It’s August. If you live in the northern hemisphere, you know that means it’s 35C (95 F) outside. Unless you’re in Europe right now, in which case you don’t know how hot it is because all the thermometers are under water. As is your house, your car and your office building.

Anyway, because it’s boiling out, officials have once again released their hot weather advisory: you’re instructed to take in plenty of fluids, stay indoors, and turn off the air conditioner.

Yes, you read that right. Energy managers were absolutely shocked to discover that power usage has gone through the roof this month. So they’ve asked everyone to please just stop using electricity.

“We just cannae take much more of this!” said Ontario Hydro chief engineer Jimmy Doohan, in a recent interview. “Our dilithium crystals are gaen to blow, laddie!”

If this were a one time request or a special circumstance, I wouldn’t mind shutting off a few lights and such, to ease the strain on the system. However, I don’t know about your local utility, but mine has been completely surprised, stunned and flabbergasted by August power usage, every year, since about, oh, 500 BC. You’d think by now they’d have say, a backup plan, or something.

Of course, these are the same people who are totally surprised by snow.

In Canada.

In February.

“We cannae do it!” said Chief Snowplough Driver Montgomery Scot in an interview last winter. “If we keep up this speed we’re gaen to blow up!

All right, maybe I’m being a little hard on my regional administrators. After all, humans have a long history of unexpecting the expected. For example, in my copy of the “Big Book of Bad Plannin-” (they ran out of room for the title), there’s evidence to suggest unpreparedness started as early as the cave days. Here’s one cave painting, translated:

CRO: Wot you say we put campsite here?
MAG: But isn’t dis in path of annual mammoth stampede?
NON: Don’t be silly. Dat only happen last year. And year before.
CRO: Wot dat noise?
[Thunder of several thousand large animals approaching]
MAG: Argh!
NON: Eeeg!
CRO: Oogh!
[squish!]

Fast forward several hundred years, and things hadn’t improved much during the time of the Roman empire.

CAESAR: I say we move all our armies to the eastern front.
GAIUS: But sir! Don’t you think the Gauls will revolt again this year, like they have every spring?
CAESAR: Nonsense, whatever makes you think that?
LEGIONARY: Ave! Caesar, there is some fellow named Asterix here to see you?
CAESAR: Let him in.
[pow! crash! biff! smack!]
CAESAR: Oh, I die! Fac ut nemo me vocet.*
(*Latin for: Hold all my calls.)

We hadn’t even smartened up by the Middle Ages:

PONTIUS: Ho! Geoffrey! What dost thou think of my political speech?
GEOFFREY: Read it to me.
PONTIUS: Gentlefolk: I thinketh that ye olde Archbishop ist a weenie...
GEOFFREY: Hark! Look at that sundial! Methinks it is time to go. Anon. Alack. Etc.
[running away]
INQUISITION: Mr. Pontius? Come with us, please.

I’m not sure why humans are so bad at planning for the future, especially for those things we can predict. But, I can think of three reasons: 1) Humans are basically just dorks. 2) Nobody takes history class in high school anymore, so we’re doomed to repeat ourselves endlessly or 3) We’re too easily distracted.

If number three is the case, it’s only going to get worse. Because with computers and the Internet, attention spans have decreased to the point that... oh, look! Here’s an email from my cousin Joe.

...Where was I? Oh yes, so what’s the solution? Well, maybe everyone should start by doing some advanced planning in their own lives. Figure out what you want to be doing next week. Next month. Next year. Heck, even next decade.

How can you go about doing that? Gee, I really don’t know.

I never thought to research that far ahead for this column.

-30-

Clearly, what with a defunct economy, the war in Afghanistan, and rising unemployment rates, Americans don’t have enough to worry about. This is evidenced by the fact that the tabloids are filled with breathless headlines about the love life of Twilight star Robert Pattinson.

Personally, I blame the whole thing on Martha Stewart. After spending years carefully building up our dependence on her housekeeping advice, we were bereft when she had to do time for alleged stock-related crimes (and don't those issues look huge in the light of the subprime mortgage meltdown and related economic shenanigans?) We didn't have as many practical things to fuss about. Sure, she had her minions running things in her absence (And to anyone who cares, I’d like some of these for Christmas. Minions, I mean.) but it’s taken a while for the Stewart empire to recover.

