Jack Sheehan on perils of summer, from the heat to not-so-attractive tourists

Sunday, Aug. 13, 2006 | 7:31 a.m.

We're in the throes of another boiling summer, easing into what is known in baseball parlance as the "dog days." The image that comes to mind is of a leathery ol' hound dog sprawled on the front porch of a ramshackle cabin in the Deep South, as his master sits in his trusty rocker whittling a branch into a fishing pole.

But we don't have an abundance of hound dogs or rocking chairs or whittlers out here in Las Vegas. So it might be more fitting to call this stretch of interminable heat and vapor "cicada days," in honor of those oversexed little insects with membranous wings that attempt to mate constantly by screeching urgent one-liners from one limb to the next with absolutely no concern for human auditory canals.

If I could get an insect translator to bug the olive tree in our back yard, he would hear 10,000 variations on lines like: "Hey, Baby, nice antennae! What say you come over to my branch and practice some horizontal aerobics!"

Cicadas, you see, are about as original with pickup lines as a junior stockbroker on two-for-one tequila night at your neighborhood Road Runner saloon. Only difference is that cicadas get lucky more often, at least judging by the population increase of the little vermin from one month to the next.

While after 31 summers in Las Vegas I can say I'm tolerant to the heat of the dog days, it still makes me cranky. Like anyone who's toughed out the June-through-August furnace for several years, I have a personal collection of "scorched" tales I can share about just how hot it really gets here. Like the time I was driving a friend to the airport, and to make room for his duffel bag, he stuck a black leather case of my favorite eight-track tapes near the back window of my '75 Ford Granada with no A/C.

By the time I discovered the ill-placed box, the tapes looked like an overcooked mash of linguine. Losing The Bee Gees "Saturday Night Fever" track was especially hurtful because I had almost mastered mimicking Barry Gibb's trembling falsetto, albeit a half note off-key.

But that was more than a quarter century ago, and as anyone who's been paying attention to Al Gore knows, the planet is much hotter today. And while there's not a whole lot I can do about it other than trade in our SUV for a bicycle, I do find that a certain amount of venting cools my brow. Please bear with me as I share my most recent list of complaints about desert summers.

The worst part of this cardboard glut is that many of the signs will remain staked in the ground for weeks or months after the general election, even though there are laws mandating they be taken down promptly. This year I'm going to remember the names of those candidates who leave their signs up well after the removal deadline so I can make sure I walk our dogs in their front yards after they've scarfed three bowls of Cal-Can. Call it a crap-for-crap trade-off.

It's equally bad in showrooms. For those of us who remember the days when a sport jacket or neatly pressed shirt was the minimum expected male attire for an evening out, having to endure the dude at the next table sporting cut-off jeans and a wife-beater as he guzzles his two-drink minimum Colt 45s sort of dulls the luster of a night on the town.

It's pointless to leave a voice-mail in these instances because I know that my call won't be returned until after the 63 messages from their much richer or more important friends. The lesson here is that if I have something to say to my affluent friends, it should be conveyed before Memorial Day or after Labor Day. Nobody with any real loot endures this inferno.

It's no wonder the rest of the world hates us.