The heat wave left me no alternative but to break into the remaining case of vinho verde and self medicate while propped up in a cattle trough full of cold water. Since science is now telling us the new normal will be entire summers hovering around 100 degrees, it looks like a quarter of the remainder of my life will be spent soaking, one way or another.

I refuse to use air conditioning, because I don’t want to shell out money to the bastards who brought us our last brilliant little war, along with climate change and brazen theft in the banking sector. I’d rather spend the money buying them rope so they can take the only decent path remaining to them.

Plenty of assholes commit suicide. It’s not like they’d even be breaking new ground.

Anyway, the combination of heat, wine and inactivity, plus a new discovery in the field of paleontology has led me to the posit a theory on a matter that has long baffled the scientist and layman alike: Why Tyrannosaurus Rex has those apparently useless little arms.

Well now we know that a greater number of dinosaurs were feathered, it’s a short step to imagining T Rex as a sort of pond-chicken, using its weighty tail to anchor its non-buoyant arse to the shoreline, while it dipped its head in the swampy waters trolling for mudfish. It might even have boasted a flashy tongue, or one coated with a stinkbait pheremone, that it waved in the murky water until it snagged a large bullhead or fifty gallons of fry.

Upon lifting its head back out of the water, it would be faced with the task of trying to keep any of that bullhead that remained outside of its mouth, or stem the flow of fry from the gaps between its teeth.

Hence the little arms that can just reach its face.

I came up with this idea while observing an entirely different, vegetarian type of aquatic bird from my bath a couple of days ago. It just hit me, out of the blue, like a 103 degree weekend or a bottle of slightly fizzy wine.

I felt like Eugene Marais, only without the morphine, or the background in science.