August 31, 2007

The devil arrived in Burbank and changed the temp to 116. Too afraid to complain out of fear of heat retritbution.

August 30, 2007

Heat means business. It means sweat and blotchy T-Shirts and carrying washcloths or hand towels in public. Workers and slackers. Adults and children. Walkers and bussers. All of us bide our time, just waiting for that boastful sun to give us a break and pick on the other side of the globe for a while.

August 29, 2007

When someone who lives in Bakersfield asks you if it is always this hot here, you know it's real dang hot. Temps hovered in the 120s today. At least in the minds of many.

August 28, 2007

Amazing eighty-eight. Hippity-hot man, no joke. The sun in Los Angeles doesn't give a rats ass about responsibility to dates and seasons. It shines here like it does because it is free to be seasonless.

August 27, 2007

What was all that sentimental romantic yang-yang about grey skies and cozy end-of-summer-back-to-school cloudy weather talk for the past two days? Getting a break from the blistery flames of 90 degree heat is a lot like weekend release from a detention center or catching your boss in a compromising emotional moment. It is an view-changing yet fleeting experience. The clouds, well they can cloud your judgment. The sun came back today with such memory-erasing gusto, I could close my eyes for the next seven days and still see it.

August 26, 2007

In what almost shook the entire foundation of what 80 and Sunny is based on, the Los Angeles sky presented as a pile-up of gentle grey cottontails today. Actual rain drops fell for several consecutive minutes in the early afternoon. It was heavenly, homey, and comforting.

August 25, 2007

The signal to the end of summer came today, the last Saturday of August. What appeared as little grey yesterday came back for a repeat performance today, this time bringing a bit of a sprinkle in the northern valleys. It is good, a welcome change. It sure won't be a lasting change but for just this weekend we can pretend that we should be out gathering dry goods for the impending hibernation period. Grey days make you a creative forward-thinker like that.

August 24, 2007

The beauty of today was that it was almost nearly kind of overcast for a bit. Hints of fall and nostalgia surfaced in the .04% cloudy sky. It seemed cooler. Some people in the back to school mood sported light sweaters after 5pm. In a stable weather environment like Los Angeles, one lets the chronological date, as opposed to physical temperature, determine clothing choices. Of course in SoCal, irreverence is essential. But, with less than two weeks left to wear white accessories, the light sweaters seem a bit excessive, no?

August 23, 2007

Pleasant weather, the sunny and eighty two variety, encourages no ill will, no rebellion, no upheaval, and no motivation other than to enjoy, enjoy, and enjoy.

Margaritaville.

August 22, 2007

Lovely lower 80s today.

Guest writer in regards to the LA light:

"I arrived in LA at night so it wasn't until the next morning, when I stepped out of a small apartment on San Vicente Boulevard, that I saw this light. And it thrilled my soul. I feel lucky to live with that light...

...And the light is inspiring and energizing. Even with smog, there's something about that light that's not harsh, but bright and smooth. It fills me with the feeling that all possibilities are available. I don't know why. It's different from the light in other places..."

Master David Lynch, Catching the Big Fish

August 21, 2007

It was actually pleasant today. Hotly pleasant but it didn’t cook in the afternoon like the bun broiling afternoons of the past week. Looks like we are going to be getting a break and going back down to our normal, pleasant, and expected 80 and sunny weather. It’s much better this way. Everything seems thicker when it’s in the nineties. Traffic and air, not to mention people’s boastful hot weather attitudes dominate steamy days.

You ever notice when you’re out in the Inland Empire and you take a mention at how hot it is and people will say something like, “THIS isn’t hot, it’s only onehundredandinsertsingledigit. Last week, it was HOT.” I love when people adamantly identify with local weather. It reminds me of home sweet freezing Michigan home. You cannot just roll up and tell someone how hot their town is. Funny how this doesn’t work with Los Angeles sunshine. Will there ever come a day where someone will comment on how beautiful and sunny it is and I will defensively respond by saying, “oh THIS isn’t sunny and beautiful… you should have seen it last week…”

People just don’t get defensive about beauty. They get defensive about suffering and experiencing challenging weather. And this is the kind of human insight I am uncovering through my careful analysis of Los Angeles sunbeams.

