How to Dress for Extremely Hot Weather (Seriously)

Ironically, my current stomping grounds of north Georgia did NOT suffer from the record-breaking heatwave recently; the high-pressure system that turned most of the continental US into a bake oven ended a bit west of me, which meant my neighborhood was actually cooler than more northerly climes for most of the past week. This in turn inspired me to take to social media so as to tell my northern friends "How terrible. You poor thing. I feel very very sorry for you right now." And since I merely typed that statement onto a social media site, said friends could neither see my facial expression nor hear my tone of voice, both of which would immediately indicate "She's lying through her crowned teeth right now. She doesn't feel sorry for us at ALL. If anything, her soul is being corroded by a scorching schadenfreudey envy of the 'Serves you RIGHT. See how the other half lives??!' variety...."

Having said that, here is some genuine non-sarcastic advice for people sweltering under unusually hot temperatures, specifically conditions that are hot and humid: ignore everything you've ever heard along the lines of "Cotton is a comfortable fabric in hot weather." That might be true for hot and dry climates -- I've never actually lived in one myself, so I wouldn't know -- but cotton is terrible in humid conditions because it hoards moisture, and feels wet too.

Up north, anytime there was a brutal winter cold snap, there would always be "news you can use" stories advising how to dress in layers against the cold, and those stories always said "Do NOT wear a cotton layer closest to your skin, because if you perspire the cotton will stay wet and ironically increase your risk of hypothermia." Despite this, it took me much, much longer than it should have, to figure out "Hmm, so, if cotton makes you feel wetter and sweatier in cold weather, perchance might it do the same in hot?"

True fact: until I moved to Georgia three summers ago almost every casual summer garment I ever owned was some form of cotton, and I figured it was a fact of life that "when you personally are sweaty and gross, so too are the clothes you have on." Which is indeed the case -- IF those clothes are cotton.

The two fabrics you want to wear in hot and humid conditions are linen or rayon (also sold as "viscose" or "bamboo.") Linen is a more high-maintenance fabric -- it wrinkles if you look at it too hard, and (at least on me) somehow always manages to look baggy and ill-fitting even when a garment is cut to your precise size and shape. Rayon has some advantages over linen -- not nearly as high maintenance, and many forms of it do not hold ANY body heat at all, making it ideal for high temperatures -- but according to an article I read, some people dislike rayon precisely for that reason: they say the "cool" feel of the fabric on a hot day can come across as almost "slimy" to the touch. I wouldn't know about this, however, because I only wear rayon on days sweaty enough that EVERYTHING feels slimy, since I'm touching it with a damp and sweaty hand. Also, I've noticed a wide variation in quality between various types of rayon -- some of it is so nice, it looks and feels identical to silk, linen or cotton; some is so cheap it looks more like that rubbery polyester used in really bad 1970s leisure suits.

For days when the temperature would be pleasant except the humidity makes it too hot (or a tiny bit too chilly), silk is an excellent fabric: it stays dry to the touch as does linen or rayon, but holds noticeably more body heat than linen or cotton of similar thickness, meaning even very thin silk is best avoided in high-heat conditions.

Under NO circumstances do you want to wear nylon, spandex or polyester in hot humid weather. Even cotton is better than those three.

End message. We now return to your irregularly scheduled programming. Trump sucks.

The "Historically Rich" Game

There is a little game I like to play (or train of thought I like to ride, or whatever label or metaphor you choose), especially when I'm reading or watching well-researched historical fiction or non-fiction: imagine you're going back to live in a certain historic era, and bringing with you various items from our modern time so that in the past, you can sell these items and get rich. What items do you buy now to sell then?

Of course the game has rules: whichever time period you choose, you can only bring items that actually existed back then -- no carrying anachronisms like plastic or artificial fabric to Shakespeare's England. You can't get rich by "inventing" or "discovering" something before its time, only by selling already-existing expensive things. (The one exception is: you can bring modern versions of things whose modern-ness is not detectable by ordinary human senses, only via scientific testing which didn't exist then. For example: you can have linen or silk cloth dyed with artificial modern dye to reproduce Tyrian purple or other super-expensive natural colors, because fake vs. real Tyrian purple dye can only be detected via chemical testing which people back then couldn't do anyway. If you're going to a time where transparent glass existed but was very expensive, you can have modern mass-produced glass provided it looks and feels identical to the super-expensive stuff Venetians were producing, even though modern glass is made by a different process and likely has some detectable chemical differences as well.)

You're limited to spending $1,000 in our time buying things to take back. However, you cannot spend more than $50 on any one item or "type" of item -- for example, if you're going back to Elizabethan England, you'll definitely want to bring some black peppercorns, since they were literally worth their weight in gold ... but you can't spend more than $50 on pepper or "spices" in general.

Also, for purposes of the game, you only need focus on "things you sell to get rich," not "things intended for personal use." The thousand dollars does not cover your personal clothing, food, furnishings or medicine; assume that's all taken care of.

Things you can legally acquire for free (via Craigslist, roadside garbage salvage and the like) CAN be added to your list without counting against your $1,000 spending limit. (When I lived in northern Virginia, I remember one of my neighbors once threw away a broken dresser with one of those big rounded unframed beveled-edge mirrors. The mirror had many chips along its edges, which makes it garbage by modern standards -- but if you went back to a time after perfect glass mirrors were invented but were still hyper-expensive luxuries, you could take that chipped mirror, use a glass cutter to cut it into un-chipped smaller pieces, and add the mirrors to your list without counting any of it against the $1,000 spending limit.)

Also, I confess: I've never played the game to the full extent of writing out a complete list of at least 20 different items plus freebies -- it's more like "I'm really enjoying this well-researched novel about life in an early Mesopotamian Bronze Age city ... hmm, if I went there to live I'd bring $50 worth of pre-1982 copper pennies -- that alone is enough scrap copper to set me up VERY nicely in an early Bronze Age city. Technically, any such pennies I find in the street don't count toward the $50 limit either. Also, I'd want $50 worth of rough lapis lazuli from one of those online gemstone or geology wholesalers... or should I buy $50 worth of tumbled-gemstone lapis lazuli beads instead?"

So .. what sort of el cheapo or even el free-o modern items would you bring back to various time periods?