So, in the interest of returning some level of sanity to public discourse, I am stepping into the breach. In an effort to give you all something much more useful and closer to home to focus on, I present: Chandra’s Housekeeping Tips.

The Bathtub: Modern science has yet to explain how it is that a bathtub, which gets sluiced with soapy water just about every day, gets dirty. However, while we wait for an answer, my solution to dirty tubs: Install a brand new one. Shellac it. Padlock the bathroom and tell everyone in your family where to find the garden hose.

Leaf Raking: Every autumn, millions of homeowners around the world spend hours raking leaves up from their lawns. Every spring, they spend hours spraying their lawns with artificial fertilizers. Answer: Let your children run through the leaves as much as they like, breaking them down into mulch. Whatever the wind doesn’t catch and blow onto your neighbour’s lawn is natural fertilizer for your patch.

Cobwebs: Removing each individual cob web as it appears is very time consuming. My advice is to wait until the spiders have created enough webs that it becomes one big, house-covering super web. This should only take about 2.5 days. Then grab a thread, stand in a corner, and reel it all in. (Caution: this may drag furniture and small animals out of place).

The Kitchen Floor: Notoriously difficult to keep clean, because it’s a high traffic area in your house. Solution: Attach mop heads to your children’s shoes, your spouse’s shoes, and all four paws on the family pets. Since they’re the ones running through it all the time, they may as well clean it as they go.

Vacuuming: Buy one of those new robot vacuum gadgets, which recently received the most backhanded consumer review ever: These things really suck!

Dusting: Dust will come off the furniture automatically as you reel in the cobwebs. Incidentally, cobwebs and dust also make great lawn fertilizer.

Dirty dishes: Two words - Paper. Plates.

Cars: I get a great deal of amusement from watching my neighbours waste an entire Saturday afternoon washing their car. I mean, there are so many other important things you could be doing with that time, like, for instance, kicking back and watching the other neighbours rake their lawns. My theory on car cleaning is that the industry invented leases for a reason: by the time you can no longer tell the make or model of the car, or you lose a passenger to the backseat debris, your lease has expired and it’s time for a new one anyway.

Shovelling the Sidewalk: If all you northerners followed my advice about leaves, you won’t need to do this. The decomposing leaves that blow onto your sidewalk will release enough heat to keep your sidewalk clear for months. Spreading some on your driveway will have the same effect, plus, it’s fun to drive through the leaves.

There, that ought to keep everyone occupied for a while. No, no need to thank me.

So, the other day, over my morning coffee, I figured out the root cause of all of humanity’s problems.

Politics? Nope. Religion? Nuh-uh. The increasing influence of Jupiter as it enters the fifth house through the left window in the Year of the Ox?

No, the problem is that we have far, far too much time on our hands. And we get bored easily.

Your average rabbit, for instance, has three main activities in life: eating, sleeping and making more rabbits, which occupy about 15% of its time. The other 75% is spent staring off into the distance, doing nothing. Humans seem to need something far more challenging. (Except corporate CEOs, who have also been known to spend 75% of their time staring off into the distance, doing nothing).

I came to my conclusion after reading about the latest extreme sport. For those of you who don’t know what extreme sports are, some examples:

Heli-skiing - This is where a helicopter crew throws a skier out onto a part of a mountain so inaccessible and dangerous that mountain goats have posted warning signs. You slide down a slope on two sticks you have carefully waxed to eliminate all possibility of speed control. There are only two ways to stop: A) Hit a tree and B) Hit a rock.

Bungee jumping - This is where you tie yourself to a rope and throw yourself off a high bridge, for the express purpose of turning your stomach inside out when you come to a sudden stop. I suspect that this sport was invented by a manufacturer who had to quickly find a market for a bad batch of rope that had gone all sproingy.

Snow boarding - Enthusiasts strap both feet to a single piece of board and slide down a mountain in the most awkward way possible: half sideways. Snow boarder dexterity is greatly enhanced by the fashionable clothes (dropped crotch pants, toques pulled over the eyes), and performance drugs (the stuff that Clinton didn’t inhale.)