August 20, 2007

When you open the door to step outside into the Los Angeles daylight it is exactly like looking at the end of a reel of projected film. Where the picture gets blown out into a bright light. It's the hot-as-a-devils-toilet-seat-whitewashed-out-Kodablasted-days of August.

August 19, 2007

Even those of us not going back to school still use the impending end of summer as a motivator to get out and enjoy the weather no matter how hot it gets. Los Angeles likes to test us, to see just how dedicated to nostalgia we really are. At 93 degrees and a UV index of one hundred kazillion, will these sad sacks still try to Bar-B-Q, jog, socialize, garden, and wash cars outside? You becha. The great humans-in-an-oven experiment continues.

August 18, 2007

The only thing hotter than today was the heat put on Seanez in the top of the 12th. It's getting to the point in the summer where it's becoming too hot to do stuff. Like remembering to update a weather blog while you are still in protective air conditioning. Once outside in the unforgiving heat elements, the human brain is unreliable and fickle.

August 17, 2007

Summer days with the number seven in them should have fun-loving temperatures in the SEVEN-ties. Alas, today was a rule breaker at over 90 degrees again. The heat was complimented by a sunlight so strong, rocks melted on the landscaped lawns in Hancock Park.

August 16,2007

Outside with your back to the sun your shoulder blades feel like they are the first point of contact of a bomb blast. On the front of your body, any part of skin that is touching something else covered with skin, pools up with sweat. Your eyes squint even when they look in the opposite direction of the big orange ball. Everything is refracting and reflecting and dispersing and expounding the omnipotent rays. And they are hot. The rays give off a meaningful traveling heat. A dry broiler heat and westerly wind that encourages movement from one piece of shade to another until we wind up in the ocean.

August 15, 2007

If you are alone in the Inland empire and it is 102 degrees fahrenheit, is it still hot? If you are in Riverside with another person, does it feel like 204 degrees?

August 14, 2007

Taking sunshine for granted is a native business.

It hasn't rained for months. Griffith Park is on fire again. We could use some some respit in the form of water droplets - either rain or low-lying clouds. It's so hot and bright it's hard not to be convinced that our brains are shrinking at least 2% due to dehydration and sun cookery.

August 13, 2007

Los Angeles proved today that it isn’t always predictable. It isn’t always 80 and sunny. Occasionally, like in August, this little town likes to play desert so all of the residents can pretend that they are walking through the Mojave when really it’s just another trip to Sears on Santa Monica. Just about 18 degrees hotter than usual.

August 12, 2007

Mid 80s - Hot in and out of the sun today.

The brightness of the sun is reminiscent of student film lighting. Or maybe television news anchor lighting. No matter where people are - should I say no matter where they are staged or blocked or directed - a vicious keylight blasts out the tops of their shoulders and casts undereye shadows. It's artificially dramatic and unflattering to reality.

The Los Angeles sun sets no stage for complex emotions. You can't cry here in this lighting, on this day, with this sunshine, feeling this breeze, in front of these people and those palm trees at the Long Beach airport.

August 11, 2007

Southern California Report from Central California

Not far enough away to have someone cover for me so I have decided to give a projected forcast. It was 98 degrees and seriously sunny in the Kings Canyon canyon bottom so I can only imagine that Los Angeles weather was similar, sunny, and minus 15 degrees. Lucky.

August 10, 2007

Absent. Late. Tardy.
Sometimes you are bathed in light. Othertimes you are in a covered veilof gentle glowing light. Somedays like august 10th, you are lambasted in heaty and moggy light.

August 9, 2007

Guest writer PKV:

Today: mugginess and fogginess combined to create one totalized feeling.

In a different town muggy is already tied to foggy but in LA muggy is not always tied to foggy so you need a conjunctive term like moggy.

August 8, 2007

About 80 degrees and yes, sunny today. But what you have to understand is that it is sunny in your immediate environment. To experience variance in your Los Angeles weather experience you have to look to the skyline or to the hills. Clarity and depth of field make all the difference.

The hills today were lightly visible through cheesecloth like smog. They looked like a needlepoint stitch-by-numbers craft project just waiting for the right crafter to bring the color to the forefront.

Sometimes you just have to see the possibilities. Some days you have to use less imagination. Today wasn't one of those days.

August 7, 2007

Today was a gorgeous eighty some degrees served with a smog-in-the-morning and lush haze compote and finished with a clear afternoon blue bath shooter.

A sunny day can trick you into thinking everything is going your way. Los Angeles has a stop-gap system for making you think this for too long and it involves traffic. Sometimes its really congested and sometimes people just drive the wrong way down a street.

Similar to this psychological stop-gap, Los Angeles is known for what we in the weather world call inversions. An inversion is a layer of warm air in the atmosphere that prevents the rise of cooling air and traps pollutants beneath it. So all this glorified warm weather is actually just trapped pollutants. If I weren't writing a weather blog I would get crackin' on an in depth celebrity metaphor and publish it right here scientology.

God bless.

August 6, 2007

Today 80 and Sunny takes some science quotes from David Carle’s book, “Introduction to Air in California” 2006, Univeristy of California Press

“Blue is scattered twice as effectively as green light and about four times more than red light. Violet is actually scattered the most, but our eyes are not very sensitive to that range; we perceive blue better.”

How could anyone prove that you don’t see a purple sky? You could say you are more sensitive to violets and you were just born that way.

“…Without atmospheric gases and their abilities to scatter sunlight, our sky would be as black as outer space[he cannot be talking about Los Angeles], where light passes through but is not made visible by encounters with air molecules… Deep blue skies are dry and clean, free of smoke, dust, and haze. Water vapor and haze particles turn the sky whitish or gray because they scatter more light across the whole range of wavelengths…”

Which is why when we talk about the blue skies of Los Angeles we mean Dodger blue. It’s a scattered, fractal, gaseous version of deep mountain blue and it compliments our perfect 80 degree weather like the kind we had again today.

August 5, 2007

Take the center of the flash on a flash bulb and throw it at a white wall. Blow out the contrast on your user-friendly-iphoto. Watch a movie in the mid-day and then step outside. Pull the curtains back on a hungover Sunday morning. Get smacked upside the head. Times that all by a hundred, add 80 degrees and about nine and a half hours and you have the Los Angeles summer sun today.

August 4, 2007

Some cloud puffs, tiny airy puffs, appeared in the mid-afternoon today. They were just enough to cut the sun a like a splash of water in a glass of scotch. Oh it was still sunny mind you but, the sky was mostly clear after 2pm. Clear and sunny enough to inspire a green-screen like experiment with the neighbors TV antennae - because it looked just so good perched high up against the crisp blueness of this fine Saturday atmosphere.

August 3, 2007

Today’s weather confirmed that August means get up and getcher fitness walking in before five am. It means don’t expect your Asiatic lilies to open up by dinner time. It was the kind of dry curling-up-brown-edged heat with the blazingly blazing sun that melts glaciers, certain plastics, and pancake make-up. Grab your sunshields, it’s only the third of the month.

August 2, 2007

Days like today make questions like, "Do you want that toasted?" seem like an insult.
Isn't everything already toasted? Take your time carving that avocado dear sandwich artist, there is a back-up on the 210.

August 1, 2007

A new month, a same sun.

Sometimes the sun through a car window is so hot you feel like your skin is bruising.

Byproducts of the sun on a 80-plus-degree day:

Road Vapors: The illusion of steam coming up from paved road areas. Visible after 11am and often mistaken for spirits of the undead after 4:30pm.

Solar Flare: Mostly seen on rear windows of BMW X5s where the window meets the wiper. The uninterrupted reflection of the sun on the metal part of the wiper apparatus creates a blinding perma-flash flare that is visible from up to fourty car-lengths behind. The flare should be avoided because it causes permanent sight damage.