Rhubarb Is Good

As someone from a hot country that's regularly on fire, here's some tips:

WATER IS YOUR FRIEND! WATER! IS! YOUR! FRIEND! You can transfer SO much heat into this bad boy! You cannot cool down without water!

Wrists under the cold tap. Splash your face and the back of your neck. Fan yourself.

In some countries you can buy a little handeld fan with a water sprayer.

Damp tea towel around the neck. Stick an ice pack in there on hotter days.

Half fill a water bottle with water, stick in freezer. If you use a bottle with a straw, make sure it's lying on its side with the straw side up and out of the water. When frozen top up the rest of the way with tap water and off you go.

Desperate to cool off? Wet T-shirt. Sit in front of a fan. This will nuke it, just don't get hypothermia and don't fall asleep like this.

Cold showers are also your friend in summer. Some people get psyched up by these. Personally, I sleep like a baby, so I'm good to have them before bed. Just keep in mind that it takes a bit of time for the cool to circulate, so your body will tell you that you're colder than you actually are. I find that when I have cold showers I need to step out of the spray when I think I'm cold... I'll just wait, and thirty seconds later the temperature has evened out and I actually need to step under again. Rinse and repeat until you maintain coolness even after stepping out for a bit.

If you can't do cold showers, turn the cold shower on anyway and just stick your arms under. When they're cold, lift your arms up above your head. The sensation of cool blood draining into your body is fucking weird and kinda unpleasant but less unpleasant than being hot.

Feet in a tub of water with ice. Blood naturally flows to your extremities when hot, so take advantage of this. If you don't have a tub of ice water, sticking a wet rag on your feet in front of the fan works too, it's the less powerful version of the wet T-shirt.

Drinks lots of water but make sure that water has electrolytes as well. Stay in the shade.

Keep air circulating. Fans don't actually cool rooms down, they just help transfer heat from your body to the moisture on your skin or the air via evaporative cooling.

Block north facing windows early in the morning so the sun doesn't get in. If you're in the northern hemisphere, this is opposite for you. Keep in mind that if your home is brick, the bricks will still heat up and slowly release heat into your home even after the sun goes down so this will only do so much.

If it's hotter inside than outside, close all your windows but two, making sure they're on opposite sides of the house/unit you're in. Point a fan out of one window, making sure that the doors between the rooms with the open windows are all open. This will help create a mini pressure system in your home, pulling cooler air in and pushing the hotter air out via the fan. Bonus points if you can get that fan high up where the hot air rises; even within a single room the top is much hotter than the air by the floor. Adjust the amount of open windows based on how many fans you have, but generally you want more windows with fans open than windows without fans to keep the pressure correct.

Obviously, use your common sense for these. Not everything WILL work for you, just use the stuff that does and adjust what needs to be adjusted. Some of these will be impossible to use in the workplace but others you can still use. Others are best used at home. If humidity impacts your ability to use any of these, get a dehumidifier if that's an option, or use more ice instead of evaporation.

So the only reputation he has is ‘that bastard con artist who banked 19 years of aw-shucks-wormie-ness and used it to outrageously fleece everyone who’s almost anybody.’ Vader reading the report like…damn you Kenobi did you get HONDO to raise my son??

Jabba’s reaction to Luke’s message is INFINITELY funnier if we consider the idea that ‘Skywalker’ amongst the wretched local villainy (who mostly ignore imperial and rebel propaganda) is actually synonymous with TWO things - that brat who totally messed up the podrace bookies 25 years ago, and the infamous Anchorhead Con. Jabba gets this message about ‘Jedi’ and is like LOL i think the other Skywalker tried to pull some hotshit with that too before wimping out.

Everyone openly laughs like sure you’re a Jedi and I’ve got a bargain vaporator farm I want to sell you. 

“So this fucking—SKYWALKER, dude, have you ever heard the name Skywalker? You know what it means? A FUCKING ASSHOLE, that’s what it means. Like. The first one was bad enough, this little shit named Anakin who was fuckin’ NINE YEARS OLD and he just WON THE FUCKING BOONTA EVE PODRACE and set SIXTEEN bookies out of business and if I ever meet him I’m gonna set him on fire for it—

“And then this new one, Luke? Fuckin’ nobody, raised by his aunt and uncle out in the Wastes, little aw-shucks hick farm kid, the kind you could give him a five-credit piece and a ten-credit piece and he keeps taking the fiver because it’s BIGGER, that kind of simple, and then he comes into Mos Eisley one afternoon and sells his aunt and uncle’s moisture farm, right, I’ve been out there a few times, several of us have, and it’s a nice place as far as moisture farms go, mildly profitable, and the kid is fucking happy to get like two-thirds its value, so he sells the farm, right? TO NINETEEN DIFFERENT PEOPLE! Do you have any idea how much Jabba’s finance people had to do to get that sorted out? Nineteen fucking mortgages on ONE fucking property, puts every real estate con Jabba the Hutt’s entire CLAN ever pulled and we were on the WRONG SIDE OF IT! We had every pirate and smuggler from here to Corellia laughing at us! And THEN! And THEN—!

“So he pops up via hologram message acting like a DIPLOMAT from the REPUBLIC, claiming a title and rank from an extinct, defunct, ILLEGAL order and wanting to bargain with Jabba—are you fucking kidding me, BARGAIN WITH JABBA for a smuggler who’s up to his ass in debt when he’s responsible for that farm scheme, acting like he doesn’t even fucking REMEMBER it and expects that Jabba’s forgotten it too. Like. Absolute fucking idiot, and anticipating that Jabba’s just as stupid. And he offers a pair of droids as a gift. Like, built-in-the-Republic-era, random-ass droids that he probably picked up from the Jawas that morning for a few hundred credits and a junked ‘vaporator.

“I mean, Jabba’s seething here, but hey, free droids is free droids. Whatever. He takes the droids, throws things, orders a fight to the death between two gamblers who owed him money, killed one of his dancers at some point … and then Boushh shows up with fucking Chewbacca in chains—he’s Solo’s first mate, so Jabba was all happy about that, but not happy enough to pay the full bounty—and what’s Boushh do? Pull some gonads out from somewhere after all these years, and also pull out a fucking THERMAL DETONATOR! Going to blow us all to fuck if he doesn’t get his measley fifty thousand, and, well, there’s no arguing with crazy like that. 

“So now, if you’re keeping score, Jabba’s lost an absolute SHITLOAD of money and had his bookmaking industry fucked all to hell for like three years after the stunt from Skywalker the First, got screwed out of ANOTHER shitload of money in the farm scam by Skywalker the Sequel, got all but called an idiot to his face and insulted six times over by the same dude who’s apparently scammed so many people he’s forgotten who he has and hasn’t scammed, and got threatened out of fifty thousand credits by a second-tier bounty hunter IN FRONT OF HIS ENTIRE COURT.

“And then the next morning, what the fuck? Jabba’s favorite sculpture is gone, the one with Solo as its main ingredient that Boba Fett brought him. And Boushh is gone. And Jabba’s got a brand-new dancer chained up next to him. Night duty guy tells me Boushh unfroze Solo, and the new dancer girl IS Boushh, which, okay, you’re dealing with people like that and you look like that? You definitely need a helmet, but I feel like pretending she didn’t breathe oxygen was overkill. Anyway, then Skywalker shows up. All alone, no weapons, nothing, like he really believes in this Jedi shit. Arrogant little bastard, and we’re all laying bets on how Jabba’s going to kill him.

“So he talks a little, and fwoop! goes the trapdoor, and okay, everybody who bet on “Rancor” is doing a little happy dance, but then! BUT THEN! He fucking KILLS THE RANCOR! Drops its own cage door on its head and punches right through its skull! And—fucking NOBODY bet on that, which is a damn shame because everybody else would’ve just torn the winner apart out of sheer rage at that point and we coulda used some good bloodshed then, y’know? I mean, I dunno if you’ve ever met Jabba the Hutt, but he’s the kind of boss that’ll just go off and kill you for failing him or just because he’s angry at something. Just complete fucking asshole. I mean, he was pissed enough that everybody was worried for their safety, and so somebody dying messily right then would’ve calmed him down a bit.

“So Jabba’s big mad, and he gathers Skywalker and Solo and Chewbacca all together and says he’s gonna feed them to the Sarlacc, which is a nasty tentacled carnivorous plant out in the desert, so we all board the sail barge and have a nice little pleasure cruise—have you ever been to Tattoine? I’m fuckin’ kidding, it’s brutal. But hey, we get to see Skywalker executed, right? Wrong.

“Jabba offers them the chance to beg for their lives, and Solo calls him a slimy piece of worm-ridden filth, which, I mean, I could do better, y’know? If I’m about to die? Anyway, Skywalker goes up first, gets prodded to the edge, flips a salute off to who-knows-where, and does this little twist in midair, catches the fucking plank, and fucking SPRINGBOARDS himself back onboard, CATCHES HIS LIGHTSABER FROM MIDAIR where the one DROID shot it to him, and starts sending guards over the side, usually in pieces.

“So more guards rush forward to help, and there’s this huge fight, and fuckin’ BOBA FETT falls in, and while that’s going on? The fucking dancing girl has grabbed her chain and is FUCKING STRANGLING JABBA WITH IT! Like, I look over and he’s bucking and struggling and she’s pulling on that chain like anything, and then somebody hits me over the head with a bottle of Corellian brandy, and by the time I look again he’s pitched over dead! And nobody freaking bet on that!

“And then? Off they fucking go, Skywalker and Solo and Chewbacca and the dancing girl and the droids and one of the guards who I played sabacc with the other night and he owes me twenty credits! And that fucking Skywalker just cost me my job, and if I see him again I’m going to burn him to cinders myself!”

The man subsides, eyeing the gigantic ebony figure in front of him who, except for a couple of momentary starts as though he might say something, has been silently listening to him all this time.

Size-wise, Darth Vader has nothing on Jabba the Hutt, but somehow, he is scarier.

Finally, the dark form speaks. “You said you could do better.” A moment’s silence, and he clarifies. “If you were about to die.” He gets the impression that whatever monster lurks behind the helmet is smiling. “You are about to die now. Because you are a criminal, and because of what you have said about my son, Luke Skywalker. You have an opportunity to do better. Use it.”

The so-condemned criminal, late of Jabba’s palace guard, lets his jaw hang open unflatteringly for a moment while his brain catches up with events. HIS SON, which means …  

“YOU’RE Anakin Skywalker’s HUSBAND?”

The steady, hissing rhythm of Darth Vader’s rebreather actually stops dead as the Dark Lord straightens up as if stabbed with an electroprod.

The administration either got rid of or didn't listen to people who could explain the algae problem, and decided that the problem was because other administrations were just stupid and didn't know how to take care of the pool, and also saw an opportunity for grifting some money.

So they painted the bottom of the pool dark blue, which absorbed more heat from the sun and made the algae bloom faster than ever. So they dumped hydrogen peroxide in it, which only killed the algae around the edges and also made the new paint job peel.