I went for my usual three-mile-run yesterday.

Normally, such an observation would not qualify for the blog, as I try to avoid blogging about mundane personal activities. Really, do people want to hear about what I eat, what I wear, what time I go to bed, and how thoroughly I brush and/or floss my teeth? I certainly hope not, and in any event my dignity deters me from routine discussions of the mundane.

But if recent news headlines are to be a guideline, my ordinary run has become anything but mundane. It might even be considered death-defying behavior, because temperatures have been in the high 90s.

Today's front page has a huge headline -- Just a Little Warm-up -- This early heat wave may serve to toughen us for what's to come.

It almost set a record.

Yesterday's official high in Philadelphia was 97, just one degree shy of the record set in 1933. Unofficially, it was certifiably hot, a day for slurred thoughts and slow movements, a day to seek air-conditioning and serious hydrotherapy.

"I don't want to leave," said Monique Benitez, 23, of Northeast Philadelphia, her clothing pleasantly dampened from the spray of the fountain in Logan Square, where she had brought her 2-year-old daughter yesterday.

Sunday and yesterday, about 10 patients showed up at the Our Lady of Lourdes Hospital emergency room in Camden with heat-related problems.

"Today we saw two very ill young people because they were exercising outside without proper hydration," said Russell Harris, an emergency physician at Lourdes. "So, no, the word hasn't gotten out. What surprises me is that we're seeing people who should know better."

Besides, don't "we" all pay? I'm thinking maybe that assholes like me shouldn't be allowed to run around risking their lives, and if we all have to pay (as we soon will once medical care is fully socialized), then maybe there should be laws, and people caught running around in the heat should be treated as akin to drivers without seatbelts or cell phone drivers, and ticketed for their anti-social behavior.

(Perhaps that's a good argument against blogging about high-risk activities like jogging.)

The thing is, I'm old enough to remember when not everyone had air conditioning. It was a luxury, not a necessity. The only other people who seem to remember that live in nursing homes:

At the Upper Darby Community Complex and Senior Center, Al Brooks, 81, of Essington, and his friend Wayne Smith, 79, were reminiscing about life before air-conditioning. And not liking it.

"I don't know how we even did it, really," Brooks said during a game of pinochle with a few other card sharks from the center. "We didn't know it was hot," said Smith. "We didn't even think about it, we really didn't."

What intrigued me the most about the story was the subtext of the subheadline: "This early heat wave may serve to toughen us for what's to come."

What's to come?

Now, we all know that weather is not climate (at least, the scientists still allow us to believe that), and there's no mention of global warming in the piece. But at the Inquirer's web site, comments to the piece are solicited -- with the question, Do you believe: In global warming?

In the comments, "Bender" complains that "sloppy reporting" "allows" people to think skeptically:

asking "do you believe in global warming?" is like asking "do you believe in gravity?" its scientific fact that the average temperature across the globe is getting warmer every year. Its sloppy reporting like that that allows people to still think it isn't real.

I enjoyed these responses from "Simon":

....Sometimes it just gets hot on a day that it doesn't usually get so hot. I think the weather has been doing this for about 2 billion years.

[...]

There's no "global warming". Take off the tin-foil hats people and calm down. I went skiing in Jackson Hole, Wyoming this past winter and they had 600 inches of snowfall this season which broke the previous record from 1996. I didn't see any moose or caribou sweating in the 11 degree temperature either. So...to recap: there's no "god", there's no "tooth fairy", the U.S. government didn't blow up WTC 7, and there's no "global warming".

I still have a right to run, and to discuss my survival against all odds.

Speaking of odds, I've long wondered about "records." If records of high and low temperatures have only been kept since the Victorian period, considering that there are 365 days per year, isn't it mathematically very likely that in every year, new records will be set on one day or another?

But alas! Because of the sloppy reporting which results when journalists are intimidated I keep asking such questions. And now, all I can do is repeat myself:

How long have these "records" been kept, and what is the reference point for determining normal? Suppose no one had ever kept records until today. Wouldn't that mean that on every day forward for the first year, each day's temperature would set a new record for that day?

In year two, each day would have either a higher or a lower temperature, right? So, on any given day, there would either be a record low temperature or a record high temperature. As time went by, there would necessarily be fewer and fewer record temperatures, and an "average" would emerge.

How long have these records been kept? What are the mathematical odds of a record high temperature in the next five years? For all we know, it might be abnormal not to have a record in five years.

I'm not a statistician, but I smell something odd going on.

Has anyone run the numbers?