedos and bikinis are powerless against me.” Or words to that effect.
“Just wait,” I told my colleagues and beloved daughter. “Soon you will be praying for a cool day such as this one.”
So now a heat wave is coming, though it’s doable as far as heat waves go, expected to peak at around 90 degrees; not like the killer heat that’s hitting other parts of the country now.
Residents of the delightful states of Texas and Florida, as well as our nearby friends in Arizona, are experiencing the wrath of summer now, with cities in the southwestern part of Arizona, a wee bit of inland California, the southern half of Florida, most of Texas and about half of Louisiana getting plastered this week with temperatures in the danger zone—that is, where highs range from 103 to 125 degrees. In places like Laredo and Baton Rouge, it’ll reach 113 degrees this week, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, with highs at or above 110 degrees in scores of cities and towns throughout the Southwest and the South.
“The most deadly of all natural catastrophes is not fires or hurricanes, it’s heat waves,” retired NASA climatologist Bill Patzert told us a couple of years ago, citing the 2003 European heat wave that killed 70,000 people. Last summer, according to a report published Monday in the journal Nature Medicine, 61,000 people died in Europe because of heat waves.
Here in Long Beach, the sun has been relatively kind to us, though there are occasional sweltering days that are particularly dangerous to the elderly, and in many places where there is less tree cover and ocean breeze.
Our city rarely climbs into climate’s danger zone due in large part to our proximity to the cooling breezes from the Pacific Ocean. Just another reason not to flee to the loving embrace of the governors of Texas and Florida, despite their unceasing efforts to relocate Californians to their states.
In our last conversation on a hot summer day last year, Patzert, who lives farther inland in LA County, asked me to do him a favor: “Go down to the beach and splash around in the water for me.”
File under: ‘Why don’t people tell me these things?’
So, I’m spinning the virtual dial on streaming channels over the weekend and I stumble upon the fact that Hulu’s “Reservation Dogs,” one of my favorite TV series of 2021-22, had snuck in an entire nine-episode season on me without a hint of warning. So, yeah, thanks for that.
So I’ve got that entire season to binge on just in advance of the series’ third and final season drops Aug. 3.
Season 2 isn’t quite as jubilant and carefree as the initial nine episodes, which followed a group of bored and imaginative Indigenous teens around their reservation in rural Oklahoma (the series is the first to be filmed entirely in the Sooner State). For one thing, they’re growing a tad older now with adulthood troubles starting to infiltrate their world that had centered chiefly on their desires to go to California. There’s still that hope, but without the youthful enthusiasm. Still, it’s a fine series to watch and vividly shows the hardships and boredom of life on the reservation.
Another reason to not stray too far from the couch on Aug. 3 is the fact that’s when the second batch of five episodes drops for the second season of Netflix’s “The Lincoln Lawyer.” The first batch came out July 6 which I devoured instantly and am now left hanging for the next five episodes, also dropping on Aug. 3. Why do bad things always happen to me?
