The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

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Yesterday on the South End the thermometer hit 100 plus degrees. I know this is the banana belt, but even so, this is scary stuff. And today the meteorologists are running around with their hair on fire, yelling Excessive Heat Warning to any and all of us who think 80 degrees is hot as a Hell in a propane truck explosion. Today, they predict, we’ll hit 105 and Seattle and Gomorrah will peak at 111, melting freeways and turning bridges to goo.

Now, God forbid anyone politicize this any more than critical race relations, no global warming talk here, just a small blip on the meteorological record book, a mere 10 plus degrees warmer than ANY TEMPERATURE RECORDED ANY TIME OF THE YEAR EVER! Well, since the dinosaurs…. Just in the history of homo sapiens. I’m going to run down to the garden and plant watermelons and pineapples, fifty fifty I get a harvest. Next year I’ll plant papayas and banana palms, all kinds of exotic tropical flowers and wait for the anteaters and monkeys to migrate north, new garden vermin.

Triple digit temperatures on the South End, in case you live in Tucson or Yuma, aren’t exactly normal here, about as likely as rain that is half frogs and toads. I’m not one of those people who see climate change in every unusual rainstorm, hurricane, heat wave or cold snap. And no way am I going to argue with my neighbor with the historic TRUMP 2020 sign on his tree that will no doubt stay there til it rots or he can replace it with the TRUMP 2028 banner, but … geez, it’s hard to watch the world heating up every year this past decade or two without acknowledging that maybe, just maybe, even probably, all right, definitely, this greenhouse we call Earth is growing hotter. More hurricanes, more hundred year floods, more historic droughts, and yeah, triple digit heat waves on even the South End.

I get that one party is beholden to the gas and oil and coal industry. So I understand they’ll fight tooth and nail to keep digging and drilling and burning hydrocarbons and deny the remotest possibility of any of that being responsible for our heat wave this week. I get that. Doesn’t say much for profiles in courage but after the past few years I think we know that courage left D.C. on a fast coal burning belching train long long ago. Me, I don’t have kids, don’t have to worry about a future much beyond a couple more decades at best. But the folks with a stake in the future? You tell me. That stake seems more like one to the heart. In a couple of days the temperatures should return to the old normal. But not mine. History will not be kind. Course, we just won’t teach it, I guess.

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If you’re like me (I know, you hope you’re NOT!), you’ve been diverted lately from the usual political comedies by the tragedies in Houston and now Florida which is in the crosshairs of Hurricane Irma. Irma? Who comes up with these names, some bored yahoo in the basement of the National Storm Appelation Department? And if you’re like me, you feel lucky to be torn away from the 24/7 drumbeat of Trump Tweets and maybe you even feel a little guilty considering the suffering of folks down there in the Bible Belt whose God has apparently forsaken them.

But now along comes that bombastic bomb thrower Rush Limbaugh to suggest the hurricanes are nothing more than liberal conspiracies to alarm the masses and thereby open the door for legislation on Global Warming, as big a hoax to the Rushter as the notion that Obama was born in the same country as him. Lies, all lies! A conspiracy of the left! An evil plot to destroy America! But he can stop them, maybe only he can stop them, by broadcasting the truth from his beacon of Brietbart babble.

Thank God for the Rushman! Faux hurricanes! Who’d have thought the Left could stoop so low. Bogeyman meteorology!! What’s next? Glaciers supposedly melting? Polar bear uprisings? Icebergs plowing into San Francisco? Is there nothing too low for these liberals to stoop to?

Apparently not, according to Herr Limbaugh. But … today he has decided to, well, let’s just say he’s decided to play it safe. He’s evacuating himself from the phoney baloney hurricane that’s nothing but liberal hot air. Not, I’m sure, to protect himself. No, the man is far too courageous for that. Truth, he would tell you himself, is all the defense he needs. The mouth is mightier than the sword. Or the whirlwind. Or whatever …. No, I’m sure he’s taking a small break from the routine of Savior, maybe indulging in a much needed vacation. Either way, I’m sure we could use a much needed vacation from Rush. And if that hurricane should actually make landfall with 150 mile sustained winds, don’t think it’s proof the libs were right. Probably brought on by the sudden vacuum of the Rushster gone silent.

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