Sunday, January 31, 2010

4 degrees

When you land in an airport and the Pilot tells you it's 4 degrees with a wind-chill making it -10 you know you could be in for a long day, although I am convinced that whenever you get to the extremes of temperatures adding or subtracting 10 degrees doesn't have any additional effect. (I also realize -10 is not a real extreme if you live in Siberia, Fargo or Wasilla but for normal city people it's pretty darn cold). The point is that for me -4 feels exactly like +4 in the same way 105 feels just like 115.

Basically when it gets colder than a certain level, assuming you're not outside for 20 hours, there is no way my body can tell anymore . These are the times that as long as you going to freeze your ass off regardless of how many layers you have on. The other thing is that whenever you get to the edge of the normal range of weather in your particular region people go completely nuts and the temperature is all they can talk about. It's not like the human body can't handle 24 degrees but when you over hear conversations in an elevator you feel like people are contestants on some extreme reality show.

It got me to thinking about an article I read about in India where the temperatures had gotten unseasonably cold and hit 40 degrees and the poor people where so cold they were burning their furniture in a bonfire to stay warm. The pictures looked like it was -50 with them bundled up like a bunch of 20 year old snowboarders. The best thing about the story was that there were guys saying they got frost-bite while the interviewer was basically wearing sandals and a Hawaiian shirt...


Sent from my Verizon Wireless BlackBerry

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