Wednesday, January 22, 2014

33 freaking degrees

[As you might guess, I wrote this post this summer and never got around to posting it.]

Today while driving from my home in North Hollywood to Santa Monica, I experienced either a 30 or 33° drop in temperatures. (There was a brief pocket of 110° temperature according to my car's thermometer but I have more confidence in the 107°).

A 30° change is admittedly very rare, however a 20° drop is not that unusual. Furthermore, you can get those 20° to 30° deltas without even leaving the Los Angeles city limits, let alone leaving the county.

All of this goes back, though admittedly in a roundabout way, to our long-standing thread about the difficulty of generalizing from city to city and the danger of having one region dominate the pool of journalists and pundits.

Not only are there sacrifices that are relatively minor in Los Angeles but which would be devastating in some other parts of the country (like making do with space heaters), there are sacrifices that would be devastating in one part of town but not that big a deal in another part of town (like doing with air conditioning).

[postscript: I was in Santa Monica a few weeks ago. It was 79° -- four degrees warmer than it was in North Hollywood.]

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