Car heat a recipe for disaster

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I'm going to start with something that's a little outside this column's usual scope -- a recipe for yummy cake. You'll need the following ingredients:

8 teaspoons of brown rice flour

4 teaspoons of cocoa with mini-marshmallows

2 teaspoons of brown sugar

1/4 teaspoon of baking soda

1 dash of salt

1/4 teaspoon of vanilla extract

8 teaspoons of water

4 teaspoons of safflower oil

Stir all the ingredients together until the batter is smooth and an even taupe color, except for the mini-marshmallows. Don't drive yourself nuts trying to get those little buggers to change color and get smooth. Grease a cupcake pan and divide the batter evenly between two of the cups. I guess you really didn't need to grease all those other cups, so take a couple of paper towels and wipe the grease out of them. Bake for 15 minutes in your car.

Yes, summer is rapidly approaching, and even with those folding Jiffy Pop sun screens, the temperature inside your car can easily reach 150 degrees -- hot enough to bake a yummy cake and kill bacteria. Some sources contend it can reach 170 degrees in a car, and one study by Safe Kids Worldwide reports that in a vehicle with a black interior, the temperature can reach 187 degrees.

For our purpose, let's be conservative and stick with 150 degrees, that's plenty bad enough. That's hot enough to melt crayons into a multicolored goo that you can never really get out of your upholstery.

More importantly, it's hot enough to kill, and every year in Southern Nevada, it does. Even with a window cracked, the air inside a vehicle can reach those same lethal temperatures.

So don't leave your pet in a car in the summer months. Even if you're just popping into the store for a minute, even if you leave a bowl of water in the car, even ... look, unless the pet in question is an abyssal fish whose natural habitat is a lava vent, take it out of the vehicle or leave it at home.

I wish it weren't necessary to make this point, but it goes even more, by a factor of infinity, for children.

Each year, I cross my fingers, pray to God, Jesus, Allah, Vishnu and the Great Spaghetti Monster that this year we won't end up with a critically dehydrated, brain-damaged or dead child that was left in a hot car.

Yet, nearly every year, my worst fears are realized. It's enough to shake one's faith in the Great Spaghetti Monster.

A study in the online journal Injury Prevention revealed that during a seven-year period nationwide, 82 percent of children who died from being left in a car were in there for less than an hour. In this climate, we can presume the life expectancy for a child left in a car is considerably less.

Yes, it's a pain to unstrap the kid, shlep the youngster inside and juggle the Big Gulp and the wallet while trying to keep said kid out of the ubiquitous point-of-purchase candy rack.

It's a pain, but it's also a matter of life and death.

F. Andrew Taylor is a Las Vegas freelance writer. His column appears twice monthly. Contact him at fandrewt@cox.net.