It’s Getting Hot In Here . . .

. . . so take off all your clothes:

The possibility of rain today may ease the pain of the oppressive spell of hot, muggy, sticky weather that saw yesterday’s temperatures hit 90 but made it feel like it was over 100 degrees.

Then again, it may not.

“You want to take all your clothes off,” said Hesham Gamal of Queens, a hot dog vendor working a nine-hour shift yesterday outside Madison Square Garden.

Then there’s this:

Vicky Jeudy, a 24-year-old aspiring actress from Queens, said, “I feel like I’m in Arizona this week.”

Doesn’t she understand that’s a dry heat?!

Meanwhile, the Times — in its own inimitable style — develops a literary angle, of sorts:

Women trudged by wearing see-through shirts, some men no shirts at all. The basketball courts were left to the ghosts, and the sunlit sidewalks were wet as the sea.

Yesterday morning defied science, at least the kind learned in nursery rhymes. Out came the sun and dried up nothing. The itsy-bitsy spiders were denied a second chance at the waterspouts. It was humid, that was all, but people found other ways to say it.

“The first word that comes to mind is brutal,” said Greg Oire Ganter, 33, a photographer from the Lower East Side. “It’s disgusting. It’s sluggish. It’s gross.”

Then comes the grand unifying theory . . . oh, the grand unifying theory:

A common theory holds that hot weather is more tolerable than cold. This fails to account for something meteorologists never refer to.

Call it the Grumpy Factor, a phenomenon tied to humidity. In a nursery-rhyme-science sort of a way, the Grumpy Factor explains how unpleasantness can shuffle across the city, lighting tempers and darkening moods.

“Especially if you have heavy coats,” said Linda Sadiker, 44, petting one of the five dogs she was walking in Park Slope, Brooklyn. Ms. Sadiker allowed that she was a little jealous of her charges, who were massed around her on a stoop, not straining at their leashes but just standing and panting.

“Most of these go to refrigerators they call apartments, while I’m out here,” Ms. Sadiker said. “Nice to be a dog in Park Slope.”

Not to mention a healthy dose of Class War! No time now, though, it’s too hot. Must. Make. More. Literary:

The streets were alive with carting and pouring and lifting, all the things that go undone when no one does them. On Fifth Avenue a worker climbed a ladder above a storefront; half a block away Con Ed workers climbed a ladder the other direction. Life went on, angrily.

Can’t make much more literary . . . too hot . . . must find whale!