It’s Days Like This That Make the Rest of the U.S. Hate L.A.

The outlook, weather forecasters say, is for continued fair weather.

Fair?

Fair? What kind of word is that to describe this? This is anything but fair.

How about glorious? Or ridiculous? How about, in other words, grossly unfair.

This is what’s wrong with California.

Elsewhere in the world Wednesday there were air raids on Iraq, a president on the verge of impeachment and, at scattered locations around the globe, people digging out from under feet-deep blankets of snow.

And here we sit in Fantasy Land in record temperatures, pretending it’s Christmastime.

Bless their sunny little hearts, Southern Californians try. They bundle up in fleece and flannel and huddle over lattes. They make fat men dress in hot clothes and sit in air-conditioned malls. They import Christmas trees.

The big trouble Wednesday was trying to keep the trees from spontaneously combusting in the heat. One lot in Burbank keeps all of its trees in a huge red-and-white striped tent to keep the poor things out of the sun.

The only reason anyone in areas where they have real winters would keep Christmas trees under cover would be so they could find them in the snow.

Here, lot operators turn hoses on their trees. And they advise shoppers to keep the trees in water with maybe a little food coloring thrown in.

At Stu Miller’s Christmas Tree Lot in Encino, workers wrapped new shipments of trees in burlap before giving them baths.

No wonder no one takes Southern California seriously. It’s bad enough that Los Angeles is full of beautiful people. In and of themselves, beautiful people are not lethal to a regional reputation. Some of the genetically less-well-off will always resent their mere existence, of course, but put them somewhere where bad stuff might happen to them--Central Park, say, or Omaha--and people will cheer them on.

Put the beautiful people here in the middle of this--this what?--this silly, balmy, wonderful paradisiacal place, and the national reaction is: Those people are living in sin.

That is a well-honed view in the Rust Belt, where California is regarded as the geographical equivalent of easy money: unearned, and therefore flawed and probably not worth much in the long run. And it is weather like this week’s that does the most damage. Whatever bad weather ever does come here, the view from outside is that it could never be bad enough to make up for all the good that preceded it. Certainly, this week’s weather doesn’t qualify.

Our big weather story of the week is wind. The fateful Santa Anas are blowing. The product of high- and low-pressure systems from Utah and Mexico converging out over the Great Basin, the winds are the only interesting weather Southern California can expect over the next week or so, forecasters say.

The last time I was misguided enough to be in the Midwest in winter I ended up driving through a blizzard. We had planned a trip across 1 1/2 states. When the storm arrived, we never even considered not going. We drove. It’s what you do. Grip the wheel, squint and go on. Which we did, through near whiteout conditions. We couldn’t see 10 feet in front of us, but we never paused, never got stuck.

Eventually, though, the car quit. The problem? The air cleaner was clogged with snow. The wind was blowing so hard it drove snow through the grille into the filter and packed it tight.

Southern California has plenty of other menaces, many self-inflicted, but weather isn’t really one of them.

Highs Wednesday reached up to 90 degrees, recorded in San Gabriel. Readings of 87 in Oxnard and 75 in Lancaster set records in those cities for the date. It was 88 in downtown Los Angeles, just one degree short of the record for Dec. 16..

The warm weather will continue for several days, decreasing with the winds over the weekend, according to Jeff House, a forecaster with WeatherData Inc.

This, while at the same time there are little kids in Minnesota with their lips stuck to steel pipes they were trying to lick icicles off of.

As House said, the winds--which gusted to 30 mph in the canyons--were interesting, but hardly qualify as real weather.

How dire was it? One weather forecaster warned listeners not to leave home without their contact lens solution. Exactly.

You can’t parody L.A. All the satires are--or will be tomorrow--true.

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Times staff writer Karima A. Haynes contributed to this story.