temperate glory

The temperature has finally dropped to 70F for the first time since - let's see, I've been keeping a spreadsheet of the weather forecasts so I can be prepared for heat waves - since the end of April. Over 5 months. Maybe I can finally put away the fixings for chicken salad, which is my go-to dinner recipe on nights when it's too hot to cook, and bring back out the lentil soup which is a mainstay for winter.

Fortunately this summer the heat never got quite so continuously over 100F that I was forced to retreat to an air-conditioned hotel room as I was last year. Plus B's vigilance in running fans in open windows in the evening to cool the house down has been balm to our bodies even as it aggravates the electric bills. Fortunately we can afford to suffer through the latter.

In other news, one of the many great things about not being on FB is that I didn't even learn about the Great Outage of Monday until it was over. But now, thanks to the whistleblower, we're in for another orgy - for this has happened before - of social therapy for FB, where everybody goes around the circle and tells it what's wrong with it. And Z. issues heated denials that his company would ever do what the documents have just proved that it does do all the time.

In today's column, Leonard Pitts chides FB by pointing out that getting people to talk to one another doesn't necessarily bring them together, and he cites an interview his newspaper did 22 years ago with a historian pointing out the long history of the erroneous assumption that it does. But in fact knowledge that it's an error dates back in pop culture rather longer than 22 years:

Meanwhile, the poor Babel fish, by effectively removing all barriers to communication between different races and cultures, has caused more and bloodier wars than anything else in the history of creation.