Summer's sweltering challenges range from the vast to the miniscule | MARK HUGHES COBB

Unlike every other kooky uncle, bug-eyed conspiracy theorist and illiterate wacko buzzing and shouting for internet fame in 2024, back in 1792, Robert Bailey Thomas actually did research.

The teacher, book-binder and -seller studied weather patterns, solar activity and astronomy cycles to develop a predictive formula still in use today, kept secret as those of Krispy Kreme, Coca-Cola and KFC.

It's stored in a black tin box in Dublin, New Hampshire, offices of the Old Farmer's Almanac, which outsold and eventually beat into the tilled soil various 18th-century competitors, including one by a fella named Ben Franklin. It's now the oldest continuously published periodical on this continent.

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While many prefer the print copy, to hang for handy reference, there is an online version, offering forecasts, gardening and cooking tips, celestial insights and more, at www.almanac.com.

Thomas warned me off holding this summer's June 26-29 Rude Mechanicals performances, a 20th anniversary return to "A Midsummer Night's Dream," outdoors. The stored and storied prediction model stands, but the Old Farmer's Almanac shows the grace to learn from other models:

"Summer of 2023 was Earth’s hottest since global records began in 1880, according to scientists at NASA’s Goddard Institute of Space Studies (GISS). The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) says there is a one-in-three chance that 2024 will be warmer than 2023, and a 99% chance it would rank among the five warmest on record."

We've not had a heat-related injury in our 21 years, but we have suffered ill-ease from alternately dehydrating, knowing we run 90 minutes without intermission, and over-hydrating to the point of sloshing. As lifelong Alabamians know, it's not the heat, it's the stupidity, not admitting that it's too darn hot to play outdoors, that the air is as much H20 as O2.

Playing along the Black Warrior River, we've enjoyed river breezes, spectacular sundowns, aromatic drafts of honeysuckle and magnolia, the ethereal choreography of fireflies. Here's hoping the world gets a whole lot cooler — all right all right all right — in the future, for that is where you and I are going to spend the rest of our lives.

It's not just about mercury: It's needle-like burnt grass, or on the flip side, the Petri dish/incubator of insect swarms. With lights on the ground, we've become used to seeing what we're about to eat, microseconds too late. While in the Plan 9 future we may be eating bugs, intentionally, as food sources become scarce, I'm OK with waiting that out.

Mosquitoes avoid me and the quantities of garlic, skepticism and disdain churning through my blood. Others suffer, so one of our pre-show bits has been offering bug-spray patrons. Doused in Off, or even more fragrant Cutter's creates an oil slick, tricky if you have intimate scenes with a fellow actor. There's already sweat and spit to spare ... ah, the glamorous life.

While pondering outdoors before the Old Farmer's Almanac delivered the kibosh, I was cooling heels with a nasty-funny crack habit called "Blacklist," at least until Jellybean, Huey Lewis and Lady Liberty.

If you know what I mean, here's the Kleenex.

Jellybean was an actor named Clark Middleton, who stood out from even stacked casts in "Fringe," "Sin City," "Snowpiercer," "Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.," "Twin Peaks" and the like, despite topping out at 5-foot-4. By many standards, life didn't deal him a fair hand: At 4, he was diagnosed with juvenile rheumatoid arthritis. Doctors thought he wouldn't live out the year. In an interview from 1993, as his theater career — Middleton performed with the New York Shakespeare Festival, among others — took off:

"At first it distorted my hands. Then the cortisone I had to take made my cheeks fat. At 8, I lost movement in my neck. When I was 15, my hip snapped. After an operation, I had to be on crutches and later, after I broke my leg falling over my dog, on canes."

Bucked by his dad, Middleton felt himself a hero, because he survived, time and again, until Oct. 4, 2020, when a damn mosquito took down this giant of a guy, at 63. I'd missed the news, and "Blacklist" didn't mention Jellybean until season 8, episode 6, by which time the writers had crafted an homage.

James Spader's insouciant, oh-so-dangerous Red visits Jellybean's mom, who drops the bomb. I suddenly couldn't see. Nicknamed Jellybean, the character's name was Glen, like Glenn House, a magnificent artwork of a person, also taken by a damn mosquito. The night we heard, many shared the same WHAT? face as did Red.

Jellybean wished his ashes spread at the Statue of Liberty, all kinds of wrong and illegal, but between Red, his stoic-heroic sidekick Dembe, and Huey Lewis, yes, that one, they begin, noting Glen as infuriating, insulting, maddening. One thing he never was: afraid. Not afraid of being wrong, of a bad joke, a good time, bad timing, friendship, consequences, or impossible tasks.

"No matter how hard or unfair life was to Glen," Spader/Red says, "he loved life back. He embraced it without reservation, regret, or remorse, and that is ... rare."

Middleton again: “My dad instilled in me that I could define my own reality by how I thought about myself and how I carried myself."

I sometimes tell special folks, "Dad would have liked you." What I mean is "I wish you could have known Dad."

Generous to a fault, Dad was always not just hoping for, but actively seeking, the best. Not everyone had a dad who loved that two of his sons worked as pro musicians, despite his being unable to carry a tune in a pickup; not everyone heard pop cheering behind the first-base line at every Little League game, despite workaholism that kept seven of us clothed, fed, and housed for decades. Not everyone had a defender, a supporter, a champion.

I hope you did. If not, let me know, and I'll share as much as I've been able to carry forward.

Mark Hughes Cobb is the editor of Tusk. Reach him at [email protected].

This article originally appeared on The Tuscaloosa News: Of bugs and books and sweat: a summer's nightmares | MARK HUGHES COBB