We have had a blast of hot weather here in DC the past few days. The kind of hot that curls your hair and lets you know what a sausage feels like in the skillet. The weatherman has said the heat index is up around 107 with the humidity in the 90% range and the dew points in the high 70s, which means of course you can sweat just by looking out the window.
It reminds me of August in Pinehurst!
People would come from hundreds of miles to play golf in the blazing NC sun at midday. And they would pay large dollars for the privilege of being taken to the hospital with heat exhaustion. The natives knew better. We would stay inside or by the pool in the heat of the day and if anyone wanted to do any outdoor activity, they did it after 5:00 in the evening. Unless of course you had to prime tobacco. That was a fate worse than death.
See tobacco plants are grown in sandy soil and sprayed with a nematicide that kills the worms that eat the plant. And it smells like Bhopal. And when you snap the leaves off the plant, it spits tar, yes the brown sticky garbage that is in cigarettes, all over your hands. It gives you a contact head rush that if you are not careful can result in nicotine poisoning.
And the people who pick the weed work from 4:30 in the morning until 8:30 at night in the blazing sun with no place to hide. And they don't get paid all that much. Not to mention battling the snakes and other critters who hide beneath the tobacco plants to get out of the sun! Think about that the next time Joe Camel tries to persuade you it's a good thing to put a bunch of leaves in your face and set them on fire.
D.
1 comment:
It really is amzing that people want to smoke at all. And I agree with you about the heat, but it is actually a bit cooler for you than me. It over 110 & I stopped looking at the heat index because its just too damn depressing.
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