ABOUT THE
AMERICAN-
STATESMAN:
  E-mail the editors
  Jane S. Greig
  NIE
  School Connection
  Smart Line
  Subscribe

AUSTIN 360
SECTIONS:   360 from A to Z
  Classifieds
  Community groups
  Daily Crossword
  Lottery numbers
  Search Austin 360
  Weather

Latest AP news

  Top Headlines
  Business
  Entertainment
  National
  Sports
  Stock prices
  Technology
  Washington
  World

The heat is on The results of what stood up to the heat and what didn't in the Austin American-Statesman's heat test: We had street queso within an hour. Velveeta oozes at 99 degrees. A triple-scoop Amy's ice cream cone toppled in 18 minutes. Strawberry parfait started sliming immediately. Revlon's Fire and Ice lipstick stood up to the heat. A Hershey bar melted within an hour, but we could still read the letters. Our Big Heat warped 'The Big Chill' within 2 hours. A bag of ice disappeared -- literally -- when our backs were turned.

By Patrick Beach
American-Statesman Staff

Published: June 26, 1998

An exhaustive American-Statesman news-gathering investigation has yielded a shocking finding:

It's hot enough to melt stuff out there.

Stuff used to keep other stuff cold. Yellow stuff that purports to be "cheese food" but isn't provably either. Stuff you paint your face with. Stuff confused Minnesotans call "salad."

In defense of some of this stuff, two of the items contained "ice" in the name. One was ice, the other ice cream. But still. If you were to drop a Mrs. Crockett's Kitchens Strawberry Parfait -- a squiggling, gelatinous object weighing almost a pound and a half -- onto the sidewalk, it goes without saying that you would know a grief more profound than any you've experienced in all your life. But you'd at least expect it to sit there, yes?

No. Not in Austin. Not on the day after the longest day of the year. Not in the nascent days of panting-like-a-big-dog La Niña and it ain't even August. Not when people try to cheer you up by saying, "No, it was 109 degrees yesterday. Today it only feels like it's 109 degrees. But it's really just 99." There have even been unconfirmed reports of addled, bescorched Austinites moving to Dallas in search of some relief.

Certainly our good sense must have been semi-solid at best when the idea popped into our heat-baked domes: Go buy stuff and destroy it!

Our hard-hitting investigative assignment in hand, off we went to a convenience store for an eight-pound bag of ice, a Hershey's chocolate bar and a half-pound hunk of Velveeta. The stuff went on a hot sidewalk. In minutes we had the makings of sidewalk s'mores (hastening a dash to the H-E-B for marshmallows and Graham crackers) and street queso. We expected the bag of ice to look like a little waterbed mattress in no time, but the thing disappeared, plastic and all -- the only evidence of its having been there was an evaporating water blob -- while we were off buying other stuff. Somebody probably didn't see anything funny about melting a perfectly good bag of ice.

The triple-decker raspberry, chocolate and vanilla cone we grabbed at Amy's Ice Cream on West Sixth Street was better-constructed to stand the heat than a lot of UT-area apartment complexes. The thing lasted 18 sticky, drippy minutes in my hand before succumbing to heat and head-shaking pedestrians, dropping to the street like the glass ball tumbling out of the moribund Charles Foster Kane's hand at the beginning of "Citizen". . ., um, Citizen whatever. Too hot to look it up.

The multicolored ice cream goo wound up being a sidewalk Rorschach test as it morphed in the early afternoon sun, with passers-by freely offering interpretations, a number of them anatomical in nature. First it looked like the chest-burster in "Alien." Then it went splat.

Finding a copy of "The Big Chill" in Waterloo Video, we knew we couldn't sleep at night unless we were sure the Austin video-viewing community would never be at risk of watching this particular copy of this particularly hideous flick. We bought it and baked it on the dashboard of a Reagan-Bush era Mazda. It was even more unwatchable than before in under two hours.

Revlon's Fire and Ice lipstick proved to be the one item that held up -- a surprise, since the main ingredient was castor oil. But the Mrs. Crockett's Kitchens Strawberry Parfait, which Northerners may know as Jell-O salad, more than made up for the thrill. It made such a gorgeous crimson stain on the sidewalk that we could hardly resist drawing the chalk outline of a body around it.

And the answer to your question is no. In fact, we did not have anything better to do that day.