1. Holing up in a dark, air-conditioned room, with a good movie. I'd say going to a movie at a theater, but you have to emerge into the heat and blinding brightness eventually to get home.

2. Oddly enough, French Onion Soup Gratinee. But only if it is able to be consumed in a dark, air-conditioned room.

3. Pretty much the same music as any other time/condition, i.e. whatever I'm in the mood for, be it classical guitar, Van Morrison, Mark Knopfler, Gregorian Chant; whatever.

4. That warm, earthy, asphalty smell that is the result of big, fat summer cloudbust raindrops hitting the dusty ground after months of dryness.

5. Scotland.

1. What is your favorite way to beat the heat?
Sweet limes. A drink from the drugstore in my mother's childhood hometown of Dalheart, TX: simple syrup, lime juice, ice, maraschino cherry, seltzer water. Ah.

2. What is your favorite hot weather dish?
Homemade apricot ice cream.

3. What is your ideal hot weather music?
Rimsky-Korsakov's Cappriccio Espagnol. O'Carolan's harp music. I don't know... I don't usually lean towards any particular kind of music for hot weather.

4. What smells do you associate with hot weather?
Tomato leaves, window screens, Venetian canals (yech!).

5. OK. Enough is enough. If time and money were no object, where would you go to escape this infernal heat?
Hmmm... Ireland maybe? They don't seem to get much hot weather.

1. Swimming

2. Cold Sesame Noodles with Chicken

3. Reggae - Toots and the Maytals are a fave

4. Fresh cut grass, chlorine, hot blacktop, the smell before a storm, charcoal

5. Lake Como, Italy

1. Shade, cool cafes, iced coffee, or walking in a downpour.

2. A Mediterranean platter: gazpacho, tabbouleh, dolmades, salads with olives and cheese served with mint tea.

3. I want to cop out and say a thunderstorm or the song of loons or crickets.

4. Cocoa butter, barbeques, woodlands.

5. Backpacking and ferry hopping through an austere northern location: Iceland, Scotland, Norway.

1) Sitting under a scuppernong trellis with a ballcap soaked in ice cold water.

2) Tomatoes(sliced, salted, peppered) or a warm buttered biscuit, with a slice of tomato and a fried salmon patty, drenched liberally in pepper sauce (white vinegar in which cayennes, jalapenos and scotch bonnets have been soaking since last summer.)

3) The CDB, hands down.

4)Okra plants. Its dsgusting, trust me, but it smells like summer. (Imagine an overwhelming scent of a... Ok, if you don't know that smell, I am not telling you what it smells just like. Not appropriate for a family blog. But trust me, nasty.)

5) Anywhere? New Moon, the old swimming hole on Mills Creek back in Alabama. Only two hours away, but now owned by some connecticut yankee no one has ever met.

1. Iced tea, plain, with lots of ice...and leave the pitcher, thanks.

2. Watermelon, any way you slice it.

3. The cheerier part of popular hip hop. (Probably something about a club, or "Summertime" from the latter days of Jazzy Jeff and the Fresh Prince.)

4. Chlorine and car oil.

5. Laguna Beach

[Yep. I'm officially too uncultured for this site.]

1. What is your favorite way to beat the heat?
sleep through it -failing that, total immersion in water
2. What is your favorite hot weather dish?
gazpacho with sangria in a pitcher on the side
3. What is your ideal hot weather music?
norteno
4. What smells do you associate with hot weather?
mexican food, and the smell in the air just before the thunderstorm hits
5. OK. Enough is enough. If time and money were no object, where would you go to escape this infernal heat?
The mediterranean riviera or the pyrenees

1. Hanging out in some restaurauteur's walk-in fridge with a little snack and a cool refreshing beverage.

2. Bucatini all'Amatriciana.

3. As above.

4. Tomato plants, gunpowder (4th of July fireworks), chlorine.

5. Patagonia.