The cool (hah), gray (hah) city of love

You can usually figure out how old a longtime San Franciscan is. Talk to him about the city for a while and you'll find that the points of reference are usually fixed pretty firmly in a certain decade. The '40s: "Remember those four-course dinners for $2.75 at those family joints in North Beach? Remember Dago red? Remember mai tais at the Mark the night before you shipped out?" The '50s: "Remember Playland-at-the-Beach? Remember Seals Stadium?" The '60s: "Hey, man, remember dropping acid at Speedway Meadow? Hey, man, remember, uuuhh, dropping acid at Speedway Meadow?" The '70s: "Remember Market Street being all torn up for BART? Remember S.I. Hayakawa and Angela Davis?" The '80s: "Jeez, what a forgettable decade THAT was."

Point is, there is no one-size-fits-all San Franciscan. But I remember one thing that we all had in common. We all hated the heat.

The temperature is currently standing at, oh, I dunno, about 135 degrees in the shade, and if I hear one more person say what a beautiful day it is, I'm gonna puke. This may be a beautiful day in Fort Worth, Texas, or at the north pole on Venus, or in the torture chambers at Guantanamo, but it sucks in San Francisco. Breezy and 62 is the perfect San Francisco day. George Sterling called it "the cool, gray city of love," not "the stifling, sweaty city of love."

It's not that San Francisco is a complete stranger to hot weather. Back before George Bush invented global warming, we typically had a heat wave in April or May that lasted a few days, and then we had our Indian summer in September and October, when temps in the high 70s were not unusual. But that was all. Anything over 65 at other times, and the weather guys on TV would roll their eyes in anguish and act like there was a salmonella outbreak along Columbus Avenue.

Not any more. New-generation forecasters run their fingers through their hair product and enthuse over "... highs in the 80s. It's going to be a beautiful weekend." Yeah, beautiful, if your idea of a hike is the Bataan death march.

This is June. Tourists are supposed to be standing at the corner of Union and Columbus, shivering in their short pants and wondering why the brochures promising a sunny California lied to them. It has definitely gotten warmer here over the past 20 years or so, no doubt about it. And that's all to the bad.

Cool and breezy. Jacket weather. That's the way it's supposed to be. If you don't believe me, just ask that big hole out there known as the Golden Gate.