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It's hot, at least locally, and as can be expected this makes me think of my past.

I think I've been told that I was born on the hottest day of the year, which may or may not be true but does work as a way of cementing my relationship with heat. It may well have been hotter outside than in womb, so right after coughing and crying I may have begun sweating.

A year or so later it was, again, the hottest day of the year and this time I remember seeing pictures of my first or second birthday featuring a cake, a smiling baby, and a melting, drooping candle that wasn't yet lit.

But I don't remember any of that. What I *do* remember is my love affair with photography during my college years. I bought cameras, darkroom equipment, film, papers, and chemicals by the truckload and stumbled upon a relic of my youth. For all the years of my life in the hallway of my parent's home was a small thermometer on a sheet of aluminum engraved with the degrees. The whole thing was maybe six inches long, about as long as my open hand, and was made by Kodak.

How we ended up with a Kodak thermometer is anyone's guess, but it wasn't until I began developing film and printing photos that I noticed the thermometer had an arrow on it, highlighting sixty-eight degrees.

Sixty-eight are the exact number of degrees that every film and paper producer use for the standard, recommended, temperature of the chemicals and washes. This no longer matters, but I mention it for historical purposes.

It's easy to see where heatwaves enter into this. During the hot summer months I was occasionally stymied. The cold water in places I lived would not infrequently be over that magical sixty-eight degrees. There's not much I could ever do to make my cold water colder, and other than sweating into the stop bath and adjusting time, I was stuck.

I've no doubt that today the cold water is well into the seventies. I also doubt today's digital photographers have any idea how easy they have it, though they may still be sweating when they take their pictures.

It wasn't my intention to be rude and uncaring, but I was considering having a Bombay martini with my Peking Duck when the looks of silent horror stopped me. I was being chastised, judged, and found to be living in the past.

Neither Peking nor Bombay exist any more, and only inconsiderate, insensitive Luddites such as myself call them that any more. I'm not sure, but I get the feeling that how we refer to things is now the only litmus test we're judged by.

It may simply be familiarity, but Peking duck just sounds better to me than Beijing duck. I don't know much about it, but I think the name change had something to do with early visitors using the wrong alphabet or something. The confusion of B with P is sort-of understandable since I've heard there's still much controversy in the Philipino community over Filipino or Pilipino, and I'm taking that as a sign that Asian languages have as much trouble with P as they do with L and R.

The Mumbai thing, I'm guessing, is more about shucking off the oppressive names of Imperialism than anything else, but I have to admit it wasn't until the last week or so that I realized the name had been changed. I'd look forward to catchy songs about these name changes, but I'm sure to be disappointed.

With all these name changes going on, especially in Africa, and borders now no more settled and accepted than the authorship of the plays credited to William Shakespeare, I think the time of paper maps and atlases have passed. Maybe we should just stick with easily modified electronic maps. And maybe I could get Winston Smith's job of changing all the old references to be politically correct.

No, not the last word. I'm not that presumptious.

With the end of the 2006 World Cup (vai Italia!), message boards across the US are pretty much done with talking about soccer. As could be expected, many in the US deride the sport, mock it, and remain as partisan and chauvinistic as they do when they talk politics.

I don't see the glorious and fulfilling future promised me, nor does it leave me much hope for humanity.

For those who complain about the lack of scoring, or of ties, I sob. One of the neat things about soccer is that it isn't easy to score. I know Americans like that more than just about anything, but I like things that are hard. Hell, in basketball you can score a couple times every minute, so that can't be hard at all. American football has five to ten scores each game, and baseball isn't all that far behind. Used to be there were pitcher duals, but those went away when the American League came up with the Designated Hitter. Between that and aluminum bats, I'm surprised the sport, long my favorite, still survives at all.

The other knock against soccer is all the diving, writhing athletes. Yeah, it bugs me, too, but isn't any worse than basketball's final two minutes of intentional fouling nor football's use of intentional grounding. If you can overlook those, you can overlook soccer's acting.

I love the World Cup. If that makes me less a man, or less an American, I admit guilt.

Hah! Fooled you! You probably thought I was going to write more about soccer, and maybe I will, but first I need to write about the other big sporting event going on now, bicycle racing.

I created a new page for my website, one that shows the results of the Tour de France in a more conventional scoring format. On that page I indicate some of the things about the Tour's scoring that annoy me, and I also mention how I get around them. I wouldn't be me if I didn't find things to complain about.

Russ's World Famous, Formula 1 Scoring Tour de France page.

Like I say there, I was going to make a column showing which bikes are in the lead, but for a racing-type event I'm astonished by the utter lack of talk of which bikes are used. Motorsports talk a great deal about cars, engines, body designs, but none of that is mentioned in the TV coverage here in the US. It looks as if each team rides one bike, and no two teams ride the same ones, but the bikes are never mentioned.

Nor are the gears (universally Campagnola, I think) or any other elements of the bikes. In fact, the emphasis is so limited to the riders that the bikes don't matter at all. In other endurance-type rallies (and I'm thinking of the Dakkar now), if your vehicle dies so do your hopes of finishing.

But in the Tour de France, the bikes are a replaceable commodity, and I think that's a shame.

I'm pretty sure I wouldn't want to be remembered by headbutting someone, but since I've never done that to anyone, it's unlikely. Also, I'm not likely to be remembered very much, anyway, not unless I get off my ass and do something spectacular like be abducted by aliens.

My quadrennial love affair with soccer has gone back into hibernation. This year's Cup was a good one for me because I'd heard of many of the countries. Also, my souvenier is a good one that should last for years.

For those of you who weren't paying close attention, the match was won by Puma. It's now safe to say that their clothing will make you the best.

I didn't know that soccer had a rule that televised evidence is inadmissable, so I expect people who follow the sport more closely than I do will be all over the Zidane incident. There's already calls for the referee's blood, and I expect it to grow over the summer. It's too bad, actually, since while I don't agree with all these replay decisions, the ref can't be looking eveywhere.

Also, I've come to a conclusion. No matter the injury, the best cure is water. Everyone who's down gets it poured on them, on the spot of their complaint. Maybe that's in keeping with futbol's universality. American football players need frequent and expensive care, oxygen on the sidelines, state of the art medical supplies, to ply their craft, but simple water is all that's needed for soccer. I find that very inclusive.

Had I been dreaming of the World Cup since I was four, I'd have kissed it, too.

I wonder if it's merely a coincidence that the only two European countries I've slept in are going to be battling it out for the 2006 World Cup.

While it would have been fun for the only two Portuguese speaking nations to be in it so the players could yell at each other and leave everyone else in the world wondering what they were saying, I can't object to an Italy-France game. I'll be rooting for Italy, but not wagering on the result.

It's a good matchup, too, because Italy is wearing Puma jerseys and France is in Adidas. I was considering for a short time looking at the matches that way, by corporate supplier instead of nationality, but too many of the games were being waged by teams outfitted by the same company. It was interesting, to me at least, that while Adidas was sponsoring the World Cup most teams chose Puma. Nike, of course, was there, as was Lotto, but now it's between the warring brothers, and I can hardly wait to see who'll win.

Someday, and it may be someday soon, I'll need to buy some new clothes. It will help me no small amount to know which global corporation makes the better clothes.

I don't remember the number, but I heard on the news that a lot of states now outlaw fireworks, which no doubt saves lots of lives and even more fingers. I mention this because, evidently, I don't live in one of them.

There are lots of fireworks going off right now, right outside my window, and this thrills and pleases me no end. Not only is it delightfully colorful and aromatic, I suspect more than a handful of memories are being generated.

I remember earlier fourths, when I was growing up. No more than a day ahead of time we'd all go to the fireworks store, which was hastily erected on a parking or dirt lot, and look at all the things to buy. Then, my dad would buy a big box, one of those assortments, and we'd take it home and look at it.

Back then we could only legally get the "safe and sane" fireworks, which meant no real fireworks or explosives. Still, by today's standards, they were probably neither. Us kids were not permitted to play with them at all, but on the day of the fourth we were allowed a box of snakes and proceeded to pepper the sidewalk and porch with those characteristic markings. One year I remember I got a tomahawk thing that exploded a paper cap and sent a feather in the air, and I was able to play with that during the day, too.

But, really, we all wanted it to be dark enough for the grown ups to set off the fireworks. Dad would haul a sheet of asbestos (yes) out from somewhere and set it up in the back yard away from the trees. The first thing, always, was the paper log cabin that emitted smoke from the chimney before burning down in satisfying flames. Then, sparklers and the rest.

Our grand finale was usually the pinwheels which dad would fasten to the fence. They'd spin, showering my grandma's rock garden with colored sparks, and we'd all cheer. Well, I'd cheer, but I suspect my parents were busy watching things and drinking.

It was only later in life, when I was an adult, that I discovered the joy that could come from a trip to an Indian Reservation. With an unhealthy assortment of various tubes each promising "flaming colored balls," we'd head out to Santa Monica Beach, which resembled nothing so much as a war zone on the evening of the fourth. No, none of it was legal, but no one mined back then, we were all too busy having fun.

Now you can go there and see state sponsored displays, which look better but only as a spectator.