Last week's brutal heat wave may have prompted some of us to panic and bust open a fire hydrant, but it looks like Mayor Bloomberg has taken his own approach to beating the heat with a bizarre contraption to cool down his SUV.
The New York Post caught members of Bloomberg's security detail on Monday plugging a standard, home air-conditioning unit into one of the mayor's SUV windows, utilizing a handful of extension cords plugged into electrical outlets in order to cool down without running the vehicle's own AC unit.
A spokesman for the mayor defended the unusual approach as a mere spark of innovation, "This is an experiment to be used on extremely hot days like the types we saw last week. Even with the vehicles parked in the shade, the temperatures inside can quickly rise to more than 100 degrees." But really, if you were the second richest man in New York (and its mayor) would you hop into a hot car on a summer day? Come on!
The effort follows Bloomberg's wrist-slapping in 2009, when the mayor's city-owned SUV's were caught idling for periods of at least 8 times from anywhere between 10 minutes to an hour.
The Associated Press called out the mayor for the not-so environmentally friendly antics considering Bloomberg himself has loudly touted a strong green agenda specifically with an anti-idling law he himself pushed for.
In May, Bloomberg was also exposed routinely breaking the city's strict helicopter curfews, when a man recorded the billionaire mayor repeatedly flying in and out of a city-owned heliport during off-hours designated to protect residents from excessive noise and exhaust produced from helicopters.
Let's just hope Bloomberg figures out this whole charade prior to the next heat wave, expected to arrive as early as Thursday.