The first step is to flush all the air out of your house (don't worry, we'll bring it back soon) and replace it with cooler air. This can be done with some open windows and well-positioned fans set up to push all the warm, armpity air out of your home as you sleep, replacing it with cool nighttime air. Then, around 4 a.m. or whenever it starts to heat up outside, you simply close all the windows, kicking your armpit air outside forever.

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And possibly experience an odd sibling of empty nest syndrome.

Once the inside of your house is nice and cool, you can now turn to doing war with the sun itself. Anything you can do to stop sunlight from shining into your house, like closing drapes or blinds, will stop that radiation from getting inside and heating up your shit. Even better is to keep the sun from touching your house and heating up its shit. By planting big leafy trees on the southern exposure, installing external shades, or putting your house on wheels and driving around the country following the clouds, you'll prevent a tremendous amount of energy from ever reaching you in the first place.

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Some of these tips are a bit less economical than others, I guess.

How Well This Actually Works: Pretty Crappily

I've tried this out a few times in the past and found that it kind of works, and it definitely made me feel smug in the way that only people who get up at 4 a.m. can feel. But it never seemed to work for that long; no matter what I tried, these passive techniques always seemed to run out of steam around mid-afternoon, by which point my place was sweltering again. For these tips to be really effective, I think you need a large house with a basement, which I don't have. Also, you can't open your doors for anybody, so I hope you're not popular.

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"I'm sorry, you're contaminated with heat, and I can't let you in. No, I don't know who stole 12 trees from your property and planted them on mine. Oh yeah? Well that's very rude of you, hotty-mouth."

The fine droplets from a spray bottle will evaporate quite rapidly, and even if the water within is room temperature, a brief spray of this on your bare legs will be dramatically cooling. A more ramped-up version of this is to make a "swamp cooler," which is essentially just a bowl of ice and water placed in front of a fan, which rapidly cools the breeze coming off that fan.

How Well This Actually Works: It Depends

The evaporative cooling effect works best in dry climates, where water readily evaporates. When the relative humidity is higher, water tends to linger a bit longer in its liquid state, which is in part why humid climates are so uncomfortable: Your sweat doesn't evaporate, instead just sitting around, making you look unpleasant.

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Sexily unpleasant.

Unfortunately, the humidity in my place was on the higher side, as I discovered when I set up my "Turbo Swamp Cat Discipliner" -- essentially a garden hose arranged to drip on the blades of an electric fan. In retrospect, it may have been the Turbo Swamp Cat Discipliner itself that led to the increased humidity, as my apartment's humidity rapidly soared past the "waterfall/oasis" target I was aiming for before settling on "Turkish bath." Trying to fix the situation was its own adventure, as, due to some poor planning, my invention was on the other side of my now very slippery apartment. I'll spare you the details of the pratfalls that followed, only to point out that they were only marginally less embarrassing than those I suffered during my last visit to an actual Turkish bath.

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"Excuse me. Excuse me. Excuse me. Whoopsy-daisy. Excuse me. No, I'm fine. No, nothing hurt but my honor."

Or so I discovered when I awoke the next morning, shivering with the worst cold I've ever had. So ... success! Of a sort.

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"Chris, the tremors are a sign of your body rejecting your brain."

How Well This Actually Works: Surprisingly Effective

After taking off the necktie that I wear to bed every night, I examined my wardrobe to see what loose, flowy garments I had.

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Which turned out to be an MC Hammer costume I wore for Halloween a few years back that I made out of four bedsheets.

Complementing that with a seersucker jacket I had from a Matlock costume, and looking like the world's sickest, fanciest hobo, I decided to brave the day's heat to go get some cold medicine. And believe it or not, the clothes seemed to work! While acknowledging the fact that I may have been experiencing a cold flash, I did feel quite a bit cooler as I made my way through town, and to judge by the catcalls I received, I may have even looked a bit cooler, too.

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"Nope, that's a fever dream. Any time you feel socially accepted, that's probably your brain shutting down."

If spicy foods aren't feasible for you because of your soft, lambskin mouth, there's still other things you can do dietary-wise to keep yourself cool. Anything that keeps you hydrated, obviously, as well as cool meals that won't raise your body temperature, like salads and such. Also, eat less, and in smaller amounts throughout the day. Any type of eating will raise your body temperature via metabolism, so that entire ham you have for lunch every day is doing you no favors at all.

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Spread your entire ham across the day, like a normal person.

How Well This Actually Works: Not So Good

It seemed to me, with my possibly addled brain, that the ideal hot-weather food was something that was very cool to the touch, relatively hydrating, and incredibly, incredibly spicy. Which is how I ended up inventing a new drink by dumping a bottle of hot sauce into a Slurpee.

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My original name, "Frank's Hot-Ass Slurpee," turned out to infringe on several trademarks, so I eventually settled on the "Fucking Mistake."

This was, as promised, thermodynamically cooling, so full marks there. It was also, as promised, chemically not. Beyond that, it was probably the single most unpleasant thing I've tasted since my last visit to a Turkish bath, and I can't in good conscience recommend it to anyone, especially anyone coming down with the worst cold in the world.

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"That's the most snot I've ever seen come from one man's nose." -Helpful 7-Eleven Manager, who's presumably seen some shit in his day.