Now the latest entry in this type of sporting activity is... extreme ironing.

The object of this, erm, ‘sport’ is to do the best ironing job on five items of clothing while, say, being suspended off the side of a mountain, floating on the water, or sitting on the roof of a moving car.

Personally, I always thought ironing was challenging enough as it is. There are all kinds of potential injuries, including: steamed face, hot flattened fingers, sudden ironing board collapse and railroad track creases down your pants.

Or so I’ve heard. My own technique for wrinkle removal is to throw my clothes in the ‘ironing basket.’ Over time, heat and pressure (as the pile gets higher) slowly changes the structure of clothing fibres in the lower layers, resulting in “petrified pants” which are now permanently wrinkle free. The average time for petrification is 20 years, which, happily, is the same length of time it takes fashion makers to bring back retro styles. I’ll continue using this method until we get the “smart” clothes we’ve been promised. By that I mean shirts that are smart enough to know better than to wrinkle in the first place.

But I digress. The other new (poisonous!) extreme sport is “scorpion (poisonous!) sitting” wherein people lock themselves in small cells with 3000 (poisonous!) scorpions for roommates. The idea is to break world records (currently 32 days) for endurance.

Actually, this is a sport in which I could compete. In my house, there are no less than 5,478 spiders, some of which look like they could be poisonous. Some of the species are quite large too, with a leg span of about four inches if you squish them properly.

This means there are webs everywhere - so many that I think that for Christmas, we will simply disguise the Christmas lights as flies and let the spiders string them up. In fact, we could hold a neighbourhood competition for extreme spider decor-

See? Humans are easily bored. We need better causes. I need a cause.

Just don’t ask me to save the scorpions. Or iron.

In these worrisome times, as the world waits anxiously to see if ... Britney Spears will get over her recent breakup with what’s-his-name, I find it useful to remember the advice of my great-grandfather. When I asked him once about to how to handle the tough patches in life, he looked at me long and hard and said: “Children should be seen and not heard.”

Okay, truthfully, I never asked great-grandad that, mainly because I was about four when I knew him. However, if I had asked I’m sure he would have answered the same way yours did: “Why, when I was your age, I had to walk to school in 28 feet of snow. Naked.”

His point was, of course, that no matter how bad you have it, somebody else has it worse. For instance, take the case of some apartment dwellers in Istanbul, Turkey, who were relieved to hear that their neighbours were finally moving out. Their neighbours being a bunch of cows, that is.

Apparently one tenant, Fatma Kocaman, had been keeping cows on the first and third floor of the building for several years, and has only just now started thinning the herd.

“It’s been terrible,” said one resident. “They were such party animals, mooing and chewing all night long,” he said, adding that their favourite alcoholic drink seemed to be the Brown Cow.

“It will be such a relief to have the elevators back,” said another resident. “Anytime any of them wanted a milkshake, they’d all pile in and run it up and down real fast. Even worse, they played nothing but moosic on the elevator speakers.”

Asked by reporters where they were going now that they’ve been kicked out, their spokescow, Moostafa said, “Fortunately, my boyfriend has a place. Indeed, you might say we’ve been saved by the bull.”

Now consider the strange case of one Alan Todd, 63, of North Yorkshire, England. For the past few decades the man has been terrified of alarm bells because he suffers heart stoppages and temporary brain death every time one wakes him up. That’s right: when his alarm clock tocked, his ticker locked.

Now, setting aside the inconvenience of waking up dead every morning, consider the strain that must have put on his family. For example, how do you go about answering early morning phone calls and taking messages? “Sorry, no, he died when the phone rang, can he call you back later?”

Fortunately, doctors have finally been able to help this poor man by installing a pacemaker that restarts his heart instantly. This was a great relief to his children, who worried that the condition might be hereditary, and thought they might need... a change of heart.

As bad as that must have been, at least that fellow could report to hospital with a condition that allowed doctors to keep a straight face. In Australia, an emergency room study revealed that at least thirteen men and boys came in with “clothing related injuries” over two years. The injuries were in the nether region, the males having zipped a little too close to the, ahem, nether bits.

[We now pause politely to allow all male readers the chance to wince and cross their legs in sympathy.]

Doctors aren’t sure why there were so many injuries, except that it might be because Australia is hot, and sometimes men don’t wear underwear. However, I don’t believe this because as everyone knows, Scotland is cold, and the men there don’t wear underwear under their kilts either.

Another type of clothing injury included fractures suffered from falls in that tricky stage of putting on pants, where one leg is in, and the other is searching for the hole. Which just goes to prove that Australians are normal people: because they put their pants on one leg at time, just like you and me.

The strangest injuries of all though, have to be the “finger dislocations” caused by putting on or removing socks improperly. So to all those readers who wrote in a few weeks ago to tell me about there being no such thing as proper sock procedures and especially left and right socks, I have this to say: Pthththb.

And to all those people who think they have a tough life, I also say this: zip it.

Just do it slowly, okay?

Every once and a while, researchers will announce a discovery that so dumbfounds you, you just want to smack your forehead and say: “Why didn’t I think to get a job that pays me big bucks to announce things that everyone already knew?”

For example, one of the most recent dispatches from “The Department of Blindingly Obvious Scientific Results” is the discovery that teenagers sleep in on weekends because... they don’t get enough sleep during the week.

The study, conducted in Denver, Colorado, also proved one very important theory: that researchers don’t actually have teenagers of their own at home. Otherwise, they could easily provide answers to what I know will be the questions in their next study: that is, WHY don’t teenagers get enough sleep during the week. I will bet money that they’ll discover that:

1. Teenagers stay up too late talking to friends on the phone.
2. Teenagers stay up too late talking to friends on the Internet.
3. Teenagers stay up too late talking to friends at the mall.
4. Their teachers are really rude and keep waking them up in class.

Okay, you laugh, but in doing so you miss the really, really important discovery of this study: in order to get these results, a group of adults somehow managed to get more than 700 teenagers to say something other than “mmph.” If we could duplicate their technique, it would change family dynamics around the world.

Meanwhile, scientists based in New Hampshire and Montreal have learned that when babies babble, they are actually trying to learn how to talk. Apparently, before now, researchers believed that baby babbling was just mouth exercise. (Known in scientific circles by the technical term, “flapping your gums.”)

The study authors came to their conclusion by observing that babbling babies opened the right side of their mouth more than their left. Your right side is controlled by your left brain hemisphere, which is in charge of speech, ergo, their conclusion. My question is, how do you open the right side of your mouth more than the left? Also: Just what the heck does ergo mean, anyway?

What this new theory proves is that researchers don’t actually have any babies at home either. Now I think it’s highly significant that scientists don’t seem to have either babies or teenagers. This means we have no hard data on whether there’s a connection between having babies and having teenagers and so we can’t prevent another outbreak.

Possibly the best study of all though, was the one released from the University of California, that said that dogs are actually smarter than we thought.

First, there is the shocking news that dogs can probably count. Having been owned by two Brittany Spaniels at one time, I can verify these results. Early in their puppyhood, Rusty and Taffy established a mid-morning snack that involved not one, but two biscuits. Each. If I gave out only one apiece, they would look at me adoringly with their big brown eyes before dragging me off to the kitchen by the ankles for a refill.

The other finding was that dogs may actually be trying to convey different emotions when they bark. Imagine! As luck would have it, the Japanese toy maker Takara has just unveiled a gadget that translates dog barks into one of six human emotions. I obtained one of these gadgets and went out to interview the neighbourhood dogs. The translations:

Bow wow? - (Confused) Hey, where’s my biscuit?

BARKSNARLSNAP!! - (Angry) Who said you could walk on the grass?!!

Zzzzzzzzzzz - (Sleepy) [I didn’t ask this dog any more questions. You know what they say about letting sleeping dogs lie.]

WOOFWOOFWOOF! - (Happy) Let’s-play-fetch-let’s-play-fetch-let’s-play-fetch

Ruff. Sniffle. Ruff. - (Sad) Bummer. I just had a bath.

Bwahahahahahaha! - (Laughter) Didn’t all those humans reading that column look funny trying to open just the left side of their mouth?