I have to admit extreme weather makes life more interesting. 

Blizzards are my favorite form of wild weather for the way they totally transform the landscape, but there is something about heat waves that transform the world in subtler ways.  From the comfort and safety of an air-conditioned room, the world looks the same as if it were seventy-eight degrees (a little wiltier, yes, but not so different really).  But heat waves completely transform the psychological landscape. Turn off the AC and people get crazy.

Now summertime's the time when you hear stories about people doing especially crazy shit anyway.  Don't get me wrong, there's good crazy — lads playing soccer in nothing but short-shorts on Clemente Field, bodies glistening in the punishing heat, when most of us can hardly move — and then there's heat wave crazy.

Like this story of a certain Carlos Edwards, an unemployed Bahamian living in Malden, who when his mistress wouldn't take him to the bank to make a withdrawal, tossed their seven-week-old baby at her feet and told her "I hope you both die."

People just don't do that shit in a blizzard or flash flood.  Only a heat wave.

But equally heat-wave crazy is the mistress and mother's desperate response:

“I just want everything to be OK for my son,’’ Sears said. “I feel sad that any of this happened, to my son and to [Edwards]. I don’t want to say that I don’t love him, because I do, especially because he’s never done anything like this before.

“In the entire time I’ve been seeing him, I just don’t see him being the type of person that could do this,’’ she said. “I don’t see anybody really being able to do this.’’

But people do, and Edwards did. 

This man snatched your seven-week-old baby and slam-dunked him.  The kid is in critical condition with brain-swelling.  "I don’t want to say that I don’t love him, because I do, especially because he’s never done anything like this before"???  How many babies of yours would he have to drop-kick before you could say maybe you didn't love him, um, quite so much?

(In fact, the article contains quotes to that effect not only from Edwards' mistress, but from his mother and female defense attorney — ladies, what is up with excusing not just bad behavior but, like, baby-killing behavior like this?  I mean, I'm not familiar with this summer sport — how many mulligans do you get in Baby-Tossing?)

That's some heat wave crazy shit.

Everybody gets in on the act in a heat wave.

Another heat wave story took place in Allston where a man too old to be riding a scooter around attacked a driver who cut him off in traffic. 

Freedberg, 51, followed the woman’s sport utility vehicle to Commonwealth Avenue, where he removed his helmet and repeatedly struck the driver’s side window until it shattered and cut her arm, Wark said. The woman’s 4-month-old son was in the backseat.

I'm sure she was perfectly oblivious in her air-conditioned SUV that she had cut the little man on the scooter off, and while I have had this experience and wanted to smash out a window or two with my U-lock over the years cycling in Boston, again, this never would have happened in a blizzard or a flood.  But that's not the end of the story.  It gets heat wave crazier.

After his court appearance

Freedberg was leaving Brighton District Court when Fernando Castro-Laboy, 34, of Jamaica Plain [husband of the woman Freedberg had attacked], attacked him, taking Freedberg’s helmet and striking him on the head, Jake Wark, a spokesman for the Suffolk district attorney, said in a statement.

They've both pleaded not-guilty by reason of heat wave insanity.