47. It was a perfect day in Los Angeles. So perfect that even Shakespeare, had he lived another 370 years, might have said he himself had not the words to describe it. Everyone's experienced such a perfect day at least once. The sun was shining, and soft white clouds were parked in the deep blue sky. The temperature was perfect for shorts and flops. Not cool, not warm—just perfectly in‐between. A lazy breeze occasionally stirred the leaves on the trees.

Such a day isn't typical. Most days in LA are quite hot. Most evenings are quite cool, even nippy. Also, inland weather is not always the same as beach weather. Burning up in Pasadena, you hop into your car and drive toward Santa Monica, thinking of diving into the refreshing cool ocean. Once you near the 405, however, you remove your sunglasses. What happened, you think. Where'd the sun go, you wonder, as you eye the gray sky, roll up the windows, and turn the heat on in your car. This doesn't happen most of the time, but it happens enough that you learn to always pack a warm jacket and long pants for a trip to the beach.

June is a peculiar month. It's preceded by about two months of hot weather and followed by about six months of hot weather. But June itself is usually cool, with a month‐long gray sky that looks "rainy," but it never rains. Although many locals find June weather to be refreshingly cool, the local TV weather people complain daily. Every June day, they ask, "When is the 'June gloom' going to end?" They like to say "June gloom." It rhymes, sort of, and it makes them feel clever.

Eventually, of course, the gray June sky reverts to a blue sky, with its yellow sun and high temperature. For the next six months, the local TV weather people complain about how hot it is. They ask, "When will this weather cool down?" They get excited if the temperature drops five degrees. They get excited if they learn about a faraway Pacific storm. They tell viewers that, even though it's battering the coast of Japan, it might soon bring LA relief from the sun and the dry weather. Of course, it never does. They fill up their allotted time by pointing to every little city on the LA map and telling you its temperature, even though the temperature for one city is rarely one degree different from that of another city. It must be a boring job to be a weather person in LA. 6.0, 433