muppet corpse

If you’re still desperately thirsty after having some water, you probably need electrolytes. There are many options - eat a pickle, have a gatorade (or whatever brand you prefer), add an electrolyte packet to your water, sprinkle salt on some watermelon, make a fun drink with coconut water.

for my Euro pals

Water with salt for electrolyte replacement. Use whatever salt you have, you don't need fancy pink Himalayan salt. Warm water is fine, don't worry about making it cold. Just make sure it isn't hot.

Wet a rag and put it in your freezer for 20 minutes, then wrap it around your neck. As you take one out of the freezer, put another one in.

Run the coldest water you have access to over your wrists every 10 minutes or so. Veins are close to the surface here, and the cool water circulates and lowers your core temp ever so slightly. Do it repeatedly and you'll feel a little cooler over the course of an hour or so.

If you have tile, linoleum or hardwood, that's the place to sleep. If the heat is still oppressive at bedtime, use the rag trick on towels and sleep on those.

Most of your houses are built to keep heat in. If it gets cooler at night, sleep outside. Seriously.

If you have public buildings or transport with air conditioning, seek it out. Examples include shopping centers, movie theaters, libraries, community centers, restaurants, buses, trains, even your car.

Please check on your disabled and elderly neighbors. Also make contact with neighbors who live in upper flats. Invite them with you if you're going into town to find an air conditioned building. Help to heat proof their homes. Share your tips. Have them spend the day in your house if it's cooler.

For kids: playing with water is a great way to keep them occupied and help them stay cool. Kiddie pools, buckets, community pools, splash pads, sprinklers, trips to the lake, etc are all ways to keep your kids and yourself occupied. Never leave children alone while around water. If you need to leave, have another trusted adult take over for you.

Avoid cooking or baking if you can. Ovens and stovetops add a surprising amount of heat to your house. If you have shelf-stable foods or leftovers that don't need heating, now is the time to use them. Save cooking for cooler parts of the day if possible.

You're being targeted by one of the cleverest scams going right now, and the reason it works is uncomfortable: the email genuinely came from PayPal.

The trick is in the subject line, not the email

When most people think "phishing email," they picture sketchy senders, broken English, and links to weird domains. This scam is the opposite. The email passes every authenticity check — SPF, DKIM, DMARC, all green. It comes from PayPal's actual mail servers. The fonts are right. The footer is right. The unsubscribe link works. If you forwarded it to a security expert and asked "is this really from PayPal?" they'd have to say yes.

So how is it a scam?

Scammers have figured out that PayPal lets anyone send small amounts of money to anyone else, and that PayPal will dutifully email the recipient a notification. The scammer sends you a payout of, say, one Hungarian forint — about a quarter of a cent. PayPal's system then automatically generates and sends you a real, legitimate, fully-authenticated email confirming the transaction.

Here's the catch: the email's subject line is whatever the scammer typed when they set up the payout. PayPal doesn't sanitize it. So they write something terrifying like "Pending charge of USD 987.90 — call this number with questions" and PayPal's servers cheerfully deliver that subject line straight to your inbox, wrapped in a perfectly legitimate-looking notification.