There's only so large I'm allowed to make this ... But it's a map of Spain, Portugal, the Straits of Gibralter, and associated areas. 40C is something like 120F.
I may also have to do today's post all as part of the caption, center-justified, because of the limits of Blogger, a very limited program (except for all the others, which don't exist).
I post this map because it's only April, and on places like www.reddit.com/r/AmerExit which is dedicated to ways people in the US can escape the US, Portugal is much-cited as a fairly affordable way to get into Europe.
If it gets up into 120F in April, who knows how horrible this summer will be. 120F is Israel temperatures, yes, one thing that's not mentioned much about "making Aliyah" or moving / "returning" to Israel as a Jew, is that the place gets super hot.
I noticed a summer or two ago that the Earth's temperatures might be imagined, North to South, like a boat. People who go on cruises and are prone to seasickness are advised to get a berth near the center line of the ship, as there's the least movement up and down as the ship bobs around and does its thing. Likewise, I've seen - vicariously thank goodness - some wild heat fluctuations over the last few years, all in areas distant from the equator.
There were crazy wildfires in Australia, the more populated parts of Australia being the Southern, more temperate, areas. There was the "heat dome" over the Pacific Northwest, and some years earlier than that, a crazy hurricane, named Sandy, up in the New York City area.
Meanwhile, on r/hawaii, I'm seeing complaints about a lot of things (mostly homeless bums and "mainland" behavior like gun violence) but nothing about temperatures. Not cold, not heat, nothing. Therefore I conclude that the equator, with respect to temperature swings, is like the center line of the ship.
Now, if things get so hot overall that even on the equator it becomes difficult to live, then that's the end game. By then the parts of the Earth further North and South will be unlivable.
People don't seem to realize that they can move to, say, Newfoundland or Iceland or Greenland, and as temps get warmer, it will suddenly be a nice, say New Jersey or Carolinas climate there. It will pass through that kind of climate more often within the wide temperature swings, but that's what's gonna get ya: the wide temperature swings.
As a wise person put it, we humans may be a very adaptable species, but the plants and animals we depend on are not. Not only will the wide temperature swings confuse the hell out of the plants, canceling a lot of harvests, but the other mistake people make is to think that just because they move to Greenland, the Sun itself will cater to them personally by changing the very angle of itself to the Earth. They assume there will be the same amount of direct sun making for good growing as you get in, say, Georgia. (Either Georgia will do.)
Instead, now, it's going to be the same weak, slanting sun there is there now, the Sun will not change its angle just to accommodate the whims of American Boomers. So the sun will be weak and slanting as always, plus the wild temperature swings.
I'm not saying the band of say 20 degrees North and South of the equator will be a way out of doom I'm just saying it will be the driest place on the lifeboat before the whole thing sinks.
And sink it will, whether in 10 years or 100, it will. Temperatures high enough to cook all life on earth other than some single-celled organisms and perhaps some of the life forms adapted to live off of deep undersea vents, is already "baked in".
And if we suddenly went to zero emissions, all the smokestacks suddenly stopped smoking, then the McPherson Paradox would kill us even faster. The McPherson Paradox is another thing that's ignored by almost everyone. The smog in the air actually keeps the Earth from heating up by blocking sunlight. Make the air crystal-clear and we cook extra fast and it happens within weeks.
It's all very cheerful, isn't it? I just want to go home where my memories are, and live whatever years I have left. "When the world is running down, you make the best of what's still around" - some musical guy.
I wasn't going to go anywhere today but was going to rest my back by staying in bed and getting back to work reading "Angry White Pyjamas", a book by an English guy who, with two buddies, goes through a sort of "combat Aikido" course that's taught to the Tokyo riot police, but that civilians can go through also. I'd read about 1/3 of the way through and then dropped it, so I'm starting from the beginning again.
I woke up at around 3:30, thought that's OK because if this were a bank day I'd have time to be "out the door by 4" which is the correct way to do it because it rhymes. But it not being a bank day, I got up anyway and had my black coffee and Lipovitan and aspirin. My back still hurts but maybe hurts a bit less and being a restless sort of person I guess, I decided I'd go out.
I gathered up trash, and books and things to donate, and put together my pledge for the temple for May, so I had a few useful things to do. I took off a bit after 5, dropped off the trash in a trash can on Taylor, went by the temple and dropped off my pledge, then went to the little free library there in Japantown and dropped off the other stuff.
Then I went to Nijiya and got a can of Dutour coffee which I put on my card and got $40 cash back. This works out perfectly, $100 of my last check staying in the bank, some going into savings around here, and my spending just the right amount. I was "allowed" to take out about $43 more, and Dotours are pretty cheap at Nijiya, only something like $2.25.
After buying the coffee I put it in my bike bag and went back in and got an unagi don, what the hell, life is short. I got talking with the tall white guy who knows some Japanese, who was talking about his wife doing some Japanese traditional dancing. I asked if she was involved with the flute playing and taiko drumming I'd heard yesterday, and he said no, but somehow it came out that they're moving to Henderson, Nevada and will be gone in a couple of weeks.
I said it's a popular thing, that there are a lot of people moving there etc. He liked that there are a lot of seniors' activities, and I agreed, and said my boss's daughter had moved to Nevada and she's only in "her high 40s I think".
I kept it to myself that it's idiotic to move to a place where the stupid is so concentrated as Nevada or any of the other stupid-rich places people are moving like Florida and Texas. Why doesn't this guy bugger off to Japan? If he's got a Japanese wife and knows some of the language, it being so much cheaper there to live, why Nevada?
I ate my unagi don out front, enjoying the nice if a bit windy weather and the people walking around. It was nothing like yesterday but there were a lot of people around and lots of kids. The unagi don was even really good, with a higher quality of unagi than I usually find in ready-made bentos.
I decided to ride downtown and look around, maybe see how the "SoFa Street Fair" is going. I wandered over there and it's both crowded and loud. I don't mind so much if the loudness is actual good music, but these were just 2nd rate cover bands by the sound of them, trying out their "original" (not very original) material. It was pretty Meh and the line to use the bathroom was long so I just turned around and called it a day.
I wandered home, taking a street over from my usual streets, hoping as Sunday is a day people put things out, that I might find some old (but clean) T-shirts to clean my bike with. I didn't find any but I found a nice mug and a blower fan.
I got back here tested the blower - it works. I washed the mug and found it holds a bit more than my old one. The new one was apparently a souvenir, and say's Cars Land on it, with tons of little pictures of the cars/characters from the movie Cars. It's actually pretty cool, as much as I hate cars I like that movie.
On my way home I'd also stopped at a dumpster I haven't stopped at for a long time because I usually don't find much but this time around I got green beans and some of those little red super hot peppers. I cut up the beans and made a dressing and put the bean salad in the fridge for later. Then I got to work making some home-made chili oil. I washed and cut up the chilis, dried them a bit, and took a mix of peanut and sesame seed oil and simmered them in the oil along with some garlic flakes, until it seemed like it was infused with the flavor OK, then ran it through a coffee filter into the bottle the peanut oil was in. Now I just have to get some gyoza and try this oil out.
Dinner was some corned beef and the bean salad. The salad was a bit fibrous, in other words, just right. I'm reminded of an episode of Sponge Bob, where Mermaid Man and Barnacle Boy have fallen under some kind of a spell due to eating the competition's burgers. Spongebob stuffs a Krabby Patty burger in each of them and then waits, dumbfounded, waiting for it to work. "Oh yeah!", he exclaims, "They're old! They need fiber!" So he tips a good amount of stuff marked "Fiber" into each of them, and then the cure works.
The main thing is, the idea of taking stuff out of a dumpster and eating it, doing things with it, was utterly foreign to me in my 20s, back in the 80s. And it was a social disaster that one side of the First Insurance building in Honolulu looked out over, among other things, a really great Goodwill that I discovered and started shopping at. Nowadays, I'd gain points with co-workers for finding cool clothes there, but at time, I lost a ton of points. At least now it's cool to bargain-hunt and scrounge.